By Ed Knudson, Digimarc
The dreaded queue — few sights are more unwelcoming to a customer than long lines at checkout. It creates a poor final impression of the shopping experience and if daunting enough can even result in lost sales.
Oftentimes, the cause of this front-end gridlock is human inefficiency on the part of the shopper or the checkout clerk. Fortunately, there are exciting new digital technologies on the immediate horizon that retailers can leverage to alleviate these checkout bottlenecks, by streamlining both the scanning and payment processes.
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Scanning And Product Verification
Ideally, it should take but a few fleeting seconds to scan an item for purchase at the point of sale; however, there are often impediments that slow things down. Every time a sales clerk (or shopper during self-checkout) fumbles around looking for a hard-to-find barcode, it costs precious seconds. Meanwhile, damaged or unreadable barcodes result in annoying, time-consuming price checks.
However, a new digital product ID technology called the Digimarc Barcode is poised to change the game. This next-generation barcode consists of digital watermarks that are repeatedly printed across an item’s packaging graphics in a way that is imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable by POS scanners, smartphones, tablets and other devices enabled with Digimarc software.
Located on all sides of an item’s packaging, and typically repeated hundreds of times, these watermarks effectively make all sides of a package scannable without affecting its graphic aesthetics. Since these new barcodes contain each item’s unique GTIN data, POS systems can quickly identify the product regardless of how the cashier orients the items in relation to the reader.
A quantitative model recently made available by Digimarc determined that the 120 highest-volume supermarkets, big-box supercenters, warehouse centers, discounters and drug stores could realize labor cost savings of over $500 million annually simply by improving checkout scanning rates by a single item per minute. However, since digitally watermarked packaging is estimated to speed up checkout rates by up to 33%, equivalent to seven additional items per minute, the savings from it could be much greater — as much as $3 billion annually.
Digital Payments
The payment portion of the checkout process can be equally frustrating, with customers rummaging through their wallets, swiping and re-swiping their credit cards, and grappling with the POS terminal’s unwieldy touchscreen and stylus pen.
With interest in digital wallet technology rapidly growing among consumers and retailers, we should expect debit, credit and loyalty cards to become digitized soon, removing a lot of the extraneous payment steps we see today at the POS.
In one popular scenario, customers would pay with their smartphones by scanning imperceptibly encoded, branded images appearing on a payment terminal screen. Scanning the images would securely authorize a payment to the merchant either directly or via the cloud. The transactional data would be communicated via line-of-sight light wave technology — a method generally considered more secure than Bluetooth Low Energy, RFID or NFC, as the data is less likely to be intercepted.
In our fast-paced world, it is incumbent upon retailers to minimize pain points at the POS, lest shoppers look elsewhere — such as online — for an easier and more enjoyable shopping experience. As an exciting new age of invisible barcodes and digital wallets dawns upon us, there are now viable opportunities to ease these long-standing causes of checkout friction. After all, losing your customers to inefficiency is by far the worst way to thin out your checkout lines.
Ed Knudson is Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Digimarc, provider of omni-media solutions for enhancing shopper engagement. He is an authority on digital watermarking and frequently speaks at marketing, technology and retail events including EMERGE, RAMP Retail, MPA Digital Technology Conference and Mobile Engagement in Retail.
