Cloudera, the provider of a platform for machine learning and advanced analytics, reports that Shoppermotion is using Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub to improve the retail store customer experience.
With Cloudera Enterprise as its data management and advanced analytics platform, Shoppermotion has created a proprietary mapping and analytics engine that enables brands and retailers to better understand and capitalise on in-store shopper behaviour in real-time.
Through the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices embedded in carts and baskets, Shoppermotion can help retailers passively track the journey of every customer in the store, while simultaneously ensuring their privacy.
Shoppermotion’s IoT solution is helping to solve some of the biggest challenges and unknowns for in-store retailers and brands: understanding how shoppers are navigating the store, how much time they spend in each aisle, and where the ‘hot zones’ and ‘blind spots’ are located.
By combining the capability to accurately track each consumer’s full path in the store with a machine learning and advanced analytics engine, Shoppermotion can provide real-time insights on how customers behave while they shop in-store.
Shoppermotion’s analytics engine, built on Cloudera Enterprise, is able to process and deliver the massive amount of data collected every second – analysing the millions of routes shoppers take throughout the store and their stops in each aisle – to help retailers understand customer journeys, shopping patterns and trends, and apply predictive models to suggest in-store improvements.
Shoppermotion has created an IoT-based solution for its clients, using Cloudera Enterprise to easily ingest, store, and analyse streaming sensor data in real-time. In each Shoppermotion-supported physical retail store location, small beacons are attached to the shopping carts and baskets.
These beacons transmit a signal every second to bluetooth sensors in the ceiling to track the shopper while in-store. The sensors capture customers’ behavior in real-time – which aisles they shop, from which direction they approach the aisle, and even how long they linger in front of different items.
“Shoppermotion is changing the way in-store offline marketing is done, the way online marketing did when Google Analytics for websites appeared back in 2005,” said Jorge García Bueno, CEO of Shoppermotion.
“By taking advantage of the intelligence from this platform, one of our clients was able to drive a 9% increase in sales for one of their main categories after making changes to the layout of their store affecting traffic flow. Dwell time increased by 1.3 minutes in that same area.”
According to Shoppermotion, all the information about each store is accessible to Shoppermotion clients in a customised and easily accessible analytics dashboard, where they can measure the loss of traffic in each aisle or traffic flows throughout the store and even predict when there will be a peak of shoppers in the checkout line.
In addition, brands and marketers can use the Shoppermotion technology to compare promotion conversion rates to individual aisle conversion rates in order to discover opportune windows to run specific marketing campaigns in-store.
“Cloudera provides us with an end-to-end modern machine learning platform and industry-leading support that saves us time and effort carrying out maintenance and configuring tasks, so we can focus on what matters most – delivering more value to our customers and helping them transform the shopping experience,” said Marco Doncel, CTO of Shoppermotion.
Some of the companies already working with Shoppermotion include the global retail giants such as IKEA, transnational consumer goods company Unilever, grocery chains such as FMart and Carrefour and retail malls by Unibail Rodamco.
“We are starting to see IoT use cases in real-world applications today ranging from industrial operations optimisation to connected vehicles and predictive maintenance. Now, Shoppermotion is applying big data processing and machine learning analytics to create an IoT solution that wasn’t possible before to disrupt the retail industry.
They are accessing data previously unavailable and using it to improve the shopping experience for consumers and create new market opportunities for retailers. The retail industry will be forever transformed through this innovative application of IoT,” said David Pieterse, vice president, EMEA at Cloudera.
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