The Internet of Things – Improving Customer Shopping Experience at Stores

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from just being an experimental concept, and is now completely transforming the ways in which industries operate. Forbes calls the Internet of Things a giant network of connected things, with relationships between people and people, people and things, and things and things. We consider the problem of tracking physical browsing by users in indoor spaces such as retail stores[13]. Analogous to online browsing, where users choose to go to certain web pages, dwell on a subset of pages of interest to them, and click on links of interest while ignoring others, we can draw parallels in the physical setting, where a user might walk purposefully to a section of interest, dwell there for a while, gaze at specific items, and reach out for the ones that they wish to examine more closely. As our contribution, we design techniques to explore and track each of these elements of physical browsing using a combination of a smartphone shopping app which eases the customers' physical shopping experience and BLE beacons for [5]. We believe that access to physical browsing information of shoppers in retail stores can not only provide crucial insights into shoppers’ needs and interests but also reveal the effectiveness of the store layout itself.