Grocery shopping is something we must all do, but one of the pain points of the traditional shopping model is having to queue behind long lines to checkout. This has led to shoppers opting for mass merchants like Target, Best Buy, and Amazon, especially due to their e-retailing platforms.
But supermarkets and grocery stores can stop this customer bleeding by investing in smart shopping carts. Not only do they eliminate the queueing issue, but they also improve the shopping experience by introducing features like gamification and instant product information. They provide a marketing platform as well because stores can advertise more products.
Therefore, developing smart shopping carts is a smart business move for such clients, and here’s how to build them using the RK3588 control board.
What Is a Smart Shopping Cart? The Magic of Adding a Tablet to Traditional Shopping Trolleys
A smart shopping cart is a shopping trolley equipped with hardware like cameras and weight scales, but the most significant addition is a tablet with a large screen.
Just like how large screens, high processing power, and operating systems turned regular phones into smartphones, these tablets introduce large screens, high processing power, and operating systems to trolleys, which enable customers to:
- Store shopping lists
- Manage shopping lists
- Get information when weighing loose items
- Get item recommendations (advertising)
- Self-checkout by paying for items directly on the cart
Advanced smart shopping carts can enhance the shopping experience further by integrating vision and AI systems.
Benefits of Using Smart Shopping Cart
Smart shopping carts benefit both the customer and the store owner in different ways.
Benefits to the Customer
- Personalized Shopping Experience: Customers can import their shopping or buy-it-again lists to the cart, turning it into a companion that checks off items as you add them to the basket. The cart can also navigate you to the location of each listed product in the aisles.
- Gamification: The tablet can make the shopping experience more interesting by including gamification. For instance, it can present a spin-the-wheel coupon wheel for earning discounts or lights and sounds that make the shopper feel like he or she is on an adventure.
- Instant Information: For researcher shoppers, these carts will provide them with the required information before picking the product to buy. For instance, it might show products with the best deals or give information about each item for comparison.
- Quick Access To Loyalty Programs: Customers can login to the cart to access loyalty programs quickly before checking out. This enables them to earn loyalty points and access discounts or coupons.
Benefits to the Store
- Advertising: You know how e-commerce platforms give you product recommendations or buy 2 for discounted price offers? Smart shopping carts can implement similar upselling and cross-selling techniques to make customers spend more. Stores can also advertise new products, new versions, clearance sales, etc., directly to customers on the tablet.
- Sales Promotion via Digital Coupons: Besides advertising, grocery stores can promote sales via digital coupons more easily using the cart’s screen.
- Increases Customer Time in the Store: Large stores like IKEA are known to implement customer retention techniques to increase customer spending. Smart shopping carts can do the same using techniques like personalized interactions and quick access to loyalty programs. These eventually increase spending, leading to more profits.
- Analytics: Data is the new gold, and smart shopping carts provide a platform for collecting user data for analytics purposes, which can help to identify shopping patterns for each customer. For instance, analytics can highlight what they buy most and then use AI to predict what they will need in the future. If a customer buys lots of spices, herbs, fresh produce, and meat, the cart can recommend cooking items.
- Anti Theft: Smart shopping carts can have positioning functions to show their location and sound an alarm when they go past a defined boundary.
Also read: IoT in retail
How Does a Smart Shopping Cart Work?
Think of the things you have to do to come out of the grocery store or supermarket with your items. Smart shopping carts use various components to make these processes easier, which include:
- Tablets: These tablets have large displays that act as HMIs to show product information, advertising data, loyalty programs, etc. They also house the processing power and memory needed to store and manage shopping lists, provide product recommendations, and process data coming from the connected sensors.
- Computer Vision: This feature requires cameras, which provide data to the machine learning algorithm to identify items you drop in the cart and check them off your list. The cart can also use computer vision to navigate you around the store to the products you want.
- Sensors: Smart sensors help to detect things like the product’s weight and size for measurement purposes. BLE beacons can also work with computer vision for in-store navigation and anti-theft purposes.
- Barcode Scanners: These scanners enable shoppers to scan groceries as they put them in the cart to determine what to pay during checkout.
- QR Codes: Customers use QR codes to import shopping lists directly from their phones to the cart. These codes also help with bill calculation.
- Card Tapping/Swiping Machines: Mobile payments are prevalent nowadays, but some customers use cards. So the cart should have card tapping/swiping machines to complete the checkout process.
Top 10 Smart Shopping Cart Companies
The top 10 smart shopping cart companies include:
- Focal Systems Inc.
- Klever-Kart, Inc.
- Xi’an Chaohi Network Technology Co., Ltd.
- TRACXPOiNT
- Walmart Apollo, LLC
- Vmark, Inc.
- Caper Inc.
- SmartCart S.A.
- Fujitsu Limited
- SK Telecom
These companies mostly serve supermarkets and shopping malls, and projections show this smart shopping cart industry will expand by a CAGR of close to 7% from a valuation of $4.5 billion to $6.7 billion. Therefore, there is potential to grow as more supermarkets and grocery stores demand this technology to remain relevant in the retail market.
Smart Shopping Cart Technologies
- AI: Artificial Intelligence, specifically machine learning, works with the onboard sensors mounted along the basket’s upper rim to create a single data point about the picked products. So for instance, AIoT can accumulate and aggregate data from the sensors to automatically determine the items you add and their quantity, then calculate your total in real-time.
- IoT: IoT is critical in shopping carts because it helps with real-time inventory management, waste reduction, and product quality improvement. This technology requires data from sensors for analytics, so each item must have an RFID tag to track product information, movement, and purchase, as well as to prevent theft. On the cart, an RFID reader should scan each product placed inside. IoT gateways may be necessary to help send various sensor data to the cloud.
- Instant Computer Vision Camera Recognition: This technology helps the cart to identify the products immediately as you place them in the cart.
- Weather Resistance: Like traditional shopping carts, smart carts are placed outside the store for customers to pick and push them into the store. And after checking out, customers take these carts to their vehicles to load the products. This exposes the tablet, sensors, and other components to weather elements, so they should be weather-resistant to maximize durability.
- All-Day Batteries: Each cart is meant to be used by different customers throughout the time the supermarket is open. So it needs to have a high-capacity battery that can last for at least a full day. Battery weight isn’t an issue because pushing the cart is easy.
- Shopping List Synchronization: Using a mobile app, customers should be able to share shopping lists and other data with the cart by scanning QR codes.
- Weights and Measures: Smart carts can weigh produce because they feature built-in weight scales. If the AI camera vision system fails to recognize the fresh produce, you can enter its code for the cart to calculate its price based on the weighted value.
- Loyalty Integration: The tablet onboard the cart integrates with the store’s coupon and loyalty card program to provide this feature directly to customers. It also gives them information about the eligible items and expected savings.
- Customized Ads and Digital Coupons: This platform provides an avenue for customer data harvesting, which can help develop tailored ads that deliver high conversions.
- Order Ahead Integration: Grocery stores sell ready-made meals that might need some time to prepare. So immediately customers get their hands on the cart, they can order these items and pick them up after checking all items from their shopping list.
- Nested Charging: This technology makes it easy to accommodate multiple smart carts in a small space when charging them. Just like how they are normally stored in a nested formation, they should interconnect and recharge while nested at one station at the end of the day.
Introducing RK3588 Board – Dusun IoT’s Embedded Hardware Platform for Smart Shopping Cart
As the central system in the smart shopping cart, the tablet should have powerful AI processing and IoT capabilities to run the required functions. Dusun’s RK3588 high-performance tablet motherboard is suited for this application because it has the following features.
- Powerful heterogeneous octa-core ARM chip (Cortex A76/A55)
- 6 TOPS NPU for AI processing (image recognition)
- Rich peripheral interfaces to support sensors, barcode readers, and cameras
- 8K video encoding and decoding with quad-screen independent display (high-quality graphics are important for shopping and marketing)
- Broad temperature range
- Dust and vibration resistance
You only have to fit the board inside a rugged water and dust-resistant case with a high IP rating, then attach the peripherals for testing and deployment. It is also worth noting that the board has a lithium battery interface, so you can hook it up to a high-capacity battery to last the entire day.
Also read: Dusun IoT Releases RK3588 System on Module
Final Words
The smart shopping cart industry is still in its infancy, but the technology has been received positively by customers because it introduces a new shopping experience. So it is the right time to get in or expand your operations in this space to rake in the profits as more brick-and-mortar retailers adopt this technology.
Our RK3588 SBC simplifies the development of this technology so that you can deploy your solutions to the market quickly. But don’t forget to incorporate it into an industrial case to maximize durability. Contact us for more information about this SBC or to make an order for your project.
