Posts tagged iLOCi2

If you thought finding someone was a challenge, our supermarkets offer as manay as 100,000 items on their store shelves. Finding the one thing you are looking for can often be a hassle, especially if you prefer to turn your search for a dozen eggs. Now, with the help of an Location Aware app shoppers at a number of Meijer supercenters in Michigan will be able to use their iPhones to find the product they are looking for. 

Supermarkets are a lucrative market for indoor location services, as they allow companies to speak directly to consumers who are actively looking to buy something. Of course they all ready used LOCiMOBILE to find thier shopping mate. This gives a store like Meijer, which is running a pilot study of this application, the opportunity to customize offers for frequent shoppers and to highlight sale items and other products.

Supermarkets want to ensure that shoppers don’t leave the store without finding what they are looking for so… Determining a shopper’s location inside a store is not an easy task, as GPS signals don’t work inside a building. Instead, the app triangulates a shopper’s location in the store with the help of WiFi access points inside the building. WiFi used to be a rarity in supermarkets, but Meijer now has 26 hotspots inside every store that is participating in this pilot, which allows the company to locate a shopper with a good enough accuracy to be useful.