Deploying a Location-Based Coupon Recommendation Service in Retail: Challenges and Lessons Learnt

Location-based services have been increasingly used to support various decisions in retail such as coupon recommendation, indoor advertisement, smart targeting, etc. However, effectively tracking user’s position to provide extra value embeds several challenges ranging from technical and infrastructure to business, user acceptance and social. This paper presents a location-based coupon recommendation service deployed in a retail store, using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons technology to track the customers. We aim to share the challenges we encountered, and the factors that affected our system’s quality and performance; and show how we handled the issues that arose. Our study moves beyond the technical challenges and discusses the business and user acceptance challenges, highlighting the role of the application context. This paper aspires to provide realistic and more holistic, not just technical, guidelines on prospective researchers and designers of location-based services for retail stores and other contexts. The outcome of the paper highlights new directions for existing challenges and introduces new ones related to beacon configuration, the choice of the unit of analysis, the definition of areas of interest, and acceptance by employees.