{"id":23386,"date":"2020-03-05T11:23:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T10:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intellias.com\/?p=23386"},"modified":"2024-07-23T09:48:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-23T07:48:10","slug":"indoor-positioning-technologies-as-a-rising-force-in-retail-sales","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/indoor-positioning-technologies-as-a-rising-force-in-retail-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Indoor Positioning Technologies as a Rising Force in Retail Sales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Indoor location technologies<\/a> have been around for a good while. It\u2019s not a brand-new concept, nor is it something that consumers and companies haven\u2019t come across yet. However, it is only recently that the market started growing at an increasing rate and it looks like we are yet to witness the triumph of indoor wayfinding and positioning solutions. According to a comprehensive research<\/a> report by MarketsandMarkets, the global indoor location market is expected to soar to $44 billion by 2022.<\/p>\n

In a broad sense of the word, an indoor positioning system is an array of sensors and smart devices that determine the position of people or objects inside buildings, where traditional methods like GPS or A-GPS become hugely inaccurate or fail to work at all.<\/p>\n

The benefits of being able to reliably determine an individual\u2019s position inside a large building, such as a shopping mall, are multi-faceted and we are going to look at them in detail in the following article.<\/p>\n

Reasons for growth<\/h2>\n

In a world where everything can be bought on Amazon and delivered right to your door, one would think that the days of traditional shopping are numbered. However, this is not happening \u2014 or, perhaps, not as fast as some tend to believe. According to multiple studies, around 90% of worldwide retail sales<\/a> are still made in physical stores.<\/p>\n

This proportion is gradually shifting towards purely online shopping, but one thing is clear \u2014 traditional retail is not going anywhere. People still spend a lot of time at malls and leave 65% of their shopping budget in stores<\/a>, not their browsers.<\/p>\n

How we buy<\/b>
\n\"Indoor
\nSource: Big Commerce<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s changing is the very paradigm of the offline shopping experience. These days, shoppers often come to brick-and-mortar stores to finish the transaction they started online. Prior to entering a physical store, they may spend countless hours researching the market and narrowing their choice down to one or two options.<\/p>\n

In the store, they just need to verify that they made the right choice and complete the purchase. Retailers are well aware of that and try to make their in-store experience as immersive as possible: almost a half invest equally in online and in-store technologies and around 20% favor in-store tech<\/a> over online presence.<\/p>\n

Because of this, businesses remain very serious about their retail stores and invest heavily in cutting-edge technologies such as indoor wayfinding, navigation, and positioning.<\/p>\n

Indoor positioning system 101<\/h2>\n

The concept of complex indoor navigation and positioning systems did not come out of nowhere. Today, smartphone penetration in the United States, for example, is over 70%<\/a>. In plain English, it means that 7 out of 10 people walking into a mall on a Saturday morning carry in their pockets a powerful device that uses 3G\/LTE, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth to connect to the outside world.<\/p>\n

These signals can be used to accurately detect the position of a device\u2019s owner and guide them through the maze of modern humongous shopping centers. From the technical perspective, a shopping mall navigation system can be implemented on either the client or the server side. The first scenario requires an app on the user\u2019s device that will use the venue\u2019s wireless infrastructure to determine its position.<\/p>\n

As an alternative, positioning services can be placed on the server side, read data from multiple sensors, and use advanced algorithms to recognize Wi-Fi and BLE-enabled devices and calculate their coordinates. These solutions can use a variety of different technologies, including BLE (iBeacon), Wi-Fi, UWB, and others, to \u201csee\u201d shoppers\u2019 devices and communicate with them.<\/p>\n

From the technology standpoint, mainstream indoor positioning solutions can be broken down into several distinct types:<\/p>\n