NFC reading to a shopping cart

[BinuParticipant]

Hi,

I am planning to setup a supermarket, where I have all products displayed as a demo in my physical store.Each product has an NFC tag. . A customer walks in with his NFC phone , and when tapping the phone to his required item tags ….this product is added to his shopping cart app or to a text file one by one.

After all shopping is done , he places the phone in another NFC reader at the cashier, and cashier gets all his added items in his computer, after which he pays.

Kindly give a solution.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Binu, can you clarify what you mean by “customer walks in with his NFC phone”? The issue is that not all NFC phones have the capability of reading NFC tags. If we assume that all phones used by customers are NFC-enabled phones supporting Android 5.0 or above, then the solution is straight forward. You would write an Android app that captures the unique ID of the tags deployed on the items in the store and identifies itself to an NFC reader at the cashier. Read through the links to grok the Android NFC API in order to properly compose your app. We’re glad to walk you through issues in your code or to write the app for you.

Just let us know,
Richard

[BinuParticipant]

Hi,
I am planning to use a Megento based shopping cart app . So once a customer reads a tag, the item is added to his shopping cart automatically. After all items are added, he can place his phone in a reader connected to a large touch screen/kisok, whereby he can adjust the quantity or delete any from the cart as he wishes. This kisok also has the facility to accept payments vis NFC credit cards. Or else he can go yo the cashier and make cash payment.
Hence let me know if this can be done as an extension to Magento ?
The cost as well for the customisation.
Thanks

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Binu, building an extension to Magento to manage the shopping cart is doable. It would be a web app running in the mobile browser of the customer’s phone. Again the customer would have to have an NFC enabled phone for the solution to work. Accepting payments over NFC is complicated since the reader hardware needs to be PCI and EMV certified. Do you have a kiosk and certified NFC payment terminal in mind?

Building a Magento extension that adds items to shopping cart via NFC scanning (from Android NFC-enabled phones) will cost around $10k. Having the same customer phone make a contactless NFC payment to complete the purchase will be extra. I need to know if you intend to use Android Pay or some other NFC wallet to execute payment to properly estimate that.

From a high level, it would be worth understanding your perspective. Do you own a supermarket for which you want to build this solution for? What experience have you had with NFC in the past? What experience do you have building mobile or web apps?

best,
Richard

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