An RFID-Based Shopping Service System for Retailers

With the rapid development of global economy and great improvement on life quality of consumers, the consumer shopping behaviors have been changed significantly. Modern retailers have put intensive effort on merchandise arrangement in order to satisfy the consumer demands on merchandise shopping. However, most retailers do not provide satisfactory shopping services to customers. For instance, without a customized shopping recommendation for each individual customer, consumers have to spend a lot of time for merchandise selection. Furthermore, most large-spaced retailers merely utilize signs in front the aisles of specific merchandise areas to direct consumers, which cannot provide an accurate guidance for merchandise search. Therefore, regarding the shopping services of a modern retailer, this research develops a customized merchandise recommendation algorithm (CMRA) and a shopping route determination and guidance algorithm (SRDGA). Based on the proposed algorithms, a Shopping Service System (3S-System) is established by integrating the RFID technology. Considering the consumer demands, consumer shopping preferences and market promotion plans, this research proposes an integrated, heuristic methodology to provide a customized shopping list, route recommendation and real-time direction guidance for consumer shopping. Moreover, based on the proposed methodology, a Shopping Service System (3S-System) is established, and a simulated market is created in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed model. The verification results show that the system can offer customers appropriate shopping route recommendation in a short time and could achieve real-time guidance. As a whole, this research provides a methodology and system to provide effective shopping services for consumers and as a result the shopping service quality of modern retailers can be enhanced and the sales volume of merchandises can be increased.