NFC Tags Power Virtual Shopping Wall at Annual Starbucks Corporate Event

GoToTags teamed up with Sunrise Identity, Sprint and NXP to bring an NFC-based virtual shopping experience to a major US consumer coffee company. Once a year a majority of the store managers and management attend a corporate event to focus on goals and the year ahead. As part of the conference, there is a company store on site where attendees can shop for swag. In the past this was implemented with a traditional brick-and-mortar model; inventory was purchased and shipped to the event site, purchasing retail kiosks were installed, security was hired and long lines formed. The coffee company decided this was an excessive amount of work for such a short event and was not as streamlined as desired due to human errors.

With the assistance of GoToTags the company decided to change up the process; instead of having the physical inventory available for purchase at the event, NFC enabled virtual shopping walls were deployed. These virtual shopping walls had beautiful printed images of the products with NFC tags installed behind the photos at specific touch-points. When a shopper arrived at the store, their QR enabled badge was scanned by an NFC Android phone to identify the specific shopper. The shopper then took the phone and “shopped” by touching the phone to the NFC enabled touch-points for the products they wished to purchase. When they were done they hit the checkout button which completed the transaction in the existing corporate store e-commerce system. It was an enormous success, and everyone loved the streamline process of virtual shopping without the hassle of traditional retail.