This will change the way you shop, dine, travel, meet for coffee etc.  forever!  Well, it’s not supposed to change it so much as to ‘enhance’ it.  Unlike the Amazon drone delivery technology, which is going to take a few years to develop, this is already in use in various places and House of Fraser and Waitrose are the latest to experiment with it.

These are beacons that are attached to items, for example mannequins in a shop, and when customers who have the app installed on their smartphone are within 50 metres of the mannequin, the beacon will send them a signal.  This signal details all sorts of other information about what the mannequin is wearing.  This could be where in the shop you can find all the separate items, what else they could be co-ordinated or accessorised with or even the option to buy them online right there and then.  It wouldn’t necessarily always be used for customers already in the store but perhaps in a window display, a nearby bus stop or train station, on billboard adverts or signs, they could all be used to direct potential customers into the store with details of sales and the bargains they could bag.

Cafés could ping the ‘cake of the day’ to passers-by to entice them in and if the idea of cake wasn’t tempting enough, a discount code or other special offers could be sent.  Some supermarkets are already using these beacons to push their discounts and make the shopping experience more engaging for the shopper.

This isn’t just a one way experience for shoppers though and there is always another side to the use of this technology.  Retailers can use the information they receive to understand their customers a little more.  They can see how often the shopper frequents the shop, which departments they spend most of their time in and how often the special offer vouchers are redeemed.  They can also be used to alert the retailers of when their customers who spend the most online are in the shop so that shop assistants can recognise them and make sure they are treated accordingly – clever!

It’s not just the customers that are being monitored though, shops can also use the beacons to keep an eye on their staff and how efficient they are (or not!)  They can see the conversion rate of sales from time spent with the customers, monitor where most of their time is spent (shop floor, store room, smoking area!) and observe the customer service they are offering and how that reflects on the sales.

As with the drones and most new technology, these beacons don’t come without any hurdles.  The main hurdle for the retailers is that they need their customers to want to use them.  What is the incentive for their customers to physically download an app? An app that will most probably be unique to each shop, meaning they would have to download a separate app for every shop they go into.  It could be a great way to pick up a bargain, but there is also a certain amount of Big Brother about all this, maybe we don’t want our shopping habits to be monitored to such an extreme.

So the retailers are faced with trying to demonstrate to their customers about the benefits that the beacons will offer and educate them about the advantages of downloading this unique app that will, in turn, provide them with unique customer service and money saving offers.  There has been talk of collaborating beacon technology with alternative and more popular shopping apps like PayPal so that they can start getting their message across to their customers without them having to download a separate app.  It may be through these means that they can start to build the exclusive relationships that they want.

So maybe next time you’re ambling around the supermarket or checking out the summer collection in your favourite clothes shop, have a think about what would enhance your shopping experience further.  Many people would argue that their partners already have an unhealthy relationship with certain retailers, but are you happy just browsing or do you want to really get involved?

With smartphones, tablets etc as popular as they are now and ever increasing in popularity as certain apps strive to make our lives easier, this beacon technology is on its way whether we like it or not.  Hey, if it leads to cheap cake, I’m all for it!