A mobile application to enhance shopping experience by introducing self-service and self-checkout

Abstract

Keells Superstore is a leading retail operator in Sri Lanka. They have been ahead in the technology curve and want to enhance the customer experience by using technological solutions. Even though online shopping has become a trendy solution customers find it more reliable and satisfying to do real-time shopping in the store and select the items by themselves. But in peak hours the customers have to wait in long queues even though they are buying just one or two items. „Keells Smart Mart‟ is the proposed solution which introduces self-assistance and self-checkout in order to reduce the waiting times in the queues and enhance the in-store customer experience. The system consists of a self-checkout mobile application, a web administration panel, and a QR code scanner. This project only focuses on the self-checkout mobile application which is used by the customer. The mobile application intends to provide the solution by letting the customer create an account and scan the products by himself while shopping. The application reads the barcode of the product and captures the price and the other necessary details. The customer can add the products he wants to buy to the virtual shopping cart by scanning each product. When the customer pays online a QR code is generated and the customer can check out by letting the employee scan the QR code at the checkout. The main components of the mobile application were identified and they are the customer account, the QR code scanner, the home page with a slider, the bar code reader, the product details showcase, the virtual shopping cart, the payment gateway, the QR code generator, and the product rating system. Iterative model of software development was used to implement the project and objectoriented techniques and Unified Modeling Language (UML) were used for analysis and design. Model View View Model (MVVC) architecture was adapted for development. Android was used as the main technology and Android studio was the main tool used to develop the application. My SQL was used for the database management and SQL was used as the language. Java was used as the language for both front end and back end development. The mobile application was successfully developed and both black box and white box testing methods were used to test. The usability evaluation was done in the actual shopping environment of Keells superstore using a selected set of customers. The application was improved according to the given feedbacks. „Smart Mart‟ self-checkout mobile application was a success and it can be used in any Android mobile device.