An Analytical Review of Existing Supermarket Billing Systems

Matovu Davis,Ocen Gilbert,Sekamwa Umar,Semwogerere Twaibu

doi:10.37284/eajit.4.1.440

Abstract

Retail shops and stores form part of the nation’s business sector involved in selling and providing several goods and services. The main objective was to study and analyse existing supermarket billing systems and possibly identify their weaknesses and strengths. This will enable us to generate an RFID billing system that is unique and even more advantageous than the existing systems. The methodology used was qualitative involving hard and soft document reviews and observational experiments. Findings revealed that there are several billing systems which include the manual price tag system where a mini-computer (calculator) is used to sum up the total bill per customer at a time, the barcode reader system, the smart chart with store cards, and the ‘smart shopping cart. It was noted that these have the advantage of giving confidence all the items are counted, paid for, save time and are cheap to use. However, they are also associated with several weaknesses like long waiting time (queues), the systems require a lot of human effort to read the barcodes which is not efficient, barcode systems sometimes fail to read, possible human errors while entering information, possible cheating through wrongly-fed information and the desynchronization effects because of the unreliable network. This was an awareness drive about the existing supermarket billing systems in order to enhance further studies on better ones

Highlights

Supermarkets are large retail stores operated on a self-service basis selling food goods like; agriculture produce, beverages, meat, bakery and dairy products, and sometimes non-food goods like; appliances, utensils, groceries, electronics among others (Thomas, 2004)
Attendants use a manual way with the help of their eyes to check the price tags on the items and feed those prices into the calculator to get the total cost of things purchased by a particular customer (Hamlet, 2008)
An automated supermarket self-billing system is proposed and recommended in this study

Summary

Introduction

Supermarkets are large retail stores operated on a self-service basis selling food goods like; agriculture produce, beverages, meat, bakery and dairy products, and sometimes non-food goods like; appliances, utensils, groceries, electronics among others (Thomas, 2004). In Uganda, supermarkets have taken the lead in the retail business. These were identified among others: Shoprite, Game Stores, Uchumi, Nakumatt and Tuskys, Capital Shoppers, Quality Supermarket, and Kenjoy. Industry experts say the launch of a new supermarket, which operates alongside small and medium stores, comes with a lot of unfulfilled expectations for manufacturers and stiff competition in the market. They provide many employment opportunities, more revenue, quality products, and relatively cheaper commodities to the shoppers (Gwambe & Businge, 2012)

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