Smart Stores Reality and Challenges

There are several views about what Smart Stores is. When seen under the lens of 'reality' in current times and near future, the concept of Smart Store, gets little more clarity.

1. Customer Friendly Technology
Applied to different retailing lines, this means different things. Some examples are discussed here. In the case of Fashion, customers would be interested to get the best fit on their body. A good percentage of customers may be willing to shell out premium money for that extra good fit. This is different from trial room runs - where there is lethargy to try more choices after waiting in those long queues. A solution is to use virtual reality solution in the stores to offer simulation to customers based on the outfits offered by stores. Stores can even track which designs, colors, departments and lines of clothes are being tried more and compare with sales for next season planning. As applied to grocery retailing, for the fast paced or sophisticated customers, virtual browsing of isles and items under different departments at the touch of screen, sitting comfortably inside cafe store, sipping coffee is an interesting idea. This can be extended to choose on screen and pick up at counter.
2. RFID Point of Sale
A concept that is starting to take flight in recent times is RFID quick scan at the Point of Sale, which is instead of sequential item by item barcode scan. By doing RFID quick scan, all items are read at once saving time. Cost of RFID tags is the primary challenge faced by retailers. When the cost of these RFID tags reduce, or if big retailers can negotiate better unit or bulk price for these tags with vendors, this is a sure technology to be seen in stores widespread.
3. Electronic lock on items
Some retailers in US have started using Electronic lock on items. Contrary to the expensive theft locks on clothes and costly electronic goods, these Electronic locks make it possible to stick them onto even cheaper items, making it difficult for shoplifters to put them in pocket and walk-away - which is a big loss prevention for retailers.
4. Riding on increasing network speed
Most of the stores still rely on the safe locally stored information for Store operations. Mostly nightly downloads to the stores with item master, prices, promotions and hourly updates on inventory status is followed. This is low risk for the store operations since long time, since the networks were slower. However, with increasing network availability and speed, this is becoming more of overkill to duplicate data within each store. What would start taking shape is to reduce this duplication of data and relying more on central database for item and price validations at point of sale. It is to be noted that already credit cards are authorized per transaction via network. Local register files would remain the same as today, offering offline operation of Point of sale systems. The benefit of this architectural change is reduced capital investment in opening new stores by reducing the store server, hardware and miscellaneous costs associated with it.