Smart Camera Solutions for Retail

Recent pandemic years have been tough for the retail companies. Along with the reduced sales and revenue (e.g. in clothes, cosmetics, furniture) – the companies coped with a new customer’s behavior – shifted towards online orders and home delivery. In order to survive today’s new reality, retailers and big stores should embrace different IT solutions that will reshape their business, including usage of smart camera solutions. The goal of these solutions is to provide operations teams, mobile workforce, and marketing personnel - information essential to make intelligent decisions in real time.

Tracking Customers activity

Social distancing as a preventive measure, led to cashier-less and staff-free stores. Recent customers’ surveys identified that 87% of customers would likely choose contactless stores with self-checkout options.?Tools that will allow this autonomous shopping include smart cameras, computer vision systems, RFID tags, IoT devices, and facial recognition.

Couple of years ago - we have witnessed the Amazon’s cashier-less?Just Walk Out?system. The system is equipped with computer vision, and deep learning, which allows customers to take items from shelves without paying (charged via Amazon account).

Cameras equipped with video analytics can be used on checkout, and they will share the data with the retail ecosystem’s components (via?software API). The data transmission should be minimized, so the analysis should be done in the devices (edge computing). Only the results will be passed in other systems, such as inventory management, digital shopping carts etc.

Applying Data Analytics

In order to improve the revenue, retailers could implement a data analytics solution that would assist them in running their sales and marketing operations efficiently. Smart camera solutions enable?data analytics and provide better customer experience together with:

●?????Consolidated view of the customers feeds obtained from multiple cameras - in order to analyze customers behavior.

●?????Management of thousands of products in order to avoid gaps on shelves, and also reducing waste and losses every month.

●?????Monitor employees (cashiers), in order to uncover queues (lines) and open new checkpoints.

●?????Efficient marketing, with in-store promotions based on customer’s behavior and demographics.

●?????Intelligent decision-making; by utilizing data analytics?over the information generated from video feeds with customers, products and workforce data.

Data analytics can improve the entire customer’s in-store experience. Also, retailers will allocate the right resources to their tasks, save time and lower the operational costs.

?Reporting and Getting Insights

Getting a single view of large volumes of customers, products and income is a crucial task. The data analytics solutions can enable analysis of the behavior of thousands of customers and purchases made. With data analytics solutions, the retailers will improve their operations with intelligent decision making, and efficient management of their supply chain, sales and marketing. It will drive efficiency in the daily operations. Different analytics tools (e.g. Tableau) can generate reports with visuals based on user’s purchases and performed data analyses. The reports can be created in real-time and with just?one-click, and retailer will get them in his dashboard in terms of seconds.

Remote Store Inspection

It is crucial for the retailers to ensure safety and prevent losses inside their stores. Smart camera solutions can provide smart/ remote store management and inspection. The possible use case scenarios include:?

-???????Remote surveillance – tracking the customers and employees behavior for safety and anti-theft reasons.

-???????Patrolling the store remotely, looking for staff appearance, items display, store hygiene, etc. This will ensure the company's required standards, and will improve the store management.

-???????Detecting abnormal cashiers behavior. Smart cameras can detect thousands of transactions per day and protect the store owners from trickery.

-???????Counting the number of people entering the store vs. number of real buyers in the store, and understanding the conversion rate, thus effectively planning the operation of the store.