Scan-at-once still developing

At the National Retail Federation show earlier this year, the company 5Stat demonstrated an RFID-based application for apparel retailers which scanned an entire counter full of clothing into the POS instantaneously, eliminating the need to drag each item across a barcode scanner, states Retail Customer Experience.

Microsoft has a similar demo unit in its Retail Experience Centre that rings up copies of Windows Vista and Halo Wars in a blink and IBM has two such fully functional test labs for retailers, one in southern France, the other in New York.

From a technology standpoint, basket-at-once scanning is available today but Jason Goldberg, vice-president of marketing at retail design firm MTI says, "I've seen the demos, but to my knowledge, there is no retailer that has item-level RFID tagging on all live SKUs, which would be a prerequisite for a shopping cart scan-at-once".

BlueStar, a provider of solutions-based distribution for auto ID, point of sale (POS), mobility, and RFID products, has made available a bundled POS and accounting solution featuring Intuit QuickBooks POS software and HP POS hardware, says FOXBusiness.

"Demand for single-vendor solutions is on the rise," says Rob Dorsey, BlueStar vice-president of US sales.

"Intuit's POS software coupled with the powerful HP POS products provides BlueStar with a distinguished offering. With features for increasing productivity and making processes more efficient, the combined solution will demonstrate a clear return on investment for our resellers."

Clovers Natural Market of Columbia, Missouri will be replacing all of their POS systems with Radiant Systems hardware and CounterPoint SQL software, supplied by One Step, reports eMedia Wire.

After going through a complete needs analysis with One Step Retail Solutions and a thorough demonstration of the software, it became clear that CounterPoint SQL had the features that Clovers was looking for, including integration of a scale at checkout.

Clovers also found that One Step could give them a level of support that they had been lacking with their previous system.