Business intelligence by connecting real-time indoor location to sales records

Abstract

Indoor positioning systems have many technological varieties and application scenarios. Through development of an indoor LBS service for targeted retail use case we have adopted Wi-Fi signal strength fingerprinting considering cost, resolution and scaling-up factors. A mobile app is developed and rolled out in a small scale to connect customer location data with their loyalty status and the retailer's product sales. Through this research attempt we have discovered some less communicated aspects of ILBS including the lack of accuracy, the response time lag, and the privacy concern which is most likely beyond the help of technology advancement. On the up side, valuable business insight can be generated by mashing up of transactional sales data with non-transactional location data. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.