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

Abstract

The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is core of the Internet of Things (IOT), essential for development of intelligence-rich businesses. Item-level RFID facilitates real-time track-and-trace, and thus complete visibility, of individual product items that greatly improves source-to-store supply chain management. A number of pilot projects conducted in recent years, including production tracking, pack and ship verification for logistics services, warehouse management, product anti-counterfeiting, and retail business enhancement, have demonstrated huge potential of RFID in elevating the overall efficiency of supply chains to levels not previously practicable. This research addresses some main issues of item-level RFID for retail store management of relatively high-end apparel products. An approach for integrating RFID with major in-store systems, such as inventory, on-shelf replenishment and POS, is studied. Recently, customers’ purchase decisions for high-end products have been found to shift from a conventionally rational view to an emotional and experiential one. Retailers are now expected to foster personalized customer shopping experience that warrants provision of relevant product information to empower such new pattern of customers’ purchase decisions. Therefore, an item-level RFID-enabled apparel retail management system is proposed to provide customers with more leisure, interaction for product information, and automatic apparel collocation to promote sales during shopping. In this system, RFID devices are installed to capture customer shopping behaviors 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 can help promote retail business by enriching customers with intelligent and personalized services and thus enhance the overall shopping experience.