Retail and Wholesale

Energy monitoring across hundreds of stores, scales that reorder C-parts on their own, forklifts that recognise pallets via RFID: IoT in retail and wholesale is already everyday practice. Retailers, wholesalers and distributors use connected sensors to cut costs, know their stock precisely and move goods safely between headquarters, warehouse and store.

The starting point is similar across the sector: thin margins, rising energy and staff costs, many sites in rented buildings without uniform IT, and customers who expect real-time availability. Digitalisation in retail therefore usually starts with a simple question: what is happening right now in my stores, warehouses and transports?

On this page you will find implemented solution examples from the IoT Use Case network, each with the user, the implementation partner and the technology used.

IoT in Retail and Wholesale: What Connected Stores, Warehouses and Supply Chains Deliver Today

Retail 4.0 means that stores, warehouses, containers and equipment report their own data instead of someone reading meters, counting stock or phoning around. Electricity meters, refrigeration units, routers, shelves and transport boxes are fitted with sensors that send their values over cellular or wireless networks to a platform. Energy management, automatic reordering, real-time inventory and alerts on theft or failure all build on this.

What sets retail apart from other industries is scale. A retailer often runs hundreds of sites, many of them in rented buildings with different equipment and no local IT. IoT solutions for retail therefore have to work without construction work and without touching the store network, be installed in a few hours and roll out to every store. The examples on this page show how that works.

Typical IoT Use Cases in Retail

Energy Monitoring Across the Store Network

Refrigeration, air conditioning, lighting and heating are the biggest cost drivers in stores, and equipment often keeps running outside opening hours. A retailer with more than 600 stores used the IoT Energymonitor from PSsystec and advice from TRIBICON to make all sites comparable for the first time. Non-invasive sensors read the existing electricity, gas, water and heat meters, and installation took about two hours per store without IT specialists. Energy costs fell by 5 to 10 percent, and the data provides the basis for ISO 50001 and CSRD reporting. More in the use case IoT-based energy management system.

Remote Monitoring of Routers, Vending Machines and Refrigeration

When a store router or a machine fails, headquarters often only notices once sales are missing. A company with more than 14,500 sites therefore monitors its IT routers with the SMARTsocket from PSsystec. The plug sits between socket and device, reports power failures and overheating over cellular independently of the local network and allows a remote restart. Technician call-outs and downtime fell by 40 percent.

Automatic Reordering and C-Parts Management in Wholesale

In wholesale, suppliers increasingly take responsibility for stock at the customer's site. Würth Industrie Service serves more than 20,000 customers and uses the iSCALE IoT scale from HK.SYSTEMS for this. The scale holds a kanban bin, continuously measures the weight of the C-parts and sends it via NB-IoT straight into the merchandise management system, without Wi-Fi or a gateway and with up to five years of battery life. When the content drops below a threshold, a reorder is triggered automatically. More in the use cases Self-sufficient supply of C-parts and Inventory management and reorders.

Unmanned Self-Service Stores with RFID

Technical wholesaler ProMart brings its range directly to the customer with the EasyMart store: a mobile spare parts store in an ISO container, accessible around the clock and without staff. Access and withdrawals run via RFID cards and RFID tags on the goods, with technology from TURCK Vilant Systems. Every withdrawal is booked, invoiced and reordered automatically, and stocktaking with downtime is no longer needed.

RFID in the Warehouse: From Goods Receipt to Shipping Without Scanning

Fashion distributor and logistics provider TB International handles goods for 15 brands in a warehouse with 25,000 square metres and almost 35,000 pallet locations. With the INTRANAV platform, cartons are recognised via RFID at goods receipt and booked directly in SAP Business One, and forklifts with RFID and UWB know which pallet they are carrying and where it belongs. Efficiency in full-carton handling rose by almost 40 percent. More in the use case Inventory management.

Secure Transport Between Headquarters and Stores

High-value goods go missing particularly often on their way to the store. Cyberport supplies its 16 stores with the electronically locked Dolly+ trolley from ALSO, which reports its position via GPS and only opens with a PIN the store receives automatically. During the pilot there was not a single loss of goods, although several break-in attempts were recorded. Jeweller Feichtinger ships jewellery to 20 stores in boxes with A1 Digital trackers that detect every opening via a magnetic contact and raise an alarm by SMS or email immediately. More in the use case Real-time damage prevention.

Packing, Shipping and Workforce Planning

At its Künzelsau distribution centre, Würth uses a Peakboard dashboard to show how many parcels are currently in the system and which series are still to come. The data comes from SAP and the material flow computer, and team leaders use it to plan staff in the packing area. Wholesaler FÖRCH worked with AIM to examine how machine learning improves the choice of packaging to reduce packaging waste and transport costs.

Air Conditioning, Refrigeration and On-Site Power Generation

Air conditioning and refrigeration rarely fail suddenly; the damage usually announces itself. An HVAC dealer and service provider uses a sensor box from Arrow and software from Codestryke to detect from compressor vibration whether refrigerant is missing, and sends the technician out with the right spare part (see the example). Large store and logistics roofs are well suited to photovoltaics: at REWE's Henstedt-Ulzburg site, 3,240 modules deliver 1,377 kWp, monitored with meteocontrol and connected via INSYS icom routers. For smaller businesses, electrical wholesaler Zander developed a vendor-independent IoT energy monitor together with codestryke.

Vendor Managed Inventory with IoT

With vendor managed inventory, or VMI, the supplier manages the stock at the customer's site. That only works if the supplier reliably knows consumption. IoT provides exactly this data: scales under kanban bins, level sensors in tanks and silos or RFID readers at withdrawal points report the current stock without anyone at the customer counting. The wholesaler sees when to deliver, combines routes and offers supply as a service. A related technique is level and distance measurement.

Smart Shelves, RFID and Electronic Shelf Labels in the Store

In brick-and-mortar retail, electronic shelf labels, RFID tags on goods and smart shelves with weight or camera sensors are among the best-known applications. They deliver stock data right at the shelf and allow price changes without relabelling. They pay off mainly where many items, frequent price changes or high shrinkage come together, for example in fashion, electronics and grocery. As with every IoT project in retail, the integration with merchandise management and point of sale decides the outcome.

Data Protection and Works Councils

Tracking technology in retail quickly captures employees too, for instance when locating forklifts or company cars. That is why a GDPR review belongs early in the project, and in Germany the works council as well if performance or behaviour could be monitored. Clear purposes, data about objects rather than people, and features such as the private-trip mode in digital logbooks, where no location data is stored, have proven effective.

How to Start an IoT Project in Retail

Start with a problem that can be expressed in euros: energy costs per store, stock-outs on fast movers, goods lost in transit or unplanned technician call-outs. Equip a manageable number of stores, bins or shelves and clarify early which system the data will feed into, such as ERP, merchandise management or energy management. Plug-and-play sensors with their own cellular connection avoid lengthy coordination with store IT. After a few weeks, the pilot shows whether a rollout to all sites is worthwhile.

Finding IoT Providers with Retail and Wholesale References

Every solution example on this page names the implementation partner, the technology used and in most cases the user, including Würth, Cyberport, REWE, ProMart, Feichtinger, FÖRCH and TB International. This shows you who has already delivered a comparable project. If you briefly describe your project via the contact form, we will put you in touch with suitable providers.