Scan and go’s viability depends on advancing tech

What this means: In many ways, essential retailers are at the forefront of technology advancements that improve the shopping experience for consumers. As the stores that serve consumers’ daily and weekly trips, making shopping easier and allowing consumers to shop as they desire is critical. Technologies that power self checkout and scan and go aren’t always seamless, but they’re a good indication of consumer expectations of other retail sectors in the future. Consumers want to be in control of their own path to purchase, whether that’s in what retailers they’re selecting or how they move through the in-store experience. Scan-and-go technology puts independence into shoppers’ hands. By letting consumers scan their products, they can shop at their own pace instead of waiting at checkout, making for a speedier, more convenient shopping experience. The checkout process itself with scan and go is dependent on the grocer, with various methods available for self-checkout including: A self-service register. A mobile self-scanning app, either used on shoppers' personal devices or provided handhelds. Smart shopping carts. With scan and go mobile self-scanning, consumers use their smartphone’s camera to scan products as they take them off the shelf. Whenever they are done shopping, they can choose their favorite payment method to pay directly in the app and leave the store without needing to go to a traditional checkout or self-checkout. “This makes the checkout experience extremely fast and convenient,” Georg Karner, Shopreme’s head of marketing, told Retail Leader Pro. “Furthermore, scan and go can offer real-time basket value calculation, giving consumers full cost control. It helps them stay within budget, and they always know how much they have left to spend. For consumers, this is an effective tool to successfully navigate times of crisis and increasing prices.” Scan and go also offers many convenience features, including shopping lists, detailed product information, personalized recommendations and integration of loyalty programs. At the same time, retailers also can benefit from scan and go. “Practice shows that consumers tend to spend more if they know that they are still below their budget,” Karner said. “It also helps retailers avoid waste. In the U.K., we see customers abandon frozen products at the cash desk when their shopping exceeds their budget. With the cooling chain being broken, these products can no longer be sold. This doesn’t happen with scan and go.” Loss prevention Unfortunately, some retailers — such as Wegmans and Hy-Vee — recently dropped scan-and-go systems, citing high losses. According to a study conducted by the University of Leicester, product loss could increase 1-10% per store using scan and go. Not scanning an item and mis-scanning items purposely — sometimes while pretending to scan — along with adding an expensive item to a shopping basket while scanning a fake barcode of a cheaper item are common forms of retail theft using the tech. Retailers are using a wide range of methods to prevent and mitigate theft. Randomized cart checks, exit gates, rules that flag previous offenders, first-time users, and attempts to identify items using cameras with image recognition or using sensitive weights are some of the interventions retailers use to mitigate loss. “Currently, retailers employ flagging and alert systems to try and prevent both intentional shoplifting and unintentional — human error — theft,” Mickey Balter, CEO and co-founder of Oriient, told Retailer Leader Pro. “They also randomly check carts during the checkout process.” Still, the flagging rules are often not effective enough, ending up draining store resources and causing frustration among shoppers, Balter added. “In order to keep rolling out scan and go, retailers are seeking technologies to help improve the flagging process in a way that does not impair the shopper experience but also leads to operational savings,” he said, adding the aforementioned technologies can often be cumbersome, inaccurate or very costly. Scan and go’s viability moving forward depends on retailers keeping track of shoppers’ locations in the store throughout the journey, according to Balter. “With indoor location services that integrate into the scan and go systems — just like using GPS outdoors — they could add advanced logic to the alert and flagging systems to make fraud detection more reliable,” he explained. “This means that shoppers will be able to get scan-reminder notifications if they left a department they lingered in without scanning an item, or if they scanned items abnormally — e.g., not in front of the shelf — helping reduce unintentional scans and avoid embarrassment. Retailers will get alerts for store security only for actual abnormal shopping behaviors based on shopper-lingering tendencies and even suspicious journeys that do not follow natural shopper patterns.” The use of scan and go can only succeed moving forward if retailers find a way to maximize the tech’s potential while minimizing losses. “That can only occur with advanced logic that reminds shoppers to scan their items during their shopper journey or alerts employees to suspicious shopper behavior,” Balter said. “Now that retailers are beginning to incorporate effective technologies that can easily scale to all stores, like indoor GPS inside the mobile app, scan and go will flourish. This would let shoppers have more independence while shopping and allow store resources to be used more efficiently.” Kerner also believes scan and go will soon be a standard checkout method that will, at least for now, exist alongside traditional checkout and self-checkouts lines. “Fast checkout lanes with our vector exit terminals have proven to boost adoption rates and prevent loss,” Kerner said. “That said, it is very important to tightly integrate scan and go with other forms of self-checkout and offer a unified self-checkout experience. In May, we will launch with a retailer that offers dedicated self-checkout areas with scan and go and self-checkouts fully integrated.” What’s next: Smart carts are rolling out to grocery retailers across the U.S. both from third parties and retailers themselves, and are a true indication of where checkout technology is headed for other sectors, such as warehouse clubs and mass merchants. Now that these capabilities are here, retailers need to determine how to best strategically implement them in different types of retail environments.

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