IoT InStore Shoe Popularity Tracking with BLE Tags in a Brazilian Shop

In a shop with numerous diverse products, it would be quite difficult for managers to figure out the consumer preferences. The reason could be the needs for a specific person to always keep an eye on it, which is quite a waste of labor force. This approach often leads to inefficient resource allocation and missed commercial opportunities to capture emerging trends. In such situations, an innovative IoT solution steps in to solve the challenge, making the customer priorities much clearer.

Challenge

In a Brazilian shoe shop with hundreds of styles on display, the manager was recently struggled with figuring out the popularity of every pair of shoes. Traditionally, sales staff manually get customer interests by recording interactions after assisting, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Especially during peak hours, when crowds surged, employees would become busy with serving customers, leaving very little time for recording. They could only recall the memory to get such interest information.

As a result, popularity estimates were often imprecise, leading to misaligned inventory decisions or overstocking of less-interested items. The lack of useful insights also hindered the ability of the store to tailor recommendations or optimize shelf layouts for maximum engagement. There is a need to adopt a better method for recording the interests of these onsite customers.

Solution

To better record and recognize the popularity of the shoes, our client introduces an innovative IoT solution to achieve automatic and real-time recording. The shop manager equips one M4 Lite tag on each sample shoe to get the customer interaction information. Every time one customer picks up or examines a shoe, the built-in 3-axis accelerometer within the tag could detect the movement and transfer such information to the online platform via our MKWG7 USB gateway.

On the platform, such interaction information would be marked and regarded as a dynamic “popularity score”. As times gradually accumulate, the platform could show clear and actionable information of the preference on every pair of shoes, like the pick-up ranking or rising trend. With such insightful information and trend at hand, managers could identify the most popular type and optimize inventory decisions easily.

On top of that, to enhance the shopping experience, a touchscreen has also been installed near the shoe rack to show relevant information of the shoes. Once the customer picks up the shoe, the detailed specifications of the shoes and relevant outfit suggestions will be displayed on the screen as recommendations. Such IoT solution not only reduces the manual recording workload, but also drives higher sales conversion by delivering personalized and data-driven purchasing experiences.

Featured Products

M4 Lite is a small BLE tag which is portable and easy to be deployed. It achieves significant breakthroughs in cost, distance and sustainability, thus becoming an ideal choice for asset tracking in various scenarios such as medical device tracking. Moreover, its various firmware features enable it to support multi-type asset tracking and positioning model, which allow users to change parameters as per different scenarios with much more flexibility.

The MKGW7 BLE USB Gateway bridges Bluetooth beacons and cloud servers, efficiently gathering proximate beacon data and seamlessly transmits it to the server via either Wi-Fi or USB connectivity. By offering a cost-effective and high-performance solution, the MKGW7 enables real-time location services, condition monitoring, asset tracking, and personal safety management.