The location of a tracked shopping cart in a metal scrapyard. We partnered with one of our...
Anybody with experience in shopping cart loss knows that they can travel FAR. We’ve recorded carts travelling over international borders - way beyond the distance normally covered by Wi-Fi networks or other “long range” radio options.
Even with outliers removed, a plurality of “off-premise” carts for all retailers we work with travel beyond half a mile from their stores. Our latest weekly off premise cart report showed that 43% of all off property carts we track were more than half a mile from the store.
Carts also don't stay stationary. They will often travel progressively further from the store. This further limits how useful on premise radio/gateway technologies can be.
This “half-mile” metric is important. No WiFi Router has a range beyond 100-150 feet. Many of you have multiple WiFi routers in your own home for extra bandwidth and coverage. Other forms of Low Power Wide Area Network solutions (LPWAN), such as LoRA, Sigfox or Helium can boast a range of several miles, but that’s with a clear line of sight. Realistically, many of these technologies will have a half-mile range or less in commercial areas.
In order for any cart tracking technology to be successful, it has to ensure one thing: That you can track every cart no matter where it goes. This increases your chances of recovering a high percentage of lost carts. The key to an ROI for any tracking program is your retrieval efficiency and efficacy:
- Efficiency: Does a 1 day shift of cart collection bring back 10 carts or 30? Assigning teams of drivers to spend hours searching for a few carts is not an efficient use of anyone’s personnel.
- Efficacy: How effective is the retrieval effort? If there are 30 missing carts, what percentage of this are you able to bring back per retrieval run?
You cannot guarantee positive results for retrieval efficiency or efficacy if you can’t actually pinpoint every cart’s location no matter where it is. The ONLY radio frequency mechanism that ensures this is 4G cellular coverage. With 43% of your carts beyond the range of traditional long range radio technologies, QuickTrack’s low cost, low power cellular network solutions ensures our retailer partners can successfully retrieve a majority of their lost carts. One of our retail partners recently went on a collection run for 29 carts. They brought back 31. Many of these carts were several miles from their store and had been gone for weeks. They've consistently achieved 85% + success rates for cart retrieval thanks to QuickTrack's cellular technology.
