Consumer Applications in RFID-equipped Grocery

The heterogeneity of products in grocery stores leads to consumer confusion. Stores should support their consumers during shopping, but today the only connection between consumer and retailer is at the check-out. The black-box “sales floor” can be disclosed by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) on product level. To derive possible applications this paper first compares the architecture between online and RFID-based stores. Second, applications used in online grocery stores are identified in a field-study and simulated in an RFID-based environment. The analysis shows that all the applications are technically feasible, but not all make sense. Moreover it is necessary to find a framework to usefully integrate both, the virtual and the conventional environment. Due to the features of RFID new applications become possible, whereof two using the features ‘product instance’ and ’context information’ are exemplarily shown.