RTINNOVATIONS 37


PERSONAL E-SHOPPING


NEW SELF-CHECKOUT


CONSULTANT LAUNCHES Gartmentology connects customers with fashion retailers online to fi nd clothes that best suit their individual style, shape and skin tone Developed by image consultant Susanne Newman and business partner and artifi cial intelligence expert Rob McDonald, recently launched website Garmentology is aiming to create a new type of personalised e-commerce shop window for High Street and multichannel fashion retailers.


Fashion retailers face particular challenges selling online, McDonald told Retail Technology: “Personalisation for fashion is especially complex. With peer reviews, you can’t be sure that what looks good on someone else of a different size will look good on you. Putting people into groups doesn’t always work either because when it comes to style either, everyone is different. And the cost of returns is also a massive expense.” He added: “We’re very retailer-focused and delivering recommendations into retailers’ sites is critical for us, so we’ve made integration simple for retailers. We are also looking at implementing single sign-on to make customer registration and integration even easier, especially for users who are on Facebook or Twitter.” www.garmentology.co.uk


CONCEPT EVALUATED Fujitsu is evaluating brand new checkout technology in partnership with Kroger, America’s largest grocery retailer The new self-checkout technology promises to radically reduce checkout times for customers and reduce operational costs for retailers, using a three-way system of scales, barcodes and 3D cameras to physically identify a each individual shopper’s items. Kroger is working with Northrop Grumman’s business unit,


Adaptive Optics Associates and Fujitsu to commercialise the Advantage Checkout system for use in Kroger stores and to bring the concept solution to the global market. The concept has achieved product identifi cation rates over 98% and can recognise and differentiate stacked and side-by- side items even if barcodes are hidden, as well as manage both exceptions and restricted items while reducing shrink, and improving data integrity. Chris Hjelm, The Kroger Company chief information


offi cer, stated: “Customers are choosing the Advantage Checkout because of its many enhancements to the shopping experience. These enhancements include: increased scanning and bagging speed and accuracy, minimising of queuing for the payment process and the opportunity for improved associate engagement in both full service and self-checkout modes.” www.fujitsu.com


GESTURE-CONTROLLED DIGITAL SIGNAGE UNVEILED POSlife technology creates intuitive digital point-of-sale interaction, shown for the fi rst time at recent European trade show


Online Software attended EuroShop recently to demonstrate how its digital signage systems, controlled by PRESTIGEenterprise, can be used to respond directly to customer body language. For the fi rst time displays triggered by the Microsoft Kinect technology-based POSlife solution were used to present information customers really want to see. If a customer points to a specifi c product or a certain item,


the system displays detailed information as if by magic on the nearby screens. While Microsoft Kinect provides the gesture-based controller platform, PRESTIGEenterprise processes the pictures and movements produced by this controller, transforming them into impulses to dynamically display product information at the point of sale. The companies said, with this new product, the interactive sales counter fi nally


becomes reality, dispensing with expensive touchscreens so the customer need simply only point to a product in a window display to see relevant information about it immediately. “Simply point to a product in the window display and receive the desired information immediately,” it stated. “The products are the main attraction, the product line explains itself.” www.online-software-ag.de/en


MARCH/APRIL 2011 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY


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