Zander Livingston, CEO, Truecount

How is your organisation involved with RFID technology?
Truecount provides advanced RFID software, services and consulting for the retail industry. We help our clients optimise and refine their business processes and assist them in creating long-term profitable growth through RFID technology.

Your company claims that using your solution in retail stores can boost sales. How does RFID help with that?
Our core “out-of-the-box” solution helps retailers remove what’s known as the “variance” or the “distortion rate” in their stores, which is just a way of saying that it helps them make sure they actually have what they think they have. Studies have shown that the average U.S. retailer has a 35% gap between perceived sales inventory and actual sales inventory.

At Truecount, we believe that for a store to be successful, its engine, the back stock, has to be running well. Truecount fine-tunes the engine. Thanks to RFID tags on each item that is for sale and software systems that interact with the RFID tags, retailers can maintain an extremely accurate perpetual inventory.  Truecount empowers retailers with the ability to assure that everything that should be displayed on the sales floor actually is.

Why is that important?
As an example, in a clothing store, most people will not ask a salesperson for a specific size or color if what they want isn’t on the rack or the shelf.  Studies have shown, in fact, that a majority of retail shoppers just won’t ask an employee for any help at all. If they cannot find what they want, right where they think it should be, they leave the store without purchasing anything.

I think the worst thing is getting to the cash register and having the person at the register ask, “Did you find everything you wanted today?” Even if I didn’t, I say yes. I’m not going to leave my place at the checkout, just as I am about to pay, to go back to the store’s sales floor!

By making sure that all the available sizes, colours and models of retail items are properly displayed in the store, on the shelves where they should be, and not in the back storage area or missing, retail stores can ring up more sales. That’s one of the benefits Truecount makes possible.

What is your vision for the future of RFID?
RFID will become more customer-concentric, with many customer-enhancing applications including self-check out and even self-returns. RFID technology and “self-checkout” are a perfect marriage. We’re already seeing self-checkout at some supermarkets. With RFID, we’ll see it in more places, more often. RFID makes it so fast and so easy for shoppers to check themselves out. An important side benefit is that customer service improves because sales people can spend more time on the sales floor selling instead of behind the cash register.

Right now, RFID-based services are quickly moving from a “want” to a “need” …  so hold onto the railing, because the demand is going to be huge!

Do you find your potential customers are already familiar with RFID?
Absolutely, even just in the last year. More people come to us already knowing that they want RFID. People understand the science behind it, they know how it works and they know that it works well. We definitely do not have to explain the basics as much as we used to. The biggest obstacle is the cost of the initial investment which can still appear a little daunting, but even that is changing. RFID is following the same pricing curves as any new technology – the first fax machines cost $7000 each, but then year after year the costs come down. RFID’s success is inevitable. RFID is efficient, it’s quick, it doesn’t require line-of-sight reading. It is the new paradigm for inventory management.


Truecount Corporation was created from the ground up for retail and requires little to no integration to achieve powerful benefits. Their unique retail-focused software eliminates the ‘guess work’ of deploying RFID at the item-level and provides immediate ROI. For more information, visit www.truecount.com