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The Capsule seeks to address two of the biggest customer pain points – product availability 24 hours a day and the removal of lengthy queues at the checkout.
About
Key to The Capsule store is the intelligence that needs to: (1) accurately identify products, (2) track the customer throughout the shopper journey and (3) integrate to the point of sale (POS). Technologies need to come together to offer the speed and experience shoppers expect. Let’s look at these three aspects individually and then how they work in combination. Product identification/detection: There are several methods of identifying products. The most popular method, and one we experience is the keying in of product codes or scanning barcodes. More recently, we have started seeing artificial intelligence employed to identify products in autonomous stores. Customer Activity: The customer’s actions are monitored throughout the entire shopping journey. The customer journey starts when an initial customer credential is accepted. Depending on the deployment, this could be the retailer’s mobile application, or any other acceptable identity required to enter the store. The actions monitored help to build a virtual basket that is based on the products that have been picked up and those that the customer has returned to the shelf. Point of Sale: Central to any retail store is the point of sale. This applies equally to autonomous stores that must be able to dynamically change pricing, push new promotions (reflected in the shelf edge or signage), and ensure SKUs are updated regularly. These POS features are essential in building the virtual basket and ultimately completing the payment. In more advanced deployments, integration with a CRM system can include customer identity mapped to a payment mechanism that allows automatic payment.
Key Benefits
While the urban community enjoys the convenience of fully autonomous stores, retailers with their existing estate of stores can also infuse compute technology to provide an autonomous experience. Such an experience can be added into stores by having part of the store reconfigured or having the technology co-exist across the entire store.
Applications
The Capsule technology has been successfully adapted to consider additional SKUs that come from the deli counter and the variety of beverages from a coffee machine. Most importantly, it can distinguish between shoppers on autonomous journeys and those who are taking the traditional staff-assisted checkout route. New instrumentation has been added to directly enable the integration with coffee machines that determines every button press made by the shopper. Provision has also been added to enable the shoppers to move from their autonomous journey to a traditional journey. This is in case there are products that require electronic tags to be removed, have specific restrictions, or require the intervention of traditional checkout staff.