KissAFrog Leaps into RFID

By using RFID during this step instead of bar-coding, the company is assured that human errors will not impact data accuracy. "It's faster, easier and trustier," says Tom Vieweger, a key account manager for RF-iT Solutions' German office. "The workers cannot make any mistakes within this process."

In addition, the information collected from interrogating the RFID-tagged items updates the inventory data, which is used in the company's e-commerce applications to ensure produce availability.

Abbassi believes the RFID system that Trends & Brands is implementing is the first RFID project at the item level for an online retailer. He also says the system will help the company avoid out-of-stocks for its online customers, because it will be able to conduct inventory every month at its outlets rather than annually, and every quarter at the DC, where it keeps roughly 200,000 items in stock. Using bar-code scanners to conduct monthly inventories at its outlets and quarterly inventories at its distribution center, he explains, would have been too time-consuming and costly.

Trends & Brands has yet to implement the RFID-based customer loyalty card that it originally discussed with a partner. The company may eventually do so, Abbassi says—but in a way that integrates the card into the RFID-based processes currently being rolled out.

Abbassi says he and his managers are considering whether they will tag only the new items that come in, or also go back and tag all goods stored at its distribution center. "In the outlets, we will definitely tag all items," he states, "since this is where we have the biggest problems with inventory inaccuracies."