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By the time you finally submit a payment for an online purchase, chances are good that the seller knows quite a bit about you. Your browsing history reveals all sorts of clues: your interests, which advertisements you’ve been exposed to, and even basic demographics like your probable age range and gender. Just the operating system you use can send significant signals about the prices you’ll tolerate—researchers recently demonstrated that a variety of sites routinely charge more to shoppers using Macs or Android devices.
By comparison, when you make a purchase in a physical store you may as well be anonymous (unless you use a loyalty or membership card). Amongst the unignorable success of companies like Amazon and Alibaba and the exponential growth of e-commerce in general, it’s easy to forget that 75 percent of retail sales still take place in physical stores. And those stores are eager to know just as much about their in-store shoppers as they do about their online shoppers—if not more....
Because it’s no longer enough to only know that you’re in the store. This article from The Atlantic is a must-read for retail and marketing experts. It provides a fascinating look at tracking consumers in store using big data, technology and other devices.