I was always fascinated by the opportunities of technology to change our shopping experiences. From the incredibly slow payment process at the cashier to the exhaustive logistics for the consumer … potentially smartphones could change a lot of the hassle.

When we published the article “Do Point of Sale RFID-Based Information Services Make a Difference? Analyzing Consumer Perceptions for Designing Smart Product Information Services in Retail Business” (Quote: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1451520) we thought about a way how RFID could change the gathering of information about a product prior of or during a purchase. Our main statement included product categories that could be interesting for such “scans” (using either barcodes or NFC). We used a portfolio showing electronic devices in the top field of “most likely products to be scanned to gather information”. Compared to actual scan trends as shown in the barcoo iPhone app (www.barcoo.de – one of the most popular product scan apps), also groceries are interesting to the user. Barcoo confirms, that, if kept simple, the idea of scanning a product, getting information and potentially even purchase it – is appealing to the people. However, 4 to 5 years ago, the scanning process was not easy, product data was not widespread, mobile internet was slow, cheap data rates non existent and people haven’t had so-called smartphones (iPhones, Android devices).

But now is the time: All in all a so-called sample store would become possible, in which people just scan products–no matter which technology they use–to either purchase them or get more information. Just recently I stumpled upon this amazing video from Korea (via Sven Wiesner – post on google+) in which the scanning process is in the center of the shopping activity:

What do you think of this?

Best
Florian

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