You are absolutely correct. Inventory monitoring and LP are where money is to be made (or rather "not lost" :-) ).
I have skin in the game on the loyalty part so I will abstain from speaking on that.
Coming back on your thoughts about inventory, the birth of Embisphere, the RFID company I spoke about earlier (and the reason why Decathlon started to use them), was solely the invention of a "racket" for fast instore inventory
Other uses (checkout, LP) were almost an afterthought. The sole gain on speed and accuracy of in-store inventory was enough to decide Decathlon to add RFID chips on all its inventory and Decathlon inventory is massive ! They are in the range of 30-70k active SKUs, with sometimes hundreds of thousands units of stock. Sell that in hundreds of stores worldwide, add the warehouses in every country and the manufacturing facilities in China, and you end up with millions of euros of investment just for that damn inventory ;-)
Nice! It looks like Nuukik is well positioned to take advantage of that new infrastructure!
It would be lovely if you developed an in-store navigation capability. It's so frustrating to run into a store to pickup something, and not be able to immediately find it.
The results of periodic scans should provide a decent point cloud that could be used to determine shelf/aisle geometry without a blueprint. Foursquare uses this sort of approach for its interior mapping process, but they can't tell me where to find the bean dip. There are multiple obvious ways to monetize that dataset including simply selling it to Foursquare.
We may or may not already have developed proofs of concept of in-store navigation systems for european retailers ;-)
In-store location of products is deeply linked with very complicated discussions between retailers and product manufacturers.
Moreover, facing is a very strategic part of retail and I doubt retailers would be happy to release their facing strategies to outsiders or competitors.
Even inside a retailer's organization, several opposing views exist, between maximizing breadth of product range, giving prime exposure to the private label, etc....the equation they have to solve is very complicated and I don't think there's an ideal solution to this. A retailer facing strategy is linked to its core values. It has a direct impact on its bottom line and an indirect one: the consumer's unconscious perception of facing "strategies" is probably very significant.
I have skin in the game on the loyalty part so I will abstain from speaking on that.
Coming back on your thoughts about inventory, the birth of Embisphere, the RFID company I spoke about earlier (and the reason why Decathlon started to use them), was solely the invention of a "racket" for fast instore inventory
http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power
Other uses (checkout, LP) were almost an afterthought. The sole gain on speed and accuracy of in-store inventory was enough to decide Decathlon to add RFID chips on all its inventory and Decathlon inventory is massive ! They are in the range of 30-70k active SKUs, with sometimes hundreds of thousands units of stock. Sell that in hundreds of stores worldwide, add the warehouses in every country and the manufacturing facilities in China, and you end up with millions of euros of investment just for that damn inventory ;-)