Patent Application
20140278655
Queue management in retail environments is integral to providing an agreeable shopping experience. Lines or queues for service counters, sales registers, fitting rooms, etc. may grow rapidly as customer volume increases or in response to extensive customer inquiry or purchase volume. Lengthy weight times may result in shopper frustration, anger and ultimately abandonment of intended purchases and loss of revenue.
Methods of tracking customer entry into a retail environment exist but customer volume may not correlate with in-store service needs. For example, many customers may enter a store in a short period of time. However, if only a portion of the customers make purchases or the purchases are of a small number of items, additional in-store service may be unnecessary. In addition, deploying additional employees to sales registers immediately following an influx of shoppers may not be reflective of shopper behavior in a given retail environment as some shoppers may linger in a store for an amount of time before making a purchase.
Further, existing transaction log data may indicate a number or types of items purchased by an individual shopper. Long term analysis of purchase behavior may indicate high grossing products or a tendency towards few item shopping trips for a given retail environment, for example. However, the purchasing habits of a customer base over time may not apply to real time queue management.
The inventor herein recognizes the difficulties of managing shopper queues in real time. Long term data collection of shopping trip duration and shopper purchases may be statistically digested to determine probabilistic shopper behavior for a given retail environment.
Disclosed herein are systems and methods for analyzing shopper behavior within a store. A method of the present disclosure may comprise, for each of a plurality of a first group of shopper trips, detecting a wireless signal for a shopper proxy device adjacent an entrance to the store. Furthermore, detecting a wireless signal for the shopper proxy device may occur adjacent an exit of the store. Utilizing proxy device data a trip length for each shopper based on the detected presence of the detected wireless signal at the entrance and the exit of the store may be detected. A first relationship between a number of shopper trips and trip length can thusly be calculated.
For each of a plurality of a second group of shopper trips, the method further comprises receiving transaction data for a plurality of purchase transactions at the store, and transaction data for a plurality of items. Using transaction data, a second relationship between shopper trips and items purchased in the purchase transactions may be calculated. A third relationship, between items purchased and trip length, based on the first and second relationships can be determined.
Additionally, the method of the present disclosure allows for detecting a current number of shoppers in the store and deploying an in-store service in response to detecting that a current number of shoppers exceeds a first predetermined threshold. Deploying an in-store service may comprise deploying an additional service counter attendant, or opening additional registers, as non-limiting examples. In another example, it is further possible to remove the in-store service in response to detecting that the current number of shoppers does not exceed a second predetermined threshold.
Another feature of the present disclosure is the utility of collected data in determining an optimal display configuration for a retail environment. A resultant first relationship from a first configuration of the store may be compared to the first relationship from a second configuration of the store to determine if a peak of the curve has shifted toward an increased trip length. This type of shopping behavior is indicative of shopper trip congruence, where a majority of shoppers traverse a retail environment in a singular, or in some cases multiple, dominant path or paths through a store. Stores with the largest share of shoppers experiencing a medium duration trip length and high trip congruence tend to financially outperform those retail environments where the largest share of shoppers experience short duration trip lengths.
This Summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This Summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended to be used to limit the scope of the claimed subject matter. Furthermore, the claimed subject matter is not limited to implementations that solve any or all disadvantages noted in any part of this disclosure.
A system 10 for detecting the presence of shoppers in the shopping environment is provided herein. The system 10 is similar to a tracking system disclosed in in U.S. Provisional application Ser. No. 13/350,461, entitled DETECTING SHOPPER PRESENCE IN A SHOPPING ENVIRONMENT BASED ON SHOPPER EMANATED WIRELESS SIGNALS which is incorporated herein by reference. In the tracking system 10 some of the shoppers 12 that enter shopping environment 1 may possess short range wireless transmission devices 14 on their person. In many circumstances short range wireless transmission devices are paired with other devices to provide wireless communication. For example, a mobile phone and a wireless earpiece may both utilize the BLUETOOTH® standard to wirelessly communicate via short range radio signals. As another example, a portable media player may wirelessly communicate with a wireless pair of headphones via short range radio signals. It will be appreciated that short range wireless transmission devices 14 may be any of the aforementioned or any other short range wireless transmission devices, which emit transmissions with substantially unique characteristics that can be used to distinguish the transmissions of one shopper's device from another. Additional short range wireless transmission devices may also include, but are not limited to include, a universal serial bus (USB) dongle for a portable computing device.
It is commonplace for a shopper to utilize a short range wireless transmission device in shopping environments. For example, a shopper may carry out a conversation on a mobile phone using a hands free Bluetooth® earpiece. This short range radio transmission device may transmit packets of data via 79 bands (1 MHz each) in the range of 2402-2480 MHz in accordance with accepted Bluetooth® standards. Other short range frequencies and protocols may be used for wireless transmission in other embodiments.
The tracking system 10 may include at least one receiver 16 configured to receive wireless signals from the short range wireless transmission devices 14. Receiver 16 may include a controller, such as an application specific integrated circuit, processor, etc., and associated memory. The controller may be configured to implement a wireless detection module to receive and process signals from transmission devices 14 via an antenna 20. The antenna may be a unidirectional antenna or a directional antenna (e.g., “cantenna”), configured to receive signals from transmitters in a monitored area of interest. The wireless detection module may be configured to utilize a BLUETOOTH® stack to interpret signals according to the BLUETOOTH® standard. The wireless detection data may further be configured to store detection data indicating the detected presence of the wireless transmissions from the transmission devices 14 in the associated memory.
The controller may further be configured to implement a network communications module that is configured to communicate via a network interface and associated WIFI antenna or network port with the data analyzer 22, to send the detection data to the data analyzer over a wired or wireless network connection, respectively, for downstream processing. In addition or in the alternative, the receiver may be configured as a USB device, and thus may include USB logic executed by the controller, as well as a USB interface and port that are used to communicate the detection data to the analyzer 22.
It will be appreciated that receiver 16 may be positioned within the shopping environment or may be positioned at a remote location external to the shopping environment. In one example, the antenna may be focused on an entrance/exit 18 location in the shopping environment. In this manner the receiver 16 can receive signals from the entrance/exit 18. It follows that the receiver 16 may determine the number of shoppers having a short range wireless transmission device that enter and exit the shopping environment via the entrance/exit 18. In this way, tracking a wireless proxy device indicates movements of a portion of shoppers and calibration of the tracking method (described herein below) may be used to determine a share of shoppers trackable by wireless proxy and in turn to determine overall numbers of shoppers entering and exiting a retail environment. In many stores, the ratio of all customers to the number of transaction logs is between 1.2 and 1.8, and the ratio of all customers to customers with active wireless devices that are trackable is 12:1 to 20:1.
Suitable mounting locations for receiver 16 within the shopping environment may include, but are not limited to include, a wall, an entrance, an exit, an aisle, etc. In one example, the receiver 16 may be integrated into a cover plate of an electrical outlet, and in another example the receiver may include an integrated power plug that plugs into a power outlet. The receiver 16 may be configured to draw power from the electrical outlet. In this way, the receiver 16 may be inconspicuously placed in the shopping environment 1. The receiver 16 may also be configured to avoid interference with the operation of the electrical outlet, such that the outlet may provide power to other devices. In another example, the receiver may be battery operated, and include an on-board battery supply. Furthermore, receivers 16 may be alternatively or additionally be arranged in varied locations throughout the store. For example, receives 16 may be placed at a check-out register. In this example, an elapsed time from entrance to check out may be calculated for each trackable shopper, in addition to, or alternative to, a time from entrance to exiting the store for that shopper. Additional example locations of receivers 16 may include service counters, product displays or shopper amenity locations.
Returning to
Upon initial installation of the receiver 16, the receiver may be calibrated to ensure its accuracy according to the following process. Video cameras may be installed in the monitored shopping areas and video images may be recorded of shoppers traveling through the monitored area. Technicians may count the actual number of shoppers entering and exiting the monitored area based in the video images, and may compare this to the number of shoppers emanating wireless signals that were counted by the receiver 16. A calibration factor is computed which relates the number of actual shoppers to the number of shoppers detected by receivers 16 during the calibration period. After calibration, this factor is used to compute an estimated number of total shoppers during an observation period based on the number of shoppers detected via receiver 16. As one example, it is estimated that 5-8% of the total shoppers are carrying an active Bluetooth device, and thus if there are N detected shoppers, it may be determined that there are 12*N to 20*N actual shoppers.
Further, to ensure data integrity and eliminate errors, a minimum trip length and a maximum trip length are established, and detected trip lengths for a given shopper that fall below the minimum trip length or exceed the maximum trip length will be ignored when computing shopper trip statistics, such as total trip time for each shopper and average trip time for all shoppers. This helps avoid anomalies that may otherwise erroneously skew the data.
As discussed above, the tracking system 10 may further include a data analyzer 22. The data analyzer 22 may include a memory 24 executable by a processor 26, and may be configured to receive detection data from the one or more receivers, as described above. It will be appreciated that the data analyzer 22 may be positioned at a remote location external to the shopping environment 1, such as at the central server described above. In other embodiments the data analyzer 22 may be positioned within the shopping environment. Data analyzer 22 may be in wired and/or wireless communication with receiver 16. Specifically, the data analyzer 22 may receive detection data from each of the short range wireless transmission devices 14 within the shopping environment 1. The data analyzer 22 may be configured to determine statistical data from the detection data it receives.
Data analyzer 22 may be configured to determine the number of shoppers having a short range wireless transmission device entering and exiting the shopping environment. The data analyzer 22 may also determine if a shopper having a short range wireless transmission device is entering and/or exiting the shopping environment from a direction vector associated with the short range wireless transmission device. In some embodiments the data analyzer 22 may uniquely identify each short range wireless transmission device. In other embodiments unique identification may not be utilized. A counting module in the data analyzer 22 may be configured to determine the total number of shoppers in the shopping environment based on the number of shoppers having a short range wireless transmission device. More specifically, an average ratio of shoppers having short range wireless transmission devices to a total number of shoppers may be used to determine the total number of shoppers in the shopping environment. It will be appreciated that this data may be gathered for each shopping environment via survey, visual observation, etc., or may be gathered from a plurality of shopping environments.
A receiver 16 may be positioned adjacent to an entrance/exit of the shopping environment to determine the number of shoppers entering and exiting the shopping environment. If the receiver 16 includes a directional antenna, the antenna may be positioned to receive short range wireless signals travelling through an entrance/exit of the shopping environment. It will be appreciated that other suitable methods may be used to determine the number of shoppers having a short range wireless transmission device in the shopping environment.
Data analyzer 22 may also be configured to determine the total time a shopper having a short range wireless transmission device spends in the shopping environment. More specifically, the data analyzer 22 may determine when a short range wireless transmission device enters the shopping environment and may record a unique identifier associated with the device. In the BLUETOOTH® implementation, the unique identifier is MAC address of the BLUETOOTH® device. The data analyzer 22 may then start a timer for the device and stop the timer when the device (with the same unique identifier) is determined to have left the shopping environment. It will be appreciated that the length of a shopper's stay within the shopping environment may be useful in marketing analysis.
The data analyzer 22 may also be configured to determine a metric that equals the number of shoppers having a short range wireless transmission device multiplied by the time (e.g., seconds, minutes) these shoppers spend in the shopping environment. This metric may be referred to as shopper seconds. It has been found through statistical analysis that the probability of a shopper being positioned at a location is directly correlated to shopper seconds. For example, 5 shoppers in a given area for 10 minutes yields the same number of shopper seconds as 10 shoppers in the area for 5 minutes. Thus, determining the number of short range wireless transmission devices in the shopping environment along with the time these shoppers spend in the shopping environment may be used to measure the distribution of shopper seconds in the shopping environment.
Communication between the data analyzer 22 and the receiver 16 may be encrypted to prevent unwanted parties from accessing information contained therein. The communication may be implemented over a virtual private network (VPN) or the Internet. Data analyzer 22 may utilize a suitable operating system such as Linux, Windows, Mac Operating System (OS), etc. It will be appreciated that there may be a variety of intermediary devices that may facilitate the connection between the data analyzer 22 and receiver 16. For example, a routing device (not shown) positioned within or adjacent to the shopping environment may be configured to receive signals (e.g., wired/wireless) from receiver 16. The routing device may further be configured to relay the signals over a network (e.g., VPN) to data analyzer 22. The functionality of the data analyzer 22 may also be distributed among multiple computing devices in other embodiments. For example, a wireless tracking computing device (not shown) may be communicatively linked (e.g., wired and/or wireless) to receiver 16. In some cases the wireless tracking computing device may be located within or adjacent to the shopping environment. The wireless tracking computing device may be configured to determine various tracking data corresponding to the short range wireless transmission devices in the shopping environment. The wireless tracking computing device may also be communicatively linked to the data analyzer 22. In this manner, a portion of the data analyzer's functionality may be assigned to other computing devices.
The left entrance/exit 18 features a pair of receivers to cover the entire area of ingress and egress, while the right entrance/exit features only one receiver. In combination, data from these receivers monitoring this pair of entrances/exits can be used to detect shopper presence in each monitored area, and to determine, for each shopper, a total amount of time spent in shopping environment 1.
In
Point of sale (POS) registers 30 are shown located at an entrance/exit side of the shopping environment. The registers 30 are equipped with transaction loggers 28 which may log transaction data including the type and number of items purchased per transaction. This transaction log (herein also referred to as T-log) data may be compiled and analyzed by analyzer 22. Analyzer 22 may analyze T-log or tracking system 10 data in real time.
Data analyzer 22 may use real time data acquisition and analysis to, for example, deploy and in-store service in response to detecting that a current number of shoppers exceeds a first predetermined threshold. An indication to deploy an in-store service may be given at alert device 34 which may comprise and audio or visual indication to deploy such a service. Furthermore, alert device 34 may be configured to display a signal to remove the in-store service in response to detecting that the current number of shoppers does not exceed a second predetermined threshold.
In one, non-limiting example, deploying an in-store service may comprise opening additional registers. In an alternative example, deploying an in-store service may occur following a predetermined time after detecting the current number of shoppers exceeds a first predetermined threshold. In this example, it may be detected that a certain number of shoppers have entered a shopping environment. Previous data or experience may indicate that an average shopper spends a certain amount of time in the store before making a purchase. Additional employees may be deployed to registers following a delay after a number of shoppers has entered the store to minimize wait times as those shoppers are queuing up to purchase their items.
In an alternate example, deploying an in-store service may comprise deploying an additional service counter attendant. For example, additional employees may be deployed to a deli, meat, bakery, or other grocery counter, or to a display area, cosmetics counter, fitting room, etc. Furthermore, real time data acquisition and analysis may involve removing the in-store service in response to detecting that the current number of shoppers does not exceed a second predetermined threshold. In this example, it may be detected that a certain number of shoppers has left shopping environment and in that scenario additional employees may not be beneficial at a point of sale, or providing another in-store service.
Turning now to
Stores with higher shopper congruence as far as a standard path taken in a shopping environment tend to experience higher overall sales. Furthermore, these stores tend to have a highest portion of shoppers experiencing a medium trip length duration. The method of the present disclosure may be used to compare trip length duration for differing store configurations, which will be described below in greater detail with reference to
Further, other suitable observation periods may be established, such as over a month, and the system may track, for each unique shopper, multiple visits to the monitored shopping area (store/department) over the observation period. An aggregate visit count and trip time may be calculated over the entire period for each shopper. Further, for all shoppers during the observation period, statistical measures such as average trip length may be computed.
Turning now to
In reference to
This data may be used to determine the statistical shopping behavior of shoppers in a given store setting. Further, extrapolations of the data may include, for example, an average number of items purchased and the average time a shopper takes to purchased said items. Practically, this data may be used to improve a shopping experience, and ultimately, revenue by determining a probabilistic time from a group of shoppers entering a retail environment until they will enter a service counter, or register queue. Furthermore, the number of items a shopper may be statistically expected to purchase will aid in estimates of a number or type of in-store service to deploy in response to sensing an influx of shoppers into the shopping environment.
An example of the above described situation is shown in
Deployment of the in-store service may be made based on relationships derived from previously collected data as described above. In an alternative embodiment, real-time tracking of wireless proxy devices, and/or transaction log data may be used to deploy to in-store services. In an example scenario tracking system 10 may detect that the number of shoppers in a retail environment has surpassed a predefined threshold. Alert device 34 may be triggered to indicate deployment of additional attendants to a service counter for example. Furthermore, as transaction log data from transaction loggers 28 may indicate items purchased have surpassed a predetermined threshold and an indication to deploy additional attendants to a check-out register may be given. Variations to detection and deployment methods are possible and the above scenario is provided as a non-limiting example.
In reference to
Retail environments with a peak-like items-purchased to minutes-in-store relationship such as that seen in Store B tend toward higher trip congruence among shoppers travelling through the store. Trip congruence is indicative of a majority of shoppers traversing a store by a dominant path. In most cases, a store will have a single dominant path; however, in some cases a store may include multiple dominant paths. Trip congruence may be influenced by a store layout such as shelving arranged in a serpentine fashion such as to direct customers in a single given path from entrance to check out, and ultimately to the exit. Furthermore, trip congruence may be influenced by visual stimuli, product placement, spatial awareness or other traffic flow influencing features. For example, a single entrance of a store may enter into a bazaar type area where commonly purchased items are available and readily visible and towards a periphery are specialty items. A specialty item may be something a shopper would make a specific trip for and will seek out, for example. In this type of setting a dominant path typically results, whereby shoppers enter at an entrance and circumnavigate a centralized area, with a smaller share of shoppers diverging into different areas of a retail environment away from the dominant path.
A possible advantage of increasing trip congruence is that shoppers may be physically or subconsciously escorted through a shopping environment in a manner that enables the shopper to orient themselves to their shopping environment more efficiently, which in turn causes the shopper to select and purchase items in a more efficient manner, that is, in less time per item purchased and less time per dollar spent. The inventor of the present application believes that over a very large sample size of shoppers and shopping environments, the relationship between the share of shoppers and the items purchased depicted in
This type of comparison data is valuable in retail environments as it enables a retailer to track changes in shopping behavior. Alterations to the duration of time customers spend in a store can be compared before and after an alteration to a shopping environment floor plan, for example. Additional comparisons could be drawn between alterations to product selection or arrangement, a type of, or number of, in-store services offered, or a type of display used as non-limiting examples. Furthermore, this data may be used to determine if shoppers are tending towards trip congruence, which is valuable when trying to increase the shopping efficiency of the store, as discussed above.
The particular graph of
These high-grossing retail environments also tend toward a layout where shoppers are ushered towards a singular general path throughout the retail environment. For example, these stores may have a main entrance leading into a centralized bazaar area with lower-lying displays featuring high sales items. Additional, products may be featured toward the periphery of the store on higher displays, visible and easily accessible from the central gallery of the shopping environment. Further, non-limiting methods of promoting trip congruence may include introducing visual stimuli to encourage a dominant path, promoting traffic flow and influencing shopper path by congestion of space, altering store lighting schemes, or arranging shelving to both display products and effectively direct traffic by acting as a barricade to would-be paths.
In accordance with an example method of the present disclosure data from tracking system 10 may be used to, to track a time in store for shoppers after a layout has been changed from that of the shopping environment seen in
Turning now to
The method proceeds to 804 where a trip length for each of the shoppers based on the detected presence of the wireless signal at the entrance and the exit of the store is detected. The presence of the wireless signal may be detected by tracking system 10 shown in
The method proceeds to 806, where a first relationship between a number of shopper trips and trip length for each of a plurality of a second group of shopper trips may be calculated. Data analyzer 22 may receive tracking data from tracking system 10 to determine said relationship. An example of a graphical representation of the first relationship is shown in
At 808, transaction data for a plurality of purchase transactions at the store, and transaction data for a plurality of items may be received. Transaction data may be collected by transaction loggers 28. Transaction data may be collected from a second group of shoppers which may differ from a first group of shoppers for which trip length data may be collected.
The method proceeds to 810 where a second relationship between shopper trips and items purchased in the purchase transactions is calculated. An example graphical depiction of the second relationship is shown in
At 812, the first relationship calculated in step 806 and the second relationship calculated at 801 are used to determine a third relationship between items purchased and a trip length. An example graphical depiction of the third relationship is shown in
At 814, a current number of shoppers in the store is detected. This detection may be based on a tracking system 10 as described above or by another suitable method. A number of shoppers in the store takes into account a number of shoppers that have entered and a number of shoppers that have exited the store.
At 816, an in-store service is deployed in response to detecting that a current number of shoppers exceeds a first predetermined threshold. This predetermined threshold may be determined in response to previous data acquired in a given shopping environment indicating a number above which additional attendants at counters or registers may improve an overall shopping experience or minimize wait times or queue length. Similarly, an in-store service may be removed in response to detecting that the current number of shoppers does not exceed a second predetermined threshold. Additionally, previously collected data, such as that from the third relationship shown in
The example method as depicted in
It should be understood that the embodiments herein are illustrative and not restrictive, since the scope of the invention is defined by the appended claims rather than by the description preceding them, and all changes that fall within metes and bounds of the claims, or equivalence of such metes and bounds thereof, are therefore intended to be embraced by the claims.
