a technology that has become central to retail players

With inflation and growing international competition, retail players must reinvent themselves to satisfy consumers by offering them a better in-store customer journey and strengthening their loyalty. The adoption of IoT solutions is therefore booming to meet these needs. In 2022, the retail and wholesale sector represented more than 906 million connected objects worldwide according to Statista. Today, the IoT market is expected to exceed $30 billion by the end of 2024 in the retail sector.

IoT technology in stores can be a good lever to catch up with remote sales on customer knowledge. Indeed, e-commerce sites have a major advantage by using targeted advertising methods and collecting data on users’ purchasing behavior. Retail companies are therefore increasingly realizing the potential of IoT and are enthusiastic about the future of this technology. According to a Verizon study77% of retailers believe that IoT brings real improvement and optimization of processes with a rapid return on investment. Here are some concrete examples illustrating how IoT is an asset for retailers, both in store and in the company’s supply chain.

Supply chain management and corporate environmental impact

IoT plays a vital role in the control and monitoring that revolves around retail, particularly in the cold chain or for logistics.. Its application involves in particular asset tracking, which analyses the status and movements of assets and equipment. Different IoT sensors can thus be useful within a warehouse, whether for safety and reducing work accidents or for order tracking. This can be the case for connected palettes which allow information to be sent back on the quality of products throughout the supply chain. From a technical point of view, the LTE-M network is particularly suited to these uses, offering good indoor coverage, which allows it to cover, for example, objects deployed underground. Thanks to the capture of various types of data, stocks are better supervised and prevent them from rotting in the case of the food industry. In stores, the IoT associated with surveillance cameras contributes, among other things, to verifying and automating the monitoring of restocking within the departments.

This technology is also an opportunity for the environmental impact of companies since IoT has participated in the adoption of the law relating to the fight against waste and the circular economyby Parliament in January 2020. Indeed, it can track products in real time, know their origin, their path taken, as well as compliance with the cold chain necessary for conservation. Knowing that more and more end customers look at the origin of the products put on the shelves, this represents a considerable advantage for fair trade. L’IoT also allows to optimize stocks in automating the replenishment and ordering of inventory itemswhich avoids stock shortages or overstocking, a major asset in particular for the management of unsold non-food items, which have been prohibited from being destroyed since 2022.

As cost optimization remains at the heart of companies’ concerns, IoT can provide better energy performance and maintenance of equipment for large retail brands. For example, commercial freezers located within stores represent a significant energy expenditure with continuous maintenance monitoring.. IoT sensors can observe energy expenditure across the entire chain, identifying potential energy losses, thereby improving performance and reducing costs.

Improving the in-store customer experience

Enriching customer experience with IoT provides better customer interaction with products on the shelves. By leveraging data collected from IoT devices, retailers can gain insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and purchasing habits, enabling them to make more informed decisions about product assortments, pricing, and promotions. By connecting smart cameras to other systems in the IoT, security processes can be fully automated. While the primary purpose of the surveillance camera is to ensure security and detect abnormal behavior, it can also offer traffic flow monitoring solutions to identify the number of customers, the number of cashiers needed, hot zones, cold zones. Besides improving traffic, they can observe customer behavior towards a product on the shelves to restock high-demand items and thus meet customer demand.

At the time of purchase, payment terminals, operating with SIM cards, use 4G cellular networks which are much more secure than a wifi network, in order to guarantee a fast and secure payment. Stores equipped with digital screens and/or tablets can attract customers’ attention and thus increase their sales thanks to IoTT. These screens can display not only advertisements and catalogs, but also personalized promotions based on data collected in real time in the store. Connected labels also allow prices and product information to be changed in store in real time. By connecting them to the seller’s information system, customers receive automatically updated information, allowing them to better understand the product.

All of these Data collected by IoT connectivity can be analyzed by an AI system and thus have precise knowledge of customer behavior and habits, in order to make better decisions to determine where the products that the store wishes to highlight will be placed, and more generally to implement personalized marketing strategies in the store, thanks to the feedback of relevant KPIs.

IoT has a leading role to play in the supply chain and in-store experience. In this market where IoT is already well established in different sectors (supply management, energy optimization, in-store experience, security, marketing, etc.), it is the data collected and analyzed by AI that will change the sector. But this revolution will not happen without the adoption of the most efficient cellular networks, such as 5G, which heralds new use cases and optimized management within stores and warehouses.