The smart cart. Concept illustration made with AI in 2026, not a photo of a prototype.
Retail Intelligence
In 2007, before phones could do any of it, Enter360 and TRLabs proposed a store that knew the shopper's path, tuned its advertising to them in the aisle, and let them scan a card and walk out.
The year Enter360 put forward three linked research projects with TRLabs: a smart cart, aisle readers that tracked the shopper's path, and advertising tuned to the shopper in real time. Amazon opened its first checkout-free store to the public eleven years later
For years, retailers had tracked purchases and tied them to individual shoppers through loyalty cards, one store visit at a time. The data was used to tune stores to the demographics of their customers. In 2007 Enter360 saw a bigger opportunity: track not only what people bought, but the path they took through the store, and the order and timing of every item they picked up. Then use it in the store, while the shopper was still there.
Enter360 was a business partner of TRLabs, a technology research lab with engineers in Winnipeg and Calgary, and Enter360’s founder sat on its business advisory board. Together they put forward three linked research projects.
The cart
The first instrumented the shopping cart. RFID and barcode readers on the cart recorded each item as it went in, and a screen on the handle showed a running total. The same screen could push advertising and electronic coupons tuned to the shopper in real time. The loyalty card replaced the coin that unlocked the cart, so everything placed in it was tied to a customer the moment it went in.
Scan and walk out
The loyalty card carried the shopper’s details and their payment information. Scan it at the cart, and walk out. No line, no cashier, no unloading the cart onto a belt. This was before phones could do any of it.
The path
The second project got the same data without touching the cart. Store items carried passive RFID tags, read by a series of readers placed throughout the store. Software correlated each shopper’s path and recorded when each item was picked up. Until then, that kind of data came from expensive and error-prone customer shadowing: people with clipboards following shoppers down the aisles.
The advertising
The third used both. With the items in the cart, the path through the store, and the shopper’s loyalty history, software would tune in-store advertising to individuals and to groups of shoppers as they moved through the store, on screens in the aisles and on the cart’s own display. A shopper walking up to an end cap would see the commercial that fit what was already in their cart.
One line in the plan still reads well: the advertising was to be tuned so that it was never “overly intrusive or creepy.” Nineteen years later, that is still the line every retailer is trying to walk.
How the work was done
The plan was applied research, a proof of concept, and a possible prototype, with trials in partner retail stores. TRLabs brought the RFID and embedded engineering. Enter360 brought the retail and advertising thinking and was prepared to take the results to market.
Enter360 did not write the code. The studio’s part was the one it plays on every build: hear the problem, find the idea, and work with the engineers to make it real and commercial.
Ahead of the curve
Amazon opened its first checkout-free store to the public in 2018, eleven years after these proposals went in. Smart carts with screens, and advertising networks that reach shoppers inside the store, followed. Today the cart in this plan would be a phone: one that knows where the shopper is in the store and what they have picked up, with checkout built in and end-cap screens that play to whoever is walking up.
All pictures on this page are concept illustrations made with AI in 2026. They are not photos of a prototype or a store trial.