Locandis wants to bring customers back to the store

A significant question in these times which are characterised by online shopping is: how can retailers manage to bring customers back to stationary stores? The start-up Locandis wants to achieve this, for example, by combining the benefits of e-commerce with the amenities that local businesses have to offer. Tobias Schäfers from the Copenhagen Business School and a former student and company founder Stefan Brinkhoff presented this concept as part of the Global DIY-Network, which was moderated by Ken Hughes. With the technology developed by Locandis, similar to Google Maps, customers are navigated by app to exactly the point in the store where the product they are looking for is located. Once there, the user receives information about the respective article via push-message as well as monetary incentives such as coupons.

What’s special about it: unlike a regular customer card, offers and information can be tailored to the user and generated in real time. For example, the customer is not even navigated to the shelf if the product has sold out and receives the appropriate information. When store visitors immediately find what they are looking for, they have more time to buy other products – which leads to higher spending and a longer stay, Schäfer explained when highlighting the results that their studies have shown as part of the project. The store operator, in turn, can use the collected data to analyse the buying behaviour of its customers in order to improve its customer approach and the POS appearance. The technology is based on Bluetooth. The required chips are directly integrated into the store’s lighting infrastructure.