Fashion Retail Goes Cashierless
When talking about Cashierless Technology, what do we think about first? Amazon Go will be the most popular answer. However, the Supermarket is not the only industry, which adopts the advanced technology. Fashion Retailers are catching up. Big players like Inditex (e.g., Zara) or Fastretailing (e.g., Uniqlo) have launched their self-checkout system in recent years.
According to Forbes, the hardware cost of opening an Amazon Go store is at $1 million. To achieve breakeven, it will take around 2 years. All the cameras in Amazon Go captures every move you take. When you take the product, the item will be calculated in your cart; once you put it back, it will be automatically deleted at a heartbeat. Simply put, what you take is what you pay. The camera captures the actions of you Taking the product from the shelf.
Now picturing yourself in a fashion retail shop. Let’s be ambitious. Say that we take 9 items we want to try on. We go to the fitting room. Before you leave the fitting room, you give back 6 items that don’t fit you. You end up with 3 items.
Here is the problem: what you take is NOT what you pay. And know any country allows cameras in the fitting room?! It is absurd to even think about it. Can the cameras capture the items that end up with you after you leave the fitting room? That would work for supermarkets. The products in supermarkets do not suddenly change in shape or patterns. And for the jeans you just tried? Should the camera recognize it as folded, hanging, or turned inside-out?
Fortunately, the story does not just end there. Technology like RFID has been commonly used in fashion retail industry. Every garment now comes with a RFID chip in the price tag. It records every single detail about the item: Product name, size, color, and sale status etc. You can smash your purchase in the shopping bag in whatever creative way you wish, the self-checkout counter with RFID system can scan every single item in the bag in seconds. What you take in your shopping bag in the end is what you pay. No more cameras, no more cashiers. Scan your bag one time, pay, and leave.
Just like many grocery stores follow the footsteps of amazon Go, no doubt in the future, there will be more and more fashion brands joining the Cashierless team as well.
