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3.8 What the Shopping Basket Can Tell: IoT for Retailing Industry? 195
of Things is broad term comprising applications from manufacturing, smart
power grids, RFID, mobile applications, track & trace, traffic monitoring,
smart cities and retail. Whereas it is not completely agreed upon who coined
the term of Internet of Things, there can be generally identified two streams
where Internet of Things roots back to.
Firstly, there is the Internet-oriented development which aims at expanding
the traditional Internet of data from computer desktop devices to mobile handsets,
lower power devices, down to micro-controller devices integrated and
attached physical objects and things. Accordingly, research questions are how
to tailor established communication and data protocols for low-power devices
with limited computing capabilities (e.g., 6 lowpan). Secondly, there is the
thing-oriented development which comes from associating items and things
with unique identifiers in order to relate to static descriptions and dynamic
status information throughout the lifetime of things. Early developments have
been based on barcode and RFID (e.g., GTIN, EPC, UID) and include architecture
frameworks helping to resolve unique identifiers to database locations
where the information can be stored and retrieved (e.g., ONS, EPCIS).
Either way the Internet of Things gives access about real-world processes
and phenomena in real time. For instance, it offers the opportunity to integrate
social media into the sales floor. This allows retailers to gain more insights into
the opinions of their customers and to benefit from viral marketing, as depicted
by Figure 3.20. As such, a much more fine-grain understanding of real-world
processes can be obtained. Thus, processes can be optimized, decisions can
be based on data, and innovative services can build upon new sources of data.
In retail where margins are low and revenues are high there has been a
long tradition of introducing information systems for making processes more
efficient.
About 40 years ago barcode stripes have been introduced on product items
for accelerating price tagging and check-out at the register. This very same
technology, originally designed to be used internally among supply-chain partners,
has started to reach consumers, as they can use their mobile phones today
for retrieving further information about products, such as consumer opinions
or price comparison. With the advent of mobile apps from e-tailers allowing
to retrieve items consumer experience in stores at cheaper prices online put a
new threat retailers: retailers run into the danger of becoming the free show
rooms for online retailers.