Technology company Cust2Mate is aiming to replicate the online shopping experience for visitors to physical stores via a screen that attaches to a grocery cart, giving shoppers the ability to see promotions, coupons and ads for other products while walking through a store.

“We digitize the physical shopping journey at the physical store. We . . . turn it into something which is exactly the way online shopping is being done today,” Yaniv Zukerman, chief marketing officer at Cust2Mate said to TechNX in an interview.

The firm — which is incorporated in Vancouver but operates mainly out of Israel — offers a 13-and-a-half-inch screen that fits onto the handle bars of a regular shopping cart. Once the consumer logs into an account, they are presented with a number of offers.

“Everything is shown, and if there is a discount or a promotion, that will be automatically presented and accounted for throughout the transaction.”

“So immediately, there is no chance for you to miss a deal,” Zukerman said.

History of Cust2Mate

The company, which is owned by parent firm A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp. (AZ-Q), now has more than 5,000 smart carts on four continents. It was founded in 1988 by Joseph Ben Tsur, and also has clients in the defence and security markets.

It has operations in North America, Europe, Latin America, and a manufacturing site in China.

While consumers are offered a bevy of deals and promotions, retailers can also benefit from the service, according to Zukerman.

Products are weighed as they are placed in the cart. “The security scale is one of the elements of security measures that we have on top of a camera; computer vision, and AI that makes sure that whatever you put in the basket is recorded, is recognized, and eventually we are going to pay for this. We eliminate or we mitigate to the maximum, the ability of loss.”

The products can be scanned via the smart cart tablet and if another product is then placed into the basket, an alert is displayed, which means, “shrinkage loss will be minimized as much as possible,” he said.

Happy shoppers equals more spending

Offering customers all possible deals and coupons provides a benefit to the retailer as well.

“Because you provide a much better, effortless, personalized, rewarding experience to their customers, (retailers) are getting happier customers, and what happens with happier customers? First, they are becoming more loyal, and loyalty means more valuable customers. And usually, they spend more.”

For grocery stores especially — which operate on razor-thin margins — the savings can be “significant,” he said.

“In our already existing commercial deployments, we see an uplift of expenditure for loyal customers using our carts . . . of up to 15 per cent. It’s very difficult to get a year-over-year increase in the same store of sales, and in those loyal customers, we see an increase of up to five items per cart on average. This is a huge deal.”

For Cust2Mate, the screens also offer a potentially lucrative future income stream via the retail media channel that appears on the right side of the screen.

“We enable them, together with their CPG (consumer packaged goods) partners, to usher into the store a very effective retail media channel because it’s personalized; its context-driven, and it’s highly measurable, so that will provide them with new sources of revenues and new sources of much higher margin activity.”

The firm’s technology also has an AI component that offers assistance on potentially “suspicious transactions” by analyzing what goes into the cart, and alerting store staff to validate purchases, if needed.

It also helps to “drive personalization,” for the shopper, Zukerman said.

“Because you just scanned a pasta and that will trigger: ‘Maybe it’s a good idea to offer you a tomato sauce or even a recipe for an Italian meal.’”

Subscription-based service

The company sells its units via a subscription model, which allows retailers to minimize upfront costs, Zukerman explained.

“It’s really a win-win situation, because for the retailers, it’s a much more scalable model that presents them with a better way to gain ROI (return on investment) much quicker, and doesn’t require them to put up a lot of capital in advance, and for many retailers that makes a lot of sense.”

While it doesn’t yet offer the technology here, Cust2Mate recently signed a partnership with Scallix to offer its products in Canada via a local retailer.

He wouldn’t provide the grocer’s name but said, it is a “well-known retailer that has a lot of nice stores in the Toronto area, and hopefully that will progress forward.”

“We have high hopes for the Canadian market. It’s very nice, very advanced retailers with a big number of stores across Canada, so I think it should be a great market for us,” Zukerman said.