To take this a step further, don’t just look at when a MAC address is in a store, assign it to a customer. Set up a QR code to scan and download the store’s app. If 20 percent of your customers with smartphones download it, you have knowledge about those people, including demographics and individual interests. This information can then be leveraged by the retailer, who can send customized coupons to their phones to help drive sales and raise profits.

In upping your level of intelligence, you’re able to make more money, which is the second line of IoT thinking for retail.

Now for the third step. Instead of just knowing that a consumer is in the right rear quadrant of the store, divide the store into 10 zones, each with a beacon to define a more specific location. The beacons can then send location information through the app to corporate offices to show exactly what a consumer is looking at in order to send even more specific coupons, making smart things even smarter.

Costs of beacons and applications have to come down and become more commonplace for resellers to be able to make money selling solutions to the retail industry. The simpler the integration of the solution, the lower the cost and the more channel-ready it will be.

Everyone’s definition of IoT is different. But for resellers, it’s all about collecting information from the end users’ environment and surroundings to create useful data and turn it into business intelligence. That will lead to reduction in costs, waste and risk, as well as higher profits and more efficiency. To do this, analytics, data storage, application development and sensors are involved. This isn’t a grand opening of IoT, but rather a slow, incremental process to have a fully functional and profitable IoT practice for resellers.

One thing about IoT is for sure: There’s a lot of opportunity and we’re just getting started.