The world of supermarket retail is changing quickly. After decades of slow, incremental changes inside the grocery store, the digital transformation has shined its bright light on the supermarket aisle. Electronic shelf pricing is replacing price tags, customers are ordering online and picking up groceries in-store, and inventory management systems are improving.
With so many different AI applications coming to the supermarket, one challenge retailers face is deciding where to start their investment. While each upgrade offers benefits to the retailer, few can match the short- and long-term benefits stemming from the smart cart.
While some smart carts require significant infrastructure changes to the layout of the store, clip-on devices that transform ordinary carts into smart carts can be deployed with minimal in-store changes. In the short term, these carts enable retailers to level the playing field with their online competitors by eliminating long lines, recommending related products, and offering promotions based on user likes.
However, it is the long terms benefits that should have supermarket management prioritizing investment in smart carts. The return on investment, increase in customer loyalty, and increased basket value deliver measurable, bottom-line benefits that position the store for long-term success.
Shopic smart carts deliver a consistent return on investment by improving operations in several key areas. Smart carts enable supermarkets to redeploy employees. Cashiers deliver very little value in terms of revenue increase. They simply scan items and collect payment. In a smart cart store, employee roles can be reimagined. Rather than being a cost center, they can work the retail floor as salespeople, aiding customers to find new products, answering questions, and growing sales.
The digital screen inherent in a smart cart also opens new retail media revenue streams. Forecast to grow to a $100B market this year, retail media is turning into a key revenue stream for groceries and other retailers. Supermarkets that invest in smart carts today are placing a screen in front of every customer, where they can display advertising and promote in-store products.
Smart carts also capture a wealth of consumer data. Whether anonymized to offer generalized insights or personalized to help maximize the lifetime value of a customer, analytics helps understand what consumers want, their purchase process, and the drivers that help make a sale. Those insights help deliver a strong return on investment for years to come.
Introducing smart carts to the supermarket impacts profitability in some very interesting ways. The most obvious comes from increase in sales. Shufersal, the leading Israeli supermarket chain, ran a pilot in several of their stores. Over the course of the pilot, those stores saw 12%-15% of their revenue processed by the Shopic solution. Customer basket sizes were 78% larger than average, and shopper’s monthly spending increased by 8%.
Switching from traditional checkout processes to on-cart payment systems allow supermarkets to allocate the space in the store currently being used for checkout to sell more products. The increased selling space can be used to venture into new lines of business, promote high-profit items, or showcase new products. Regardless of what it is used for, increasing the size of the sales floor will enable supermarkets to generate more sales per square foot.
Customers who try Shopic’s smart cart return to the store to use it again. The system generates consistently high customer satisfaction scores, with 97% reporting that the system is easy to use.
That high customer satisfaction score helps explain the shopper mix within three weeks of transitioning to the smart cart. At that point, 76% of shoppers entering the store are returning customers. They enjoy the easy-to-use system, custom promotions, and the ability to get in and out of a supermarket in just a few minutes, even during peak shopping times.
There’s never been a better time to invest in smart carts. The long term benefits, which include reduced costs, higher value baskets, and loyal customers, work together to position the store for long term success and high profitability.
