Retailers need accurate inventory counts to drive omnichannel capabilities like buying online pick up in-store. RFID makes this more accessible and more reliable.
The ability to scan entire shipments, eliminating the need for manual box scanning, reduces cycle count time and enables auto reorders at safety stock levels without doing a formal inventory.
Improved Inventory Management
Inventory tracking is perhaps the best-understood RFID retail benefit, as it leads to improved accuracy of inventory data and lowers costs. With accurate product-location information, retailers can streamline picking and packing processes, reduce in-store inventories, and optimize logistics with greater visibility into supply chain flows. For more RFID retail benefits, check this out.
Quickly identifying issues with incoming goods and shipments enables retailers to respond more effectively to problems such as quality issues or shipping delays. Ultimately, this visibility helps to optimize warehouse processes, improve order accuracy and efficiency, and enable a better, more consistent customer experience.
Retailers often see a direct correlation between high-performing store inventory and sales growth. That’s why a retailer needs ultra-high visibility into stock from the distribution centre to the point of sale. A comprehensive RFID retail solution provides this visibility. It ensures that a retailer knows exactly what is in stock at any given time, from the distributor to the retailer to the end customer.
It includes accurately tracking what is selling and identifying which items are most popular with customers. For example, in a jewellery display case, this could mean knowing the most popular ring size so that complimentary bracelets can be readily available.
Enhanced security is another area where RFID can add value. Combined with a video surveillance system, it allows for the automatic detection of products being removed from a display case or store shelf. Security staff can then quickly find the security video of that specific moment and review it to determine what happened. It saves time and prevents the need to search through hundreds or thousands of hours of video to find a single stolen item.
With the speed and convenience of omnichannel shopping, a store must have an efficient checkout process that can keep up with demand. It is where RFID makes a difference, with the capability to instantly connect a customer’s mobile device to the payment terminal. It eliminates the need for a barcode scan, dramatically cutting in-store checkout times. For more RFID retail benefits, check this out.
Enhanced Customer Experience
One of the leading retail benefits of RFID is enhanced customer experience. The technology reduces checkout line wait times by scanning items simultaneously, allowing shoppers to pass through lines more quickly and efficiently than traditional barcode scanners. It also frees up cash registers to handle additional sales and service transactions.
The heightened inventory accuracy that comes with RFID also improves product availability on the sales floor. Retailers can confidently stock and restock shelves, fulfil orders down to the last unit, and display products online—all critical factors for a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
Low on-floor product availability can be costly, resulting in lost sales and frustrated customers. Whether caused by an inefficient replenishment process or simply a shortage of merchandise, retailers can make better decisions with the data from RFID systems to avoid out-of-stocks and other losses.
With the ability to track the location and status of every single item, RFID allows stores to offer click-and-collect services—a popular and growing shopper trend. The system can automatically update inventories to reflect these purchases so that merchandise is available for pickup when a shopper arrives.
RFID also makes it possible to reuse or sell back inventory that may have been sold by mistake, returned or damaged. By putting the right merchandise back into the salable inventory pool, retailers can avoid margin erosion on the items that would otherwise be lost in the reverse supply chain.
In addition, RFID can enable retailers to use more efficient self-checkouts. With this capability, customers can scan their items with a mobile device and pay without visiting a cashier. This significant convenience can lead to a higher customer satisfaction rating. Retailers are already experimenting with this option, such as sports-equipment retailer Decathlon in Europe, which tagged 85.0 per cent of its merchandise to triple labour productivity and cut stockouts, raising revenue by 2.5 per cent.