Authors:
Jamal Khan, Michael Crahan, Adrian Feng, Vikrant Maheshwari, Paul Scrutton
Abstract:
This disclosure proposes enhancing shopping cart design to provide an extendable feature using smart shopping cart's sensor technology and touch enabled dashboard with the additional option for customer to call for an additional shopping cart.
Background:
"Brick and mortar" retail stores need to be lot more competitive with their online competitors and there are still areas of pain when a customer visits a ""Brick and mortar"" retail store that can still be addressed. While there are lots of innovation happening everyday to provide better customer shopping experience there are still great areas of improvement.
Lots of retailers now have smart shopping cart which has in-built POS terminal with most of the POS features, we see improvements that can still be made to these carts.
Description:
In a retail "brick and mortar" store, a customer may discover while shopping they need more space for the merchandise they are putting into their shopping cart. At that time they would need to go to the cart station of the store to either get an additional cart or a larger cart if one was available. There is a lot of prior art which provides smart cart solutions but this disclosure is trying to address smart extension of the existing cart customer as well as providing the customer the option to request another cart. Existing supermarkets often offer 2 sizes of carts , and this solves the problem of picking the small size model and needing to switch carts or create an unsafe cart situation by putting too much in the small cart.
Lots of retailers now have smart shopping carts which have in-built POS terminal with most of the POS features, we see an improvement can be made to these carts as below.
1. Sensor enabled Extension feature to a shopping cart
Existing supermarkets often offer 2 sizes of cart and this solves the problem of picking the small size model and needing to switch carts or create an unsafe cart situation by putting too much in a small cart. This smart cart will have sensor technology to keep track of how much cart space customer has already used and if a customer is about to exceed a certain store configurable cart size, the cart smart dashboard or an extended dashboard can prompt the customer if they need more room in the cart and provide customer next extendable size, or an option to request another cart. These carts will have a default size "Standard" and can be further extended to "Large" or Extra Large". On the dashboard screen depending on customer selection the cart will be extended further to the requested size. The expansion mechanism will utilize rollers/sliding mechanism/motor to adjust bottom/left and right sides of cart using two surfaces which slide on each other.
2. Companion cart(s) which can be paired with first cart
Using the touch enabled dashboard the customer can request another cart (1 or more < store configurable>). These companion carts can navigate from cart station to the cart sending request for companion cart and then it will be a self driving cart following the first cart. While ordering companion cart customer will have option to select another of the same size cart or a "Mover cart" if they want to use cart to put a large item like box of TV, furniture box, or rug etc which just needs flat cart space.
3. Companion cart self-drives to checkout
Dashboard will also have option for customer to select / or tap to send the companion cart to checkout section and stay on side of checkout waiting for customer to come to checkout.
TGCS Reference 2499
