Item-level RFID for enhancement of customer shopping experience in apparel retail

Abstract

In the customer-oriented apparel retail industry, providing satisfactory shopping experience for customers is a vital differentiator. However, traditional stores generally cannot fully satisfy customer needs because of difficulties in locating target products, out-of-stocks, a lack of professional assistance for product selection, and long waiting for payments. Therefore, this paper proposes an item-level RFID-enabled retail store management system for relatively high-end apparel products to provide customers with more leisure, interaction for product information, and automatic apparel collocation to promote sales during shopping. In this system, RFID hardware devices are installed to capture customer shopping behaviour and preferences, which would be especially useful for business decision-making and proactive individual marketing to enhance retail business. Intelligent fuzzy screening algorithms are then developed to promote apparel collocation based on the customer preferences, the design features of products, and the sales history accumulated in the database. It is expected that the proposed system, when fully implemented, can help promote retail business by enriching customers with intelligent and personalized services, and thus enhance the overall shopping experience. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.