In-aisle checkout may be getting closer.
At the annual eTail East conference and exhibition in Boston yesterday, one of the most interesting displays I came across involved an innovative approach to in-aisle shopping.
The idea is
that as a consumer shops the store aisles, the costs of items selected are automatically tabulated on the shopper’s smartphone for in-aisle checkout.
The demo, by Boston-based
SapientNitro, used small RFID-tags on products and a reader inside the bag.
As an item is placed into the bag, the tag is read and the product information, including price, is sent to the
shopper’s smartphone.
At checkout time, the consumer simply OKs the purchase via smartphone and then is on their way, skipping the checkout line.
And it worked as advertised in a
demonstration for me by Tony Terranova, director of partner marketing, and Michael Ayers, senior manager at Sapient Nitro.
Terranova said in-bag checkout is a working concept and could
ultimately involve different types of sensing or code reading technologies, though for the demo Sapient selected RFID.
This is not the first in-aisle shopping innovation to come out of
Sapient.
At the National Retail Federation conference in January, Sapient showed beacon-triggered information changing nearby screen displays, as I wrote about here at the time (In-Pocket, Phone Beaconing: Tapping into the Store Shopper).
Sapient
showed another variation of that at eTail East yesterday, with in-store displays linked to smartphone activity, so that products on the in-store screen changed on-the-fly.
The next step is for
a retailer to step up to try this out on shoppers, who will determine which aspects of in-bag checkout they may or may not like.