RFID in Retail

Viewed soberly, sales is traditionally about something very simple: products should be permanently available and quickly accessible to the buyer and find their market with the highest possible or strategically correct sales price. In the process, one realization has prevailed: too much time is spent with the goods and too little with the consumer.

Inventory management has become increasingly complex for retailers in recent years due to e-commerce and expanded omnichannel capabilities.

With the use of RFID technology, it is possible to identify each garment individually using radio frequency waves, reading hundreds of tags simultaneously. The corresponding information is stored on a chip, the RFID tag. This ensures both more accurate and faster results than manual counting, as well as better availability of goods on the shelf. This means that the right product is always in the right place at the right time.

Retailers who use RFID can therefore not only permanently evaluate inventory information from the stores, but also optimize their entire logistics chain.

This has tangible implications for the fashion customer, or as Nike CEO, Mike Parker, said in August 2019, "RFID is quickly becoming the most precise tool in our arsenal to meet the specific needs of an individual consumer at exactly the right time."

In other words: The secret to success is having the items you need in the right place and available at all times - unless the collection is sold out everywhere.

Certainly, RFID is not solely responsible for the success and sales increases of the most successful European fashion brand suppliers, but in the competition for customers willing to buy, RFID-supported inventory management obviously occupies a key position in the fashion business.

After all, customers buy where they want and only when the goods are really available. This is precisely why omnichannel commerce is now an important driver for the use of RFID.