Low-Cost Automatic Purchase Cart for Hassle-free Uncrowded Shopping in Indian Supermarkets

The shopping centers and departmental grocery stores are primarily over visited in various situations such as festivals or over-demand caused by sales and offers. Particularly in populated countries, the places are highly crowded and lead to the congestion at billing counters after customer purchases. There have been several efforts to make self-billing carts. However, the small shopping places cannot afford to invest in those systems to occupy. With an objective of a smart cart that can weigh, count and calculate the cost of selected products in a fraction of time, we have designed and implemented bill displaying of customer’s purchases. The method employs RFID tags on the merchandise in this system. When a product is placed in the cart, RFID in our proposed system detects the object and other sensors are in process. The Liquid Crystal Display 16 ×2 (LCD) enlists the product parameters based on sending elements. The price of the goods and the total billing are stored on the Arduino microcontroller. The user can see the product's price and cost, further integrated for automated payment of the generated bills. We have utilized a Bluetooth module for data communication. Overall, the integration is a low cost compared to the available alternatives and the proposed method is promising for the Purchase cart implementation in smaller shopping enterprises. The proposed method is also beneficial in crowd management and convenience for both the customers and shopkeepers, especially in the pandemic situation that we have recently encountered.