“Mobile Shopper For You" (Mobile based solution to shop in supermarkets efficiently with ease)

Abstract

In the past, People spend their valuable time going from shop to shop, looking for their shopping needs. To make shopping easy and efficient, the supermarket concept was introduced enabling the consumers to buy all their shopping needs under one roof. With the increasing of the no of consumers and the products available in supermarkets, a set of problems arise. Supermarkets introducing a massive product range in different brands has made it difficult to the shoppers to find where a particular product is being stored. Furthermore, the shoppers find it hard to decide as to which brand to choose. Supermarkets not being able to employee sufficient amount of staff for checkout counters and with large number of shoppers shopping in supermarkets has caused in having long queues in checkout counters which makes shoppers to spend more time in the checkout queues than the time that takes to pick the products they wish to buy. Supermarket chains in foreign countries have implemented set of solutions with the use of technology to improve the efficiency of the checkout process going beyond the normal cashiers. But in Sri lanka the supermarkets have not attempt to implement new solutions due to cost of implementing and the risk in security as the threat of shop lifting is high in Sri lanka. Therefore, the traditional Point of Sales system is still used still in Sri lanka. This report is undertaken in order to analyse the level of the problems faced in the supermarket industry in Sri lanka and to propose a mobile based solution that distinguish from the existing solutions and suites to the Sri lankan supermarket industry. The proposed solution comes with features which enables the user to find product locations, to plan their shopping and to create and settle the shopping bill.