Driving Impulse Shopping with a Smart Cart

Supermarkets could soon turn to monitoring technology to make us buy more stuff.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology may not only be useful for streamlining inventory and supply chains: it could also make shoppers swarm. A new study suggests that supermarkets could increase their revenues by using information gleaned from RFID tags to make shoppers behave like an impulse-buying collective.

A proposed system featuring smart shopping carts would monitor the contents of everyone's carts and feed information back to customers as they shop, all in an effort to boost sales. (Credit: Simon Smith)

Impulse buying currently accounts for about 40 percent of all supermarket purchases, says Ronaldo Menezes, an expert in swarm intelligence at the Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, FL. But his research suggests that impulse buying could be significantly increased if information was fed back to shoppers about what others are buying.

It's an established fact that consumers are more influenced by other people's purchasing decisions than they are by discounts, says Menezes. Furthermore, it's well-known that people will flock or swarm in certain conditions, such as when a fire alarm goes off. The idea here was to exploit both of these inclinations in order to create a swarm of impulse shoppers.

The introduction of so-called smart shopping carts should make this possible. Already being used experimentally by a number of supermarkets, these carts are capable of knowing what a customer has put in them by scanning the contents for an RFID tag: a sort of wireless bar code that is being introduced in products. And some carts, such as the Shopping Buddy, developed by Cuesol, in Quincy, MA, have touch screens.

So by monitoring the contents of everyone's carts, the screens could possibly feed information back to customers as they shop. For example, a customer entering a particular aisle may be informed, via the cart's screen, that 60 percent of customers currently have a specific product from that aisle in their cart. Similarly, when the customer places an item in the cart, he or she may be notified about other products purchased by customers who bought this one.

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Amazon and iTunes use similar tactics online, notes Herb Sorensen, CEO of the in-store consumer-research organization Sorensen Associates, in Troutdale, OR. He thinks the tactic will make sense in the physical world, as well. Sorensen Associates already uses RFID-enabled smart carts to conduct similar research on shopping behavior. (These carts, however, do not feature the screens that display information about other customers' purchases.)

So far Menezes has only carried out simulations of this swarming behavior, so it remains to be seen if the same behavior manifests in real shopping scenarios. "We are confident that our preferences are as close as you could get to a real consumer," he says.