It’s almost worse to use self-checkout at the grocery store than to wait in line for 15 minutes. Things don’t scan properly, sometimes they double scan, or you have to lookup a number by flipping through pages and pages of fruits and veggies in the most unintuitive UI ever designed. Of course, there’s the infamous “Please remove the last item from your bag” which then renders your express self-checkout experience one of frustration, delay and at the mercy of Marcy who is preoccupied with filing her nails and doesn’t even seem to care that your screen is frozen and there’s 15 people behind you. QThru’s smartphone app will change that. The QThru app, once installed on your smartphone, allows you to scan each individual product while you are shopping, right off the shelf as you toss it in your basket. The information about what you are scanning is then sent to the QThru cloud via the app, which in turn communicates with a retailers POS system. I spoke with Aaron Roberts, founder and CEO of QThru who explains, “this is a complex and innovative technology that they have been working on for years.”
Once you are finished shopping, you come upon a QThru screen with a QR Code, you simply scan that QR Code which then communicates with the cloud telling it that you, the customer, is standing right here right now. It spits out your receipt, you walk over to someone who then verifies your purchase and receipt, and you’ve now successfully purchased retail products through the cloud. But how do you scan a bunch of bananas or apples which are sold by weight? ”We have an optional scale, a PC based scale which will allow you to print out a QR code that you can scan and pull into your shopping cart. If a store doesn’t want to invest in that, they can then manually punch in the weight of the item after weighing it and it can be verified when the customer checks out,” Roberts told MDM in an interview.As for future technologies like NFC, Roberts is ok with that: “We’re ok with NFC, in the end you have to have a mobile shopping cart somewhere, we’re just doing things a few years in advance. When NFC is available on all products, like a pack of gum, you just take your phone and wave it on the pack of gum, it’s already in your cart. We see all technologies like QR Codes, barcodes and NFC working with QThru, we’re just enablers for the shopping experience to allow customers to do shopping in a mobile way.”
QThru is free for retailers to integrate with, but a kiosk can run $900, and the digital scale, the most expensive part, is about $4000. Of course, this is a fraction of the cost of typical self-checkout stands, and hopefully will have less things to go wrong.
“We’ve been testing QThru for six months at the IGA Ridge Supermarket in Snoqualmie, Washington,” said Tyler Myers, president of the Myers Group in a press release. “We wanted to see how our customers embraced this alternative technology and it was enormously popular. We plan to install QThru in our other retail locations including a hardware store. QThru also allows us to offer added value to our customers through exclusive announcements, events and coupons and we plan to install it now at all of our grocery and hardware stores.”
No comments:
Post a Comment