Design and development of RFID based smart shopping cart using Arduino

In the present era of socio-economic development, technologies have been contributing not only for improving supply chain management, but also to enhance customer facilities and satisfactions. Now a days, shopping centers and city malls are the prime requirement of society, where customers get freedom to see, choose and collect items as per their requirements and convenience. These stores and malls are situated in metropolitan cities and easily approachable, which increases the rush at these places with a high rate, tends to long queue at billing counters. It also needs skilled workers to arrange items in shopping center, also guide about the shopping items to customers as well as at billing counter. The proposed system is a smart shopping cart, comprises RFID reader and on-board buttons as inputs, microcontroller-based Arduino board as data acquisition and control unit, and LCD display is as output unit. The smart cart detects items, then avails option to customer to add new shopping items in bill as well as remove already added items directly from bill. It also sends the final billing information to central server using Wi-Fi module. The developed flexible shopping system provides better informative system along with facility of automatic billing generation and record the information centrally. It also provides better functionality of shopping center, minimize requirement, and working load on shopping center employees.