What We’re All Missing: Unfound Products = Lost Revenue
In an era when shopper experience and convenience are king, any consumer can relate to the frustration of having trouble locating an item in a store. How much time have you wasted looking for an item? And how many times have you not found it, and just given up?
Shoppers and retail professionals alike can agree that searching for products in stores, whether large or small, is oftentimes a challenge. This creates a stark opposition to the ease of online shopping. Inability to locate helpful store personnel and insufficient or inadequately updated store signage often leads to fraught shoppers wandering around the store, searching for a specific item – which in many cases, they never find.
In June 2019, The Location-Based Marketing Association, in conjunction with Oriient, published a white paper, outlining retail research done by VYPR and Nielsen, into the difficulties shoppers face in finding items during their journeys.
Key takeaways from the research included:
- 20-40% of Shoppers complain that during a shopping trip, they cannot find at least one product they intended to buy
- Most shoppers limit their shopping journeys to pre-defined amounts of time, and are unlikely to extend their shopping trip to find all the products on their list.
- “Missed Opportunities” – products that were planned, but not purchased, are quantified as ranging from 7-16%
- Most importantly, retailers are experiencing a 3-5% loss in revenue relating to unlocatable products.
For over 10 years now, industries across the world have been devoting resources to research, develop, and implement indoor navigation with various technologies. Locating people’s position inside buildings (and inside stores specifically), just like we do outdoors using GPS, would be a game-changer.
Until recently, the existing procedures to enable indoor positioning involved purchase, widespread installation, and maintenance of various hardware components to connect and detect users’ devices. Those components, such as Bluetooth beacons, pose cost constraints that prevent the market from deploying, while other solutions that rely on existing infrastructure, such as Wifi access points, result in insufficient accuracy.
Oriient’s indoor positioning system, which uses geomagnetic technology, offers a realistic solution, that users experience in the same way they do GPS outdoors. Geomagnetism doesn’t require any hardware or reliance on facility infrastructure, provides unparalleled accuracy of 1-meter (3 feet), and is delivered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model – making it easy to implement and cost-effective.
The full report on how unfound products directly affect revenue for retailers, and how Oriient’s hassle-free indoor positioning is helping reclaim that lost revenue, can be found here.