RFID technology in the retail industry

RFID (radio frequency identification) is not a new thing. It has been widely used for many years, and many American retailers, including Macy's, ZARA, and Decathlon, use this technology.

The working principle is very simple, that is, each product has a radio frequency ID tag, and the tag has its own unique magnetic signature. The signature is extracted by the recipient or RFID reader, which is not only unique, but can also display the location of the tagged product.

RFID is also applied to credit cards with flash payment capabilities.

Because the tag is magnetically read, it is more efficient than a typical visual scanning system, and the tag and reader do not require messy communication lines. Therefore, the immediate benefit of RFID systems is that retailers can reduce the time it takes to acquire inventory data by 90%. In other words, it took three days to get the inventory data, and RFID only took 45 minutes.

RFID has also greatly improved accuracy. The actual inventory that is manually scanned has an error of about 4%, and this value is superimposed every year, which results in a cycle count of more than 60% in the sales season. In contrast, RFID errors are typically only 0.5%, which means that inventory will be more accurate throughout the year.

Many good managers have recognized the advantages of RFID in terms of time and accuracy of actual inventory. There are many features of RFID, but there will be more features in the future.