Item-Level RFID for Retail Business Improvement

Abstract

This chapter proposes an item-level RFID-enabled store management system to help improve retail business. The system adopts an integral design approach to exploit RFID and the e-pedigree established for anti-counterfeiting and tracking of product items in a supply chain. Various modules, such as back-store inventory, smart shelves, interactive mirrors and fitting, and self-checkout services, can be subsequently implemented for retail operations and management. Features for anti-counterfeiting and individual customer marketing can also be incorporated to enhance brand image and customer experience. Moreover, intelligent algorithms may be integrated to mine useful information, such as the sales history of products and the shopping behaviour of customers from the data captured by the RFID devices to facilitate business decision-making and proactive individual marketing. As such, the efficiency of store operations and the overall retail business can be expected to improve substantially. The chapter presents the design approach of the proposed system and discusses some implementation issues, exemplified by two basic applications: (1) track-and-trace anti-counterfeiting to prevent injection of faked products into the back-store inventory and (2) smart product collocation to promote individual customer marketing and cross selling.