Creating a digital channel in the physical retail space
In-store advertising
Touchpoint Interactive Media is an Enterprise Ireland client company, based in Dublin. It works in the retail advertising area, providing in-store digital media solutions for brands such as Vodafone and Paddy Power. The company is a specialist in touch, gesture and holographic display technologies and designs complete solutions around these technologies. Touchpoint identified an opportunity to use their expertise to assist retailers and approached COMAND to help implement it. An estimated 38% of consumers have left a store empty-handed because the product they were looking for wasn’t available. Retailers in the UK are missing out on sales of £1bn/month as a result.
Digital retail channel
Holding high stock levels is expensive for retailers, and they are restricted by the limitations of space in the physical store. An online “virtual inventory” allows them make significantly more products available in this channel, which leads to a gap between the online and offline offerings. Current options for creating a digital channel within a physical retail space either require expensive, time consuming integrations and hardware, or use handheld devices requiring staff intervention to complete ordering or use payment technologies.
38%
of shoppers are unable to find a desired product
3
system integrators trialling the product
18
month Innovation Partnership
“The work undertaken in conjunction with AIT has accelerated our development path considerably and has allowed us to bring innovative solutions to the market quickly, which is crucial in the retail tech space. The work was of a very high standard and the engineers were extremely professional and diligent. We found working with them to be a seamless process and one which we would be keen to repeat in the future.”
Fergal Downey
CEO, Touchpoint Interactive Media
The Touchpoint & COMAND partnership
Through an Innovation Partnership project with Touchpoint, the COMAND Gateway designed a backend solution for the proposed hardware, named BoscaPay. This was achieved with the addition of new functionality that included the seamless delivery of the interactive display performance and the utilisation of external data sources to determine the scheduling processes.
An important feature of the system is its capacity to share information between mobile devices and the platform’s driven screens. This project also investigated the scope for pulling data feeds into BoscaPay and delivering templated user interfaces. BoscaPay has just been launched on the market and has been very well received by retailers. There are currently three trials in place with system integrators.