RFID was made for BOPIS
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the blog of Nikki Baird, VP of retail innovation at Aptos. The article first appeared on Forbes.com.
The challenge with RFID is adoption. I’ve hosted too many round tables and panel discussions where there is one retailer at the table who has adopted item-level RFID in stores and everyone else has not.
The adopter is an evangelist facing a room full of skeptics.
Based on discussions at the recent NRF Big Show, RFID is not at the tipping point but is certainly still on an upward adoption trend.
Any tech person worth their salt will shudder when they see the term “real-time.” Real-time data is expensive both from a solution architecture and a network perspective. Before omnichannel processes like buy online pickup in store (BOPIS), a daily snapshot of inventory at the end of the selling day was real-time enough.
No longer.
If the website can’t see what’s sold in the store since it opened this morning, retailers must put buffers on the available inventory for things like BOPIS. Retailers don’t want to cancel orders, but taking an item off the website simply because you can’t be sure you have enough in stores to continue offering it for ship-from-store – that is costly too.
With item-level RFID, you don’t have to look in every store every second – again, that would be very expensive to support – but if a customer views an item’s online product detail page, you could certainly take a glance in the stores, most likely to be used for fulfillment to see if enough of the item is on hand to fulfill if the customer adds it to the cart.
From what I’ve seen, retailers need to put 100 percent item coverage in one store, with 100 percent reader coverage in the same store, to understand what’s possible and how it could change their lives.
Most retailers looking for real-time inventory seek better intra-day visibility into inventory snapshots. A few retailers are ready to see whether RFID can get them that and maybe something more.