Smart Retail IoT

What is Smart Retail IoT?

Smart retail is defined as IoT-enabled retail that uses customers’ behaviour of purchasing for selling things to them. IoT is supposed to have a major impact on retail. It will soon change the way the retail industry engages with shoppers. Now, using IoT-based solutions and tools, smart retail can do targeted marketing by capturing the personal and behavioural data of customers.

Smart retail helps in customer acquisition and retention. It will enable the retailers to individually utilize their offerings and personalize the shopping experience of their customers. Smart retail will help retailers to make their brands more relevant in the eyes of their customers.

In real-time, retailers can identify potential buyers and can make personalized offerings. There can be a real-time digital engagement with the customers. Smart retail uses technology to tap into the mobile phones of customers to understand their preferences and make real-time decisions.

Using IoT, retailers can improve their customers’ in-store experience and make them come again and again for shopping at the same store. They can give personalized offers to customers by doing proper data analysis.

They can improve their operational efficiencies and in turn more RoI by being smart retailers. Consumers, nowadays, have become technology savvy and their expectations are increasing day by day. Now, it is up to the companies that how far they can meet those expectations. They have to redesign their business models and business strategies in order to address customer needs and expectations.

Retailers have to improve upon a variety of channels as well as customer touch points where appropriate information can be conveyed to customers about the products. Mobile and digital technologies enable retailers to move their customized offerings closer to the customers.

Customer closeness definitely brings more sells and hence more revenues. Every customer experience, while shopping is considered as a digital experience by intelligent devices. By analysing the navigation data of the customer purchasing behavior captured by these smart devices, retailers can improve the ‘in-store shopping experience’ of the customers.

With the use of IoT, the retailing business has transformed into smart retail and influenced the customers’ preferences digitally. It also enabled better customer engagement and make their overall shopping experience more customized and personalised.

Placing proper displays at the right positions and having the correct messages allows retailers to engage the shoppers. Digital signage can be utilized to display new inventory, promotional offers, etc. Its effectiveness can be measured by analyzing the gathered data.

In order to have an efficient supply chain management, we need to manage the complexities from start to end. It is essential to track the inventory and its condition and treatment throughout the delivery chain. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags can be used for this purpose. We can couple the sensors with the stockroom and the inventory on shelf to have customised features regarding price regulation.

IoT Applications for Wearables

These wearables then can be used to control and operate various activities and applications like home automation, personal and sports coaching, retail and inventory, transport, contactless payment systems, connected health, etc. These wearables are equipped with IoT-enabled apps for providing the interface to interact with them.

For example, different smartphones are equipped different with operating systems which help a user in interacting with a device to use its various functionalities. Similarly, smart wearables have IoT-enabled apps for various purposes. IoT-enabled apps in fitness devices help in monitoring and measuring various health parameters such as blood pressure, body temperature, diabetes, etc.

In the case of business automation, these apps help in production planning, monitoring performance, tracking sales, providing security to real-time information, analyzing marketing trends, etc. These apps give you an edge over your competitors in business.

It is not wrong to say that smart wearables help in easing overall operations and making our life more comfortable and meaningful which is filled with lots of data, information, and insights.

The time required for the development of wearable applications gets shortened with Kaa to a few weeks or even days. Wearable applications developed using the Kaa platform perform better than widely used elementary solutions and can perform as per the expectations of a customer.