ON YOUR last trip to the supermarket, where did you walk, what did you look at, and which products did you ultimately buy? Proximus, a start-up based in Madrid, Spain, wants to know.
Using movement sensors placed around a store, Proximus tracks where individual shoppers go. By combining this data with purchase records, managers can get insights into how to organise their stores to make the most of their customers' habits.
Online, many firms rely on web-analytics to learn about customer browsing and buying behaviour, says Marco Doncel Gabaldón, co-founder of Proximus. But in the physical world, decisions must be based on much patchier information. "We think that approach is wrong," Gabaldón says. "You can know the sales, but you don't know how many people pass near a product, or the conversion rate of a marketing campaign."
Proximus presented its approach at the Techstars Demo Day in London last week. A handful of low-power sensors placed on the ceiling and shelves and linked by Bluetooth detect any movement up to 50 metres away. Meanwhile, other devices locate shoppers by the ping of their smartphones searching for Wi-Fi. The start-up says they can tell where each customer is to within 1.5 metres at any given moment.
This data offers insights into what a store could be doing better. For example, if people tend not to spend time in a given aisle, that can explain why those products are selling poorly. Or if they hover in front of a row of shelves but don't buy anything, then perhaps the prices or marketing campaign need to change.
For the last two months, two European supermarket chains have been trying the Proximus technology in their stores, and the start-up is aiming to hit more locations this year.
Tracking customers as they shop inevitably raises privacy issues. Informing shoppers that they will be tracked might help, says Alfonso Perez, co-founder of Shopperception, a shopper-tracking firm based in Bedford, New York. But he also thinks such technology may be the inevitable next step in a world where we're already monitored by banks, social networks and online retailers.
"The information that's being captured by companies like Proximus is not much more intrusive than things being tracked today that we take for granted," he says.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Shoppers tracked as they go wild in the aisles"
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