Abstract:

The heterogeneity of products in grocery stores leads to consumer confusion. Stores should support their consumer during shopping, but actually the only connection between consumer and retailer is at the check-out. The black-box “sales floor” can be disclosed by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) on the product level. To derive possible applications this paper first compares the architecture between online and RFID-based stores. Second, applications used in online grocery stores are identified in a field study and simulated in an RFID-based environment. The analysis shows that all the applications could be implemented, but not all of them should be. Moreover it is necessary to find a framework where both, the virtual and the conventional environment are usefully integrated. Due to the features of RFID even more applications become possible. The last part of this paper shows exemplarily two applications using the features ‘product instance’ and ’context information’.s.ch