All your grocery shopping problems, from desperately trying to find the right aisle when you need to be somewhere else to missing the best offers, can be a thing of the past if you’re in Dubai.
Have you ever left the supermarket super frustrated because you couldn’t find some of the things on your shopping list in the sprawling store? Or did you just unknowingly miss the aisles with the latest promotions? Well, luckily for shoppers in Dubai, Aswaaq, one of the emirate’s leading supermarket chains, has joined forces with Philips Lighting to help in avoiding these kinds of irritations. By introducing Philips Lighting’s indoor positioning navigation system to its supermarket in Dubai, the retailer is offering consumers numerous advantages while shopping through the REACH loyalty app.
After downloading the app, you can enjoy a personalised, convenient, interactive and frictionless shopping experience, which starts at home. You can create your shopping lists by scanning or searching for items, and you can even add products from a recipe. Once you get to the store, the app is location-aware and can guide you to all the items on your shopping list. Are you a working mum or does your partner often throw last minute dinner parties? Imagine the time and stress you can save by knowing the shortest routes to the products you need via a map. On your way, the personal shopping assistant also sends out alerts about special offers or products that particularly interest you. What’s more, you can even receive recipe suggestions based around your shopping list and location. In the future, Aswaaq plans to add more features like being able to call a store assistant or compare product information.
The trend towards using mobile phones while shopping is flourishing worldwide. And indoor positioning, developed by big lighting companies like Osram, GE and Philips, is the innovation that is reshaping the world of retail even further. New indoor positioning projects are popping up everywhere, but how exactly do these innovative systems with several capabilities work? Basically, sensors from custom-LED lights guide consumers to their desired destinations through an app. Aswaaq is using Visible Light Communication (VLC), where each Philips luminaire in the store sends a unique code. A smartphone’s camera then receives the code and after the system’s software identifies it, the user’s location is pinpointed. Additionally, Aswaaq, the first company to provide indoor positioning in the Middle East, uses a one-way data stream and no personal data is collected by the lighting system. That’s great to know as many people in the region have security concerns when using phones for retail purposes. Philips’s reliable, instant and extremely accurate system (30cm) debuted at the Carrefour hypermarket in the Euralille mall in Lille, France —one of the biggest shopping malls in Europe—in 2015.
