The Australian retail customer’s in-store experience is slowly being transformed by the appearance of iBeacons in various shops and malls. Retailers who embrace the technology will quickly gain an edge over those retailers who lag behind. The impact on the shopping experience is potentially as great as the revolution that smartphones have made.
In June last year, at their World Wide Developers Conference, Apple quietly announced the introduction of iBeacons. The technology became available in September last year in iOS 7, and has since then been finding a number of applications in Retail.
In brief, an iBeacon is an inexpensive ($5 – $30), small, battery operated device that communicates with a smartphone via a Bluetooth technology called BLE. Although Apple announced the technology, it is supported on the latest Android and Windows phones as well as iPhones. The beacons typically communicate information about themselves such as location, motion and temperature. Apps on the smartphone use this information to provide context aware services such as presenting coupons relevant to the merchandise the customer is viewing.
In addition, the retailer can use information from the iBeacon apps to track customer movements. For example, how long were customers at a particular display? What was the path of the customer around the store?
In Australia, iBeacons have already been used in malls such as Werribee Plaza and Chatswood Chase, as well as a number of Westfield centres. Most trials at this point have been around offering coupons to Customers, but expect the use cases to get more sophisticated. For example, in Germany a group of high-end restaurants are using the technology to get detailed insights about their customers.
Like all such technologies, retailers will have to be careful to ensure the technology does not cross the line into “creepy”, and operates within the constraints of Australia’s privacy legislation. However, as long as customers perceive they receive value from the apps associated with iBeacons, experiences overseas as well as the trials in Australia indicate they will embrace this technology. Retailers who fail to take advantage of the technology risk falling behind their competitors.