Enhancing and speeding-up real-time-shopping using an indoor map, intelligent suggestions and calculations, built upon a smart phone application

Traditionally `Shopping' is a phenomenon where a customer and the merchant meet face to face in order to exchange goods and services for a payment, in a live environment; that experience cannot be virtualized by online-shopping which cannot give the real feeling of shopping and can create more disadvantages rather than the advantages it introduces. According to observations regarding real-time shopping where you can get the real experience, we can come to a conclusion that some means should be provided to enhance and speed up the process; to save time of busy people and also, provide them with some guidance to do their shopping more effectively and meaningfully. This research based development is focused on real-time shopping and it would guide the customers to quick track the goods they want to buy in a store. The solution developed as a mobile phone application on the Android platform would help the customer go to the shelf that he wants by seeing the indication on an indoor map designed in it. Suggestions based on buying-patterns of customers and locations of shelves would be provided in order to enhance the shopping experience of the customer as well as the promotion of goods in the store. The user would also be able to get the total price of the goods calculated before he goes to the counter. In addition to facilitating the customer; the application provides with an Administration Portal where the shop keeper can manage the items in the store. The application was implemented as a prototype on an Android Virtual Device and then tested by a sample set of ten users. It was concluded that the application is very usable in terms of learnability, memorability, efficiency, satisfaction and minimal errors.