Since Tesco's poster retail experiment in a Korean subway station last June, the idea of using QR codes and NFC tags to let consumers make purchases from virtual stores has exploded. Stockholm Central Station worked recently with e-commerce platform provider Jetshop to test the concept, hoping to discover how the mobile-connected "poster stores" would impact the future of retailing, according to a story on NFC World.
How it worked
Jetshop set up a 130-square-meter concept superstore featuring 20 individual departments with each presenting a selection of items available to purchase from one of Jetshop's e-commerce platform customers, including a supermarket chain, a fashion retailer and a camping equipment specialist. The poster stores included a photo of each product, its price and a QR code for purchasing. The more than 200,000 people passing through the station each day viewed the posters for the week of March 12.
Other pop-up poster stores, wrapped around 16 pedestals in the area leading from the main station concourse to the metro station, were also available.
"The superstore is an initiative to help our merchants to better understand how to use the technique to drive sales, consumer dialogue and usage of square meters for retailing," Christian Zanders, Jetshop's CEO, said in the story.
Analysts are now reviewing the project's stats as well as the results of a consumer survey covering attitudes to the idea of pop-up shopping, mobile shopping and QR codes. They'll be available in the next few weeks. According to preliminary results, however, the products with the highest sales were those that traditionally work the best in impulse buying, such as T-shirts, books, DVDs and cosmetics.
Watch the video to see how the experiment worked.
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There are numerous flaws in these installations like having to board a plane or train before the shopping "experience" is finished. That means completing one's shopping from their phone alone, again just as would be done from an app w/o the signage. Or what about the limited inventory available through the signage? Etc., etc., etc.