Retail Store Customer Tracking Software

A custom web and mobile application based on iBeacon technology for tracking customers in retail stores and analyzing their behavior. This software allows retail companies to allocate stores more efficiently, do successful location-based marketing, and improve clients' experience in the mall.

Key Project Numbers AND Facts

7 Month

time-to-market

8 Team Members

3 back-end developers
2 front-end developers
2 mobile developers
1 project manager

$330K

project budget

Retail

industry

iBeacon

technology

Web, mobile

platforms

Challenge

A huge fashion mall with a lot of luxury stores is like a big city. Plenty of people always wander among fashion showcases, making purchases and spending time inside. To make customers’ experience more pleasant and therefore increase the time spent in the mall, the number of purchases and average check, business owners needed to collect visitors statistics and somehow promote their stores.

Our software development team was asked to build a retail tracking technology that will allow our clients to track customer movement across the mall and collect retail analytics.

Solution

In order to gather business requirements and better understand how it works, we flew on a business trip to Kazakhstan. We visited Esentai Mall and discovered how the space is organized and what should be done to make it more efficient.

Our software development team decided to use iBeacon technology for customer movement tracking all over the Esentai Mall. We set up special sensors (beacons) to detect and track the smartphones of mall visitors. Signals from them were gathered in a mobile application and then aggregated and can be accessed from the admin panel. Data from beacons in retail allowed us to collect general statistics about the movement of customers in the mall and analyze it.

What we delivered to the client:

Developing a mobile application to gather and store all the data received from sensors on the back-end side with the help of Python. On the other hand, a mobile application provides customers with mobile parking payment, push notifications.

Building a dashboard with retail analytics using a mix of React, Redux, and Material UI to enable business owners to track essential data as new/returning visitors, average visit duration, retention rate, and current capacity.

Setting up beacons to gather data on visitor behavior through a smartphone’s Bluetooth module. This raw data collected by sensors is then sent to a custom mobile application for processing and turning it into useful statistics.

Providing information on retail store customer tracking with data visualization solutions like dashboards and reports.

Business Result

The Upsilon development team helped Esentai Mall develop in-store customer tracking software that retrieves data from Bluetooth beacons installed on the territory of a shopping mall, processes and returns it in the visualized form on an online dashboard.

Insights on customer movement helped to understand which routes are used the most, which stores are more noticeable, and which are less noticeable. Store managers were given an instrument to create ad campaigns to promote their stores using location-aware and scheduled notifications.

After the implementation of beacon tracking software, our clients saw the twofold growth in the number of monthly visitors of the Esentai Mall, an increase in the customer retention rate by 15% and an average conversion rate of up to 33%.