Capturing supermarket shopper behavior using SmartBasket

Abstract

Retail stores make marketing decisions using customer demographic and sales data to determine which customer and product group combination best contributes increased profit. Customer profile and sales data are of great help but they alone do not portray the whole picture. Tracking the location of a customer in a store and analyzing the customer shopping path and marrying the result to customer profile and sales data is of high interest for marketing for the purpose of streamlining store operations, maintaining customer royalty and increasing sales. In this paper, we propose a system for supermarkets that tracks the path of a shopping cart associated with a customer profile to understand the customer shopping behavior. The proposed system uses IR LED plates installed on the carts which are monitored by small and inexpensive in-shelf networked IP cameras. The shopping carts are equipped with a low cost input device that has a monitor to gather customer profile information. The system is integrated with the supermarket's web site to customize the overall shopping experience. The data collected is mined to find out the relationships among product placement, customer profile and product purchase decisions. The system is designed to monitor real time movements of the shopping cart. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.