Imagine walking up to a grocery store, filling up your cart with desired products and walking right out of the door without waiting in the long checkout lines, while your bank gets notified about the amount and deducts it from your account. Pretty awesome, right? This is what Radio-Frequency Identification can do!
RFID & Retail Industry
RFID has been seen entering in the retail industry. It acts just like the magnetic strip that is attached to the back of the ATM cards. It allows users to scan it and get the information stored in it. It also leaves the shop owner freehand by allowing him to use the electromagnetic field in order to track items in inventory. It saves the risk of items getting lost to a great extent. But what exactly is RIFD?
What is RFID?
RFID refers to the acronym Radio-Frequency Identification. RFID codes are smart labels that can connect to a local network and can track every product you buy in a retail store. A Radio-Frequency Identification chip can carry 2000 bytes of data or less.
Many manufacturers use the tags to track the location of each product they make from the time it’s made until it’s pulled off the shelf and tossed in a shopping cart.
RFID has started to replace barcodes at some level but will barcodes become extinct soon?
RFID Acceptance Rate:
RFID is not an entirely new thing as it emerged back in 2003. It created a lot of buzz in retail industry but still did not grow much. The major reason behind it was the cost of this technological rise. RFID is suitable for the items that are really costly but doesn’t stand as the best option for cheap products like handsfree or mobile case etc.
RFID has struck the retail market once again and this time the acceptance has grown up. People have started accepting it at a rate of 4% to 8% industry-wide. Businesses are embracing this technology for tags, readers and supporting technology.
RFID in Omnichannel:
Omnichannel businesses have started to realize the worth of RFID for their survival. They have come up with ways they can use RFID to satisfy their customers and hence, increase their revenue.
With RFID businesses can get real-time information of any item they desire and hence they can update the customers without wasting time. This would save customer’s and consumer’s time as well by providing a better omnichannel experience to customers.
The Future!
Though the retail industry has started to accept Radio-Frequency Identification on the place of barcodes, still the process is really slow. RFID comes with many great benefits to offer yet the price of this technology is what is keeping consumers from opting it. Still, people believe that RFID would be replacing barcodes in near future if not overnight!
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