Positioning and Analytics from Consumer Mobile Devices in Retail Stores

Online retailers have a crucial competitive advantage over brick and mortar retailers since they can easily track the activity of their shoppers. In brick and mortar retail stores, this technically translates to the problem of indoor positioning. This paper presents a solution for indoor positioning in retail stores using smartphone sensors with minimum infrastructure. Only BLE beacons are required at the entrances and exits of the store. The system applies offline processing including PDR and map matching. It also uses the list of products purchased by the shopper together with the product location to provide anchor points as extra information to enhance the solution accuracy. The system was tested on 5,500+ trajectories in co-operation with 6 retailers and achieved an average of 77% aisle accuracy.