IMPORTANCE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN ONLINE RETAIL COMPARED TO TRADITIONAL RETAIL The retail industry involves selling goods or services to customers through various channels of distribution with a view to turning a profit. This makes it one of the world's oldest professions, with evidence of markets and stores stretching back to antiquity. Knowledge management systems (KMS) are becoming an essential resource for gaining a competitive advantage in all industries. A well implemented KMS enables industries selling products and services to numerous small customers to understand and track these customers, a practice which traditionally was limited to industries with few large clients, as industries with many customers had no economic way of recoding and using records of customer interactions. An industry that increasingly benefits from real-time collection and usage of customer data through KMS and customer knowledge management systems (CKMS) is retail. The retail industry involves selling goods or services to customers through various channels of distribution with a view to turning a profit. This makes it one of the world's oldest professions, with evidence of markets and stores stretching back to antiquity. A sub-segment of the retail industry which not only depends on KMS to gain a competitive advantage, but whose existence has become dependent on KMS is online retail. KMS are present in all business areas and are directly impacting almost every line of the profit and loss statement of an online retailer. Customer acquisition, customer retention, product offering, pricing, marketing mix and purchasing are some of the key areas of e-commerce in which decisions are very often taken with the help of advanced KMS.

Question

The Internet of Things (IoT) forecasts that billions of sensors will be connected to the internet and that this information needs to be collected. The use of IoT in retail industry is tightly connected to Global Positioning System (GPS) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies that help brands track products through the entire supply chain process. Discuss any five applications of IoT used in the retail industry.