The more decentralized management approach followed by the group, which comes under the tagline “Decathlon United,” is leading some of the local, regional and national organization to take various initiatives on many fronts, which may be subsequently adopted by others within the group.
Two of the group's Dutch stores have introduced a mobile self-checkout system, called Decathlon Scan & Go. Customers at its stores in Rotterdam's Alexandrium shopping center and in Eindhoven are being allowed to select the products they want to purchase, scan them and take them out of the store after paying for them with their smartphone. A radio frequency system automatically removes their security tags, embedded in RFID chips.
The application, which is due to be available at all the Decathlon stores in the Netherlands, avoids long queues at the check-out counter. It is supplied by Mishipay, a four-year-old start-up based in London that is regarded as an alternative to Amazon Go. The system is also being used by Leroy Merlin, a DIY chain that, like Decathlon, belongs to the Mulliez retail group, and by MediaMarktSaturn's 18,000-square-meter mega-store in Hamburg. It is also operational at other retail stores in the U.K., Spain, Belgium and India.
A similar smartphone-based system, developed by a U.S. company called New Store, has been introduced at Decathlon's test stores in San Francisco and Emeryville, California, for Apple users, who can pay for the merchandise directly on the shopping floor via Apply Pay or with an Apple Watch. The salespeople are also connected to the cloud-based system with their iPhones or tablets, and they can guide the customers to order products that are not available in the store through an endless aisle, in addition to up-selling and cross-selling other products.
The service is offered here as an option. The chosen items, which are fitted with an RFID chip, must still be scanned through a QR code at the checkout counter.
