No need for RFID? No need for new retail!

Assume that a new product is displayed in a clothing store. 100 customers stop in front of it during the day, 30 of them enter the fitting room, but only one person buys it in the end. What does it mean? At least the clothes are attractive at first glance, but there may be some problems with the design details, or the clothes may be too "picky" for most people to handle. It is obviously impossible for a few clerks to keep an eye on the movements of these customers every day.

The Internet's almost pervasive "invasion" of traditional industries has made it difficult to define it as a certain type of industry. What is the core role of the Internet? One is technology, which did not exist before but now exists, and is enough to subvert past user habits and industry forms, such as search engines and digital music; the other is efficiency, which is often achieved through the reorganization of existing resources. Deployment to improve efficiency. The simplest example is that restaurant booking software allows consumers to wait for a table when they are close to the restaurant, avoiding long lines.

New retail belongs to the latter, with improved efficiency. The traditional retail industry has been criticized for several years. From Wal-Mart, Macy's, and Sears to Carrefour, Metersbonwe, and Li-Ning, hypermarkets and brand owners are closing stores across the world. Each company has its own reasons, but in summary, it is inefficiency. The traditional retail industry is too slow. It only takes a few months for a piece of clothing to be designed and sold. The trend changes and inventory backlogs are inevitable. Many clothing brands have fallen into this trap. Well-known Internet celebrity Zhang Dayi claims that she can sell 20 million yuan in goods in 2 hours of live streaming without taking up inventory. He pays a deposit first and then goes into mass production. Compared with the traditional retail industry, the difference is clear.

How to improve the efficiency of traditional retail industry? What is new about new retail? Retail is a complex form involving the entire supply chain from product warehousing to terminal sales. There is room for efficiency improvement in every link, but it is directly related to consumers. The only direct contact with consumers is the scenario of offline stores.If you want to improve efficiency, you need to let stores have eyes and brains to understand who consumers are and what they like. The core is to master user data and then push back up the supply chain.

It sounds like fantasy at first, but if you look at Amazon’s grab-and-go supermarket, Amazon Go, it’s already trying to make its stores smart. Use the app to enter the store and leave immediately after taking the items. The cameras and sensors will record what each person took and deduct the money from his app. In the future, if the duties of store clerks are as simple as tallying goods, will we still need to recruit so many store clerks and pay them higher and higher salaries?

Of course, Amazon Go is still too high-end for the current retail industry, and the technology is not yet mature. If customers crowd the store, the "machine eyes" are likely to make mistakes. This is why it has delayed its opening and has only been testing the waters among Amazon's internal employees. Moreover, this store format is rooted in the American social environment, with high labor costs and a small urban population. I went to the Amazon Go downstairs of the Amazon headquarters in Seattle before. Although it closed at 9pm, there were almost no pedestrians on the narrow road around it once it got dark. Given the population and commercial density of China's first-tier cities, it can be destroyed in minutes.

Are there other simple ways to make stores smarter? Retailers are beginning to borrow technology from the logistics industry. We are familiar with domestic express delivery by scanning barcodes and entering or reading express delivery information. However, large foreign express companies such as DHL generally use a radio frequency identification technology called RFID to replace barcodes. About one-third of the world's logistics companies are using it, and Europe is earlier and more popular than the United States.

RFID can be understood as a technology similar to NFC near-field payment, which is based on non-contact signal transmission between two objects in close proximity. However, the effective working distance of NFC is less than 10 centimeters, that is, a mobile phone equipped with ApplePay can only be used close to The payment can be deducted only after the payment is received to ensure the safety of funds; and the effective working distance of RFID is about ten meters. The express delivery industry attaches RFID tags to packaging boxes, and nearby reading equipment can automatically scan and obtain the information inside without having to see it with the naked eye. It makes high-speed sorting lines possible. In addition, it is also used in package tracking, transport vehicle management, etc.

Retail stores take this technology and embed RFID laundry tags or RFID cloth tags that are imperceptible to the laundry labels of clothes. Each RFID cloth tag corresponds to a unique piece of clothing. How many times does this piece of clothing be picked up from the shelf every day? After entering the fitting room, several pieces of the same style were bought, and the movement of these products was clearly visible in the background. It realizes single-item management of clothes and provides data for analyzing the consumption preferences of customers entering the store, which is impossible to achieve in the traditional retail industry.

Fast fashion brand Zara is popular all over the world, not because of its good design and quality of clothes, but because of its very high management efficiency. If an item on the shelf is out of stock, it can be quickly replenished. This requires real-time monitoring and feedback of data. Nowadays, many international brands are also using RFID inventory tags, RFID cloth tags, RFID laundry tags, RFID cable ties etc., because this technology can also play an anti-theft and anti-counterfeiting role.

As an RFID retail tag with its own data, RFID is an entry-level tool in new retail exploration. In addition to brand stores, unmanned supermarket projects are also currently trying to use it. If you want to find its shortcomings, on the one hand, the cost is slightly high. The cost of an RFID tag and a barcode label is about a few cents to a few dollars. The software and hardware modification of a small store may cost about 1000 dollars, so not all products are suitable for RFID tags. On the other hand, the data dimensions it can obtain are relatively single and still at a primary level, and the accuracy of recognition has not yet reached the point where it is error-free.

People in the industry who are working on unmanned convenience stores say that now it is possible to only enter one customer at a time and leave after taking it. The implication is that an RFID tag alone cannot match a certain product with a certain customer, which is also one of the problems Amazon Go solves. In addition, how to establish its anti-fraud system also needs to be considered.

RFID will be a good choice as an important auxiliary tool in new retail in the future.