70 Percent of Retailers Plan to Invest in the Internet-of-Things

• 70% of Retailers plan to invest in IoT by 2021
• 71% intend to install sensors to track customers’ footpaths
• 75% want real-time alerts in order to deploy employees to locations in the store to assist shoppers
• 79% will be using cameras and video analytics for operational purposes.

This is according to a report by ZIH Corp – Zebra 2017 Retail Vision Study.

Retailers are turning to IoT technologies to gain business insights, reduce operating costs, increase revenue and keep pace with the competition.

Nearly 70% of retail decision makers are ready to make changes required to adopt IoT, like installing a Retail Sensing analytics system.

The goal is to generate concrete, actionable insights on customer shopping habits and buying patterns by tracking customers’ movements throughout a store, and noting where people tend to linger. Retailers can leverage this behaviour data to make more-informed merchandising and marketing decisions, like measuring the effectiveness of displays.

Cameras positioned around store, linked to video analytics units, capture data – identifying which aisles and products customers prefer, and which areas of a store lead more often to a purchase.

Heat map of where people linger in a children’s clothing store

So when sensors detect a poorly trafficked area in a store, for example, that real-time data insight alerts associates to merchandising missteps.

According to research by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, of MIT, companies that inject big data and analytics into their operations are 5% to 6% more profitable than competitors that don’t. So no wonder 70% are planning to do so.

For more information on using the Internet-of-Things in retail situations, – counting visitors, testing displays, tracking customers around a store, and so on – contact Retail Sensing.

Further Reading

Zebra 2017 Retail Vision Study.

Making Advanced Analytics Work for You, Harvard Business Review by Dominic Barton and David Court