STOP & SHOP WILL ROLLOUT INTERACTIVE CART DEVICE

DAN ALAIMO

SAN DIEGO -- Stop & Shop, Quincy, Mass., said it's planning on rolling out a shopping cart-installed wireless Web tablet called the "personal shopping assistant" in its stores next year.

The device is a "one-to-one in-store communication vehicle," Curt Avallone, vice president, marketing, Stop & Shop, told SN.

"We have taken data from our loyalty card program and given it directly back to the consumer so that they can shop faster and save money at the same time," he said.

"Customers can see their shopping list by aisle, specials by aisle as well as offers from our manufacturing partners at the point of sale. We believe this is a breakthrough strategy for better customer service," he said.

Avallone spoke to SN following a presentation at the Global Electronic Martketing Conference here last month by Jack Mark, founder and chief technology officer of Unipower, Quincy, Mass., the company that jointly developed the interactive device along with Stop & Shop.

Mark said the 312-store chain halted a one-store test of the interactive on-cart communications technology to prepare for a wider rollout. He said the rollout will start in three or four stores in January and go chainwide by the end of the year.

Stop & Shop is a division of Ahold USA, Chantilly, Va.

The device, the Cart Companion, is a wireless, Web-based, battery-powered tablet that is linked to the retailer's loyalty program database, Mark said.

The "personal shopping assistant" provides customers with personalized information, including promotional offers and shopping lists based on their past shopping history.

The device also enables customers to place orders with the deli or with outside merchants linked to the program, and self-scan the order while shopping, Mark said. It is also removable, so it is not subject to the weather conditions in the store's parking lot.

About 20 units were placed in a Stop & Shop store in Hingham, Mass., in April, said Mark. The test was "paused" early last month so the two firms could seek better hardware.

The tablet used in the test was developed by Unipower, which is primarily a software company, he said. At the time, no alternatives were available, but there are now.

The test devices cost about $2,000 each, but Mark is hopeful of getting that price down to $1,200 per unit once they are in production. Most stores are already outfitted with radio frequency systems, so that represented no additional cost, he said.

"Our current plans are to perfect the hardware necessary to continue further testing and then hopefully make Cart Companion a part of our overall customer relationship management program," Avallone said.

Customer response to the test was strongly positive, Mark said.

In a follow-up survey, 380 users were asked to rank the device on a scale of one to 10, with one meaning they would never use it and 10 meaning they would use it on every shopping trip.

"The lowest score we got was a five from one consumer. All the rest of them gave it scores of seven to nine, meaning they would use it most of the time. That was huge positive feedback," he said.

The survey also found that respondents increased their shopping trips to the store by 40%, secondary and nonshoppers at the store reported a higher interest in shopping at the store, and 50% of the shoppers predicted they would buy more as result of using the device.

These customers estimated an increase in their purchases of $51 monthly, Mark noted.

"This is the first time that the supermarket industry has been able to give consumers back their loyalty information in a way that they can see benefits from it," he said.

Stop & Shop's use of the Cart Companion may proceed without the self-scanning component, Mark said. Some shoppers found the scanner on the test device difficult to use and security remains a big question, he said.

In the test, Stop & Shop spot-checked shoppers to determine the accuracy of their scanning, a short-term and less than satisfactory solution, Mark said.

A key to making it work was a Stop & Shop employee, Heidi Widera, who was dedicated to the program and could "smooth the feathers when somebody had to be rescanned," he said. Widera also helped educate consumers on how to use the device and was a major factor in the success of the test, he said.

The long-term solution to the security issue is the electronic product identification tags being developed by the Auto-ID Center of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

"The unit will automatically read those tags and deactivate them," Mark said. However, this technology may take anywhere from three to 10 years to become generally available, he said.

An intermediate solution to the self-scanning security issue is the use of scales, probably at the front end before the customers leave the store, he said.

If weighing the bags results in a big discrepancy, then the order could be more thoroughly checked, "but 99% of the time, it will be less obtrusive to the customer than spot checks."