Behind smart carts the future of retail, or How I invented the wheel

Once I read in a smart book that any invention, in fact, is the result of a negative experience. They say that this is the way a person works that once he has stuffed a painful lump, the next time he will build something like a helmet on his head. The statement is controversial, not applicable to everything, but in most cases true.

Tired of people pushing loads on the ground - a wheel appeared, a Neolithic farmer picked up the soil with a digging stick, found a wide and flat bison bone (which, by the way, was called a spatula later) in the remnants of a family dinner, invented a shovel. And the lightning conductor must have been invented by the one who, once upon a time, was shaken by a good lightning, otherwise how to think of it.


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There were, of course, those who are most needed in life , who, by virtue of genius, used to think for everyone without reference to personal experience (da Vinci and Tesla, for example), but this is a separate song. Basically, inventions are the logical outcome of their own empirical path. That's about how I recently “invented” a smart trolley for a supermarket.

The atmosphere for creativity on that day was favorable — it was the traditional Saturday for shopping, and for some reason only three out of ten were open to the cashiers in the super. In the cart, I had everything that a family of five with two small children might need for a week, and they themselves are personal. A rather numerous line roared behind me, and right in front of me in the trolley on the folding “children's” shelf the younger child was tugging, pulling the hair out of my beard and laughing at the same time contagiously (apparently, something funny was wondering). The elder at that time was sitting in the trolley itself and quickly folding back into it everything that I had just laid out on the tape in front of the cash register. In general, the cash register was approaching, but the matter did not move from a dead center. The kind-hearted aunt standing in front tried to help, but was immediately doused with juice. As a result, with her help and thanks to the cashier's skill, I still managed to pay for the purchases, but after the checkout it all happened again - the elder began to lay out of the cart what I was trying to fold into her, and the younger one, having thinned his beard by that moment, took up the mustache.



The queues are telling us

Hell retreated, went home. The recent experience was so vivid that the nervous system sent impulses to the brain immediately after the shock from the experience had passed. And what if the cart itself will perform the functions of a POS terminal? Yes, and additional features such functionality provides a lot. And on the way, I already drew the idea of ​​how to avoid shifting from empty to empty, optimizing the shopping process. To the delight of buyers and sellers.

Proud of the benefits that I bring to humanity, at home I decided to google on the subject in order to make sure of the originality of the idea. The disappointment was cruel. It turns out that on the Internet, samples of smart carts have long existed in ideas, projects, and prototypes. And in the Shanghai network of hypermarkets Lotus even successfully tested. Moreover, the understanding of the "mind of the cart" among their creators is very different.



Designers Kitai Pak and Inyong Zhang, for example, in their concept offered a model that would generate electricity when it was moving, and the store would later use it in its power grid. And the developers of the cart Smart Shopping Cart of the Korean company SK Telecom supplied their string bag on wheels with a built-in tablet computer, which helps the buyer to navigate the store and select products.



But the most desirable option - to pay for purchases with a trolley - offers only one, the most intelligible and the most relevant to my ideas about the "smart cart" sample, by the way, developed by a Russian startup. And most importantly, it is presented for the search for co-financing on the collective investment platform VCStart (about shame on me), whose blog I actually, here, on Habré, lead. Although, it is rather, not my file, but an indicator of the interest of start-ups in attracting investments on our platform. We are launching only in a week, and there are already 332 registered. We regularly look through new ones, but somehow it has become (which of course pleases), but you will not follow all of them.

In general, the project seemed very interesting, and I decided to write about it. Yes, and he was not interested in me alone - before the start of funding is still far, it is preceded by the community collection stage, and CartPay (this is the name of this St. Petersburg startup), has already managed to collect 2% of the target amount, which is more than $ 3 thousand.

What offers CartPay:

Buyers: Save time by eliminating queues at cash registers or self-service terminals;

To shops: Increased throughput of cash desks and self-service terminals (and as a result, increased customer loyalty, and in the long term, an increase in the amount of the average check) and reduced operating expenses.

How it looks from the side:

The buyer goes to the store and puts everything in his wonder-cart, on which his eyes fall and there is enough money, first bringing the goods to the built-in scanner that reads the bar code. Then he comes to the checkout and pays for the check waiting for him. Actually, that's all.

I remember that something similar in Russia was tested in its “Future Shop” X5 Retail Group, implementing RFID (Radio-frequency identification) technology. However, the overhead of introducing the radio tags on which it is being used was high and the X5 Retail Group’s test lab is currently trying to reduce RFID research. There are results - in six years the cost of one tag has decreased from 16 to 4 rubles, which is still quite a lot for its universal introduction. In addition, reading equipment is expensive to use for the use of RFID tags. X5 Retail Group is not a poor company, but it will not trade at a loss.

Contrasting with the RFID system, CartPay has a number of distinct advantages:
• The use of smart carts does not require additional labeling of goods;
• Trolleys work with ordinary cash registers and self-service terminals already installed;
• The solution is simple and cheaply scaled within one store.



In addition, optionally, buyers of stores with an embedded system will be offered a mobile application that will provide quick navigation through the store and help keep shopping lists. Also, the application will check the shelf life of the product and the number of calories in it - in my opinion, the function is simply mega-useful, especially for people with poor eyesight, given the small print on the packaging of most products.

Ensuring the safety of the trolley itself (the thing is unique, valuable, and, moreover, the scales are built into it, reinforced ) and the goods in it look like this: the smart trolley itself controls the actions of the buyer and the weight of the goods.

As it is written on the project site, “if the buyer deviates from the standard behavior scenario, the store employees are informed about it and the buyer can be checked at the checkout or self-service terminal”. It was here that I needed some clarifications, which I received by contacting the CEO of the project Yevgeny Evnukov :

Eugene, for example, a person is not very honest, to put it mildly, he put something with an unscanned code with the intention to spoil the goods on the bottom of the trolley. To detect the intention of theft and prevent it will be possible only by weights?

If something is put into the cart without scanning the bar code, both the buyer and the store employees are informed about it in the calculation. And, if the latter have a signal about the suspicious actions of the buyer, on its basis they will be able to check it. In the future, we plan to integrate with video surveillance systems and pattern recognition.

And if the error of the scales, or the goods that the dishonest person hid in the cart, is very easy?

The current prototype determines the weight change if you put one cigarette on the scales. I can’t give a more accurate answer yet, I need to wait for the tests of the trolley for usage scenarios. Of course, there is a very light product and it will not be able to fix it, but for this there are special signaling frames at the checkout and other tools to protect against theft.

How do you evaluate the potential of CartPay?

Out of 200K large retail stores around the world, 35K have self-service systems at $ 800M (VDC Research). The entire potential market of self-service systems is estimated at $ 4.3B. Our solution combines several areas of self-service systems. This point fits in the infographics below.

Even at the moment, we can say that our solution is no worse than the widespread today with simple cashier services. But, at the same time, the potential for improving the service by the cashier has been exhausted, but in our country it is just opening.

Is someone already interested in product introduction?

There is interest among retail. But everyone wants to see a complete solution for testing. They do not want to invest in the development. Of course, there are skeptical reviews, but all of them are not supported by anything, they simply do not believe, as is often the case with something new. But Jobs or Gates, too, because not everyone believed in their time)))

Well, optimistic. True, due to the design features of the trolley, you can’t take a ride to a child like this, but it does have a lot of other advantages. The case remains for the small - seed investments that a startup needs to send out the prototypes of their offspring to numerous people who want to test it.
By the way, you can buy a stake in this project on our VCStart.com collective investment platform (from $ 30). "
And on the site of the startup Sartpay.co you can leave a request for testing the prototype.