High street shopping gets IoT boost

Thanks to a city-based start-up, InteractionOne, which is enabling the physical store to talk to your digital phone.

Here’s how it works: InteractionOne places beacons inside stores that communicate using Bluetooth technology with the company’s Mobmerry app which is installed on your phone.

Launched recently as pilot projects on Indiranagar 100 Feet Road and at VR Mall in Whitefield, nearly 200 retail stores of brands such as Avirate, Celio, Guess, Kazo, Lee, Vero Moda, Wrangler, have signed up to have these beacons installed and participate in probably the country’s first instance of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled shopping.

The Mobmerry app taps into store databases and lists out products and offers. As you walk across the street, beacons detect your location and send out alerts on products and deals at shops in the vicinity. When you walk into one of the stores, you get alerts specific to that store, or on items on your wish list, or even redeemable shopping points just for walking in.

Mobmerry users can also get custom lists of products by logging in from their Facebook account, based on posts and pages that you have ‘liked’.

The beacons not only help stores communicate with customers, they also help retailers tap into data to identify customer behaviour, such as which areas did a customer spend more time in.

Some 30 retailers have come onboard the Mobmerry pilot at Indiranagar and some 150 stores at VR Mall, InteractionOne CEO Krishna Prasad told Deccan Chronicle during a demo at Indiranagar. The only hitch was a network glitch that one can perhaps put down to teething problems. Mr Prasad said that his company plans to deploy more than 1,000 beacons across shopping locations in the city in the next few months.