Improving customer shopping experience using an Android bar-code reader application

Abstract

Queues continue to grow in spite of exhaustive methods done at the supermarkets to reduce it. There has been a rising interest in fast and simple shopping in supermarkets. In the ordinary shopping framework, check-out counters are distributed to minimize the queues yet at the same time it is said to be tedious. This created an exceptional opportunity that the researcher used to improve the current way of managing check-out queues and improve customer shopping experience. A review on consumer shopping behavior and existing solutions was done to get an understanding of consumer’s reaction to queues. Several theoretical models were extracted and combined in order to facilitate the study of queues and discovery of retail solutions. The literature shows that queues are an extremely complex phenomenon, and many of the drivers and pointers to customer satisfaction with queuing cannot be measured simply in terms such as the length of queue or wait time. Improving queues and satisfying customers required considerable understanding and more sophisticated responses. A mobile and web application was developed to make the management of check-out queues easier and efficient and to improve customer shopping experience. Agile methodology was adopted as the software methodology for the development of the application. Scan It, a mobile barcode scanning application was developed as a tool to offer an interactive platform where customers can scan and purchase supermarket products. It was developed for better improvement of shopping experience. The final prototype was tested to verify if the requirements were met.