Alicorn backs Shopic’s “smart cart” technology

Supermarkets, operating on razor-thin profit margins, face a growing threat from the rise of online shopping alternatives. These digital competitors offer not only competitive prices but also the convenience of fast delivery and a seamless user experience. Unlike their online counterparts, brick-and-mortar supermarkets struggle to capture the same level of customer data, leaving them at a disadvantage in optimising pricing and enhancing the shopper’s experience.

Physical supermarkets face a significant challenge: overcoming the friction that shoppers encounter in-store. Long checkout lines emerged as the most common reason for shopping abandonment, with over half of shoppers willing to spend less or leave a store to avoid a slow checkout.

Supermarkets have begun to remedy these problems by introducing contactless or self-checkout solutions minimising shoppers’ interactions. However, with these solutions queues for kiosks remain a friction to shoppers and data is limited to point-of-sale (POS), only yielding information on purchase volume, price and time.

In contrast, e-commerce sites have leveraged user data to deliver personalized advertisements, promotions, and dynamic pricing. This approach maximizes potential revenues and margins while offering users unique shopping experiences. Players like Ocado have demonstrated the added value that highly advanced shopping recommendations, based on detailed user profiles, can bring to the table.

To level the playing field, smart retail and frictionless checkout solutions have emerged. These technologies offer physical stores the opportunity to eliminate obstacles to the shopper’s experience and gather valuable customer data throughout the shopping journey, even before reaching the POS. However, fully frictionless solutions often come with a hefty capital expenditure cost, as they require substantial infrastructure adaptation. Other solutions, such as smart carts, while innovative, are not necessarily budget-friendly and depend on high accuracy and user-friendliness to succeed.

Shopic is a game changer in the retail space. Shopic has created a computer vision-based device that can transform an ordinary shopping cart into a smart cart.

This innovation enables frictionless checkout while providing real-time data analysis and data-driven insights for supermarkets. Shopic’s solution empowers supermarkets to promote directly to shoppers, directly influencing sales and boasting an impressive conversion rate of 29.6% for promoted goods, surpassing e-commerce benchmarks.

Notably, Shopic’s platform analyses a supermarket’s cost structure and has shown remarkable results, increasing a shopper’s total spending by over 13%. This is achieved by reducing checkout staff and optimizing the supply chain, ultimately improving profitability.

 

What makes Shopic stand out is its subscription-based model, eliminating the need for extensive capital expenditure or the replacement of monolithic smart carts for maintenance and repairs. This innovative approach makes it accessible and cost-effective for supermarkets to embrace the future of retail seamlessly.