News

Report: Consumer goods, apparel, electronics are top targets for retail RFID

January 18, 2011

Forty percent of 125 survey respondents said a pilot store is part of their RFID roll-out strategy, according to a study released by Aberdeen Group.

Another 10 percent of respondents said there will be multi-store deployments involving a RFID roll-out strategy, the study also found. Aberdeen Group included the results in its "The 2011 Store-Level RFID Benchmark Report."

The study found that consumer goods, apparel, and consumer electronics are the top three product categories that retailers are currently tagging or plan to tag.

Retailers, once driven toward RFID by supply chain partners and other corporate mandates, found those to be unprofitable approaches, according to the report. Since then, retailers have discovered that RFID implementation yields better results when motivated by in-store operational improvements.

"Given the nature of the growth challenges the retail community faces in stores, and the opportunities for operations and customer process improvement, retailers are hungry for a strategic roadmap and a set of leading indicators as they look to innovate and transform their store operations with RFID," said Sahir Anand, author, vice president and principal analyst for retail and banking at Aberdeen. "Both Walmart and Macy's are leading store-level RFID innovation, per recent developments."