IoT As A Major Enabler Of Touchless Retail

By Kate Prohorchik, Iflexion

Creating shopping experiences that meet customer safety expectations is a challenge, but IoT proves the appropriate technology to make no-touch retail a possibility.

Consumer behavior has changed fundamentally this year under the influence of safety concerns, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing guidelines. Customers have shifted to e-commerce en masse, seeking to keep their shopping as contactless and low-risk as possible. Yet, when venturing outside for groceries, customers seem to prefer stores with robust touchless and self-checkout options to crowded shopping malls and supermarkets.

To live up to the emerging consumer expectations, the retail industry is actively revamping its operations and infrastructure to eliminate human interactions from the customer journey. Brands used various means for this purpose, from NFC payment to virtual product showcases, but there is one support technology that saw a particular rise in adoption — IoT.

The internet of things has been slowly but steadily gaining ground in the commerce sector, driving enhanced user experience and back office processes automation, but today it proves mission-critical for rendering some traditionally contact-based shopping activities no-touch.

Let’s take a look at the most prominent IoT-powered touchless technologies that are now disrupting the retail industry.

Contactless Self-Service

Over recent years, self-service kiosks and self-checkouts have become indispensable for retail stores, appreciated by customers for ease of use and timesaving. However, with the onset of the pandemic, concerns about the virus spread came to the fore, and most people today choose to steer clear of the unsanitary touch screens.

Meanwhile, the same safety precautions discourage many shoppers from seeking sales representatives’ help. Left without a safe channel of assistance, customers have one less reason to visit physical stores, but IoT-powered solutions allowed many business owners to break through this deadlock and offer touchless self-servicing options.

Today, self-service kiosks connectable to customers’ smartphones are gaining ground. The shopper scans a dynamic QR code on the kiosk’s screen, and the IoT system turns their mobile device into a virtual touchpad, enabling them with real-time access to the self-help terminal’s functionality. More advanced devices can be equipped with motion sensors so that a user can manipulate them with hand gestures. While certainly more engaging, such solutions require IoT testing though to ensure ultimate usability.

Some retail brands took touchless self-service up a notch and crafted unique cashier-less checkout experiences. Long before 2020, Amazon ventured into opening Amazon Go stores where customers could take goods from the shelves and walk away freely, while the infrastructure of IoT sensors, machine vision cameras, and deep learning algorithms did the job of adding purchases to the virtual cart in the dedicated mobile app and billing the customers on exit. As the epidemiological situation grew worse, the company accelerated the opening of new Amazon Go shops and began selling their “Just Walk Out” cashier-less technology to other brands.

Supermarket chain companies like Kroger, 7-Eleven, and Walmart have similar proprietary no-touch solutions they are now actively implementing. Although this emerging model is not without its rough edges, numerous surveys state how customers already prefer touchless self-service to traditional waiting in line, and this sentiment is expected to propel further development of the technology.

Autonomous Delivery

With people preferring to remain at home as much as possible, this year saw an unprecedented upsurge in both e-commerce and home delivery from brick-and-mortar stores. Snowed under orders, businesses struggled not only to fulfill and deliver them all in time but also to do it safely, without putting neither employees nor customers at risk. Retailers came up with all sorts of no-contact delivery practices, and some, pressed for the staff or wishing to safeguard their customers further, pivoted to unmanned delivery.

Not that long ago, self-driving vehicles and drones needed close human supervision and could complete only short-range last-mile deliveries, but the recent convergence with the internet of things rendered delivery devices more autonomous. Powered by IoT, devices delivering orders in the same area can operate simultaneously as a connected system, exchanging information about weather conditions and obstacles from on-board sensors and thus coordinating each other. This integration allows UAVs to fly unassisted beyond the pilot’s visual range and cover greater distances to deliver to even rural areas and makes delivery vehicles higher-performing and safer at the same time.

Alibaba, a world-famous Chinese retail and technology company, is the leading adopter of IoT-powered delivery vehicles. In September 2020, Alibaba presented a logistics robot for last-mile deliveries that will be put in use at the beginning of 2021. Named Xiaomanlv, which translates as “a competent donkey”, the device is claimed to be able to carry fifty packages at a time and cover over sixty miles on a single charge.

Another retail giant, Amazon, is currently actively testing its fleet of Prime Air delivery drones, expected to carry out super-fast thirty-minute order deliveries.

No-Touch Try-On

Another aspect of shopping disrupted by the pandemic is try-on. Although still being eager to purchase apparel, footwear, and makeup products in person, the majority of consumers — 65% of women and 54% of men — are extremely wary about the safety of trying on clothes in dressing rooms, states the First Insight survey. The percentage of male and female respondents concerned about testing cosmetics in-store is even higher.

In this context, many retailers have adopted a wait-and-see approach or tried to shift to e-commerce, but those frontline fashion and cosmetic brands that had invested in smart mirror and fitting room technology found that their innovations allow them to quench the consumers’ thirst for genuine try-on experiences while also keeping it as safe and contactless as possible.

The centerpiece of the smart mirror technology is augmented reality (AR) that realistically overlays the selected clothes or makeup on the customer. Many modern smart mirrors are also equipped with machine learning algorithms that analyze the customer’s appearance and recommend similar or more fitting items.

The internet of things is also a significant part of such devices, as it enables the visitor to scan the RFID tag on a piece of clothing and get full information about the product, including real-time color and size availability. In some implementations, IoT-enabled smart mirrors allow the customer to message the sales representative for assistance, thus saving their time and minimizing contact between them and the staff.

Closing Thoughts

The hyperawareness of what is safe to touch is one of many pandemic-induced behaviors, and many healthcare experts agree this behavior will persist. For the retail sector, this highlights the need to consider touchless solutions not as a temporary fix but as the “new norm” and take active steps to adapt their infrastructure to it.

Though not the most obvious no-touch retail enabler, in practice IoT proves important for crafting smooth and safe in-store and delivery experiences, which makes its adoption a viable step for no-touch transformation.