IOT Based Comprehensive Retail Malpractice Detection and Payment System

Despite rapid advancements in retail in the form of e-commerce, the brick and mortar side of the experience remains lackluster. One of the difficulties faced by the consumers is to follow the tedious queue through the billing process which often takes more time than picking up the products itself. Though the intent is to buy only a couple of products, waiting to bill the products consumes time and is a cause of inconvenience and lost productivity. The project aims to develop a system that can be used in supermarkets to automate the billing process and reduce waiting time. All the trolleys will consist of a connection of a barcode scanner, load cell, LCD, and a pi cam, which are integrated by Raspberry Pi and Arduino. To prevent malpractice, once the barcode is scanned by the customer, it is placed on the load cell to verify the weight of the product from the external database. Once the customer is done shopping, he/she can view the products on the display and make the payment using the inbuilt payment mechanisms. A customer-facing mobile app is also provided which provides purchase history and usage patterns for future convenience by using recommendation systems. Another novel feature of this product is that it uses ultrasonic sensors to gauge the presence of the customer in front of the shopping trolley and follows him/her accordingly.