RFID technology has grown quite popular in the last decade, especially among retail industry leaders. This is because RFID labels are as efficient in retail stores as they are for warehouses and supply chain management. Walmart and Nordstorm are two giants benefitting from these RFID applications through their supply chains and retail stores. This article explains why these brands are adopting RFID from the product supply to the point of sale.
Why do Walmart & Nordstrom use RFID?
Organizations can slow down with technological disruption once they grow across a specific limit. It happens due to several different decision-dictating factors for these companies. For instance, they need to calculate their return on investment, reevaluate their product margins, predict customer response, and ensure that the change is overall aligned with their brand identity.
However, with RFID, retail industry giants like Walmart and Nordstrom were quite confident and convinced to use RFID. Here are the several reasons for such certainty around using RFID in the retail space:
- RFID-tagged products are easiest to manage in extensive inventories. RFID tags are accurate to read and can allow these big brands to stay on top of their entire store across their retail chains.
- Customer experience can be a game-changing factor for big brands in a competitive and easy-to-penetrate market segment. RFID can allow brands to put forward information about their stocks through a web or mobile app. Users can find the product that they need and get it while it is in stock.
- Organizations can use RFID to make their offerings more accessible to users. For instance, brands can allow buyers to check and purchase products online, which they can later pick up from the store. Such a hybrid online-offline engagement model can save time for buyers and is another way to make a purchase quickly and easily.
- The staff can be on top of the exact inventory count through RFID implementations and a middleware program. Such real-time information helps the support staff assist customers with their product purchases by providing the actual size, color, or product type.
- Big retail companies suffer from a lack of traceability as it is hard to keep track of every single point of operation. RFID can allow these brands to watch different warehouses, distribution centers, and retail outlets to identify any hurdles. This outlook helps them ensure that processes are constantly in motion and that the supply chain can deliver faster.
- Organizations can avoid counterfeiting by ensuring that RFID tags are embedded in the products right from the supplier. This eliminates any chances of misconduct as the product is scanned at every distribution point. If any mismanagement occurs, it can also be traced back to the point of misconduct.
The future of retail stores
Starting just with apparel, Walmart now uses RFID for other product groups as well, including toys and entertainment products. These big brands like Walmart and Nordstorm are retail industry leaders, and their further advancements with RFID will influence other retail chains heavily.
Get in touch now to understand more about how RFID can help grow your business and how you can build your step-by-step roadmap for RFID implementation.
