Retail Compliance with Smartphone ID Scanning

With the festive season nearly upon us, retailers are bracing themselves for surges in pre-holiday sales and fulfillment. Days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday are crucial revenue opportunities for e-commerce and home delivery.

Many of those consumer orders will include age-restricted goods like alcohol. And having more people with the right tools to fulfill these sales compliantly and conveniently is a must-have.

Here is where smart data capture on smart devices can help.

By leveraging Scandit’s technology, any smartphone or Android-based barcode scanning device can be turned into an enterprise-grade ID scanner.

What is retail compliance?

Retail compliance is having the correct processes and systems in place to meet legal requirements, such as verifying IDs. Retailers have a responsibility to check the age of their customers and ensure they do not sell age-restricted products to people who are under the minimum legal age.

How to ensure retail compliance with ID scanning

Ensuring reliable regulatory compliance checks has been a challenge for many retailers over the years.

Manual processes, with their risk of errors, oversights, and lack of an auditable trail of checks, run the risk of costly fines and damage to a retailer’s reputation. Any peaks in trade merely exacerbate the risk.

Point of sale, Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS), click & collect, curbside pick up and home deliveries are just some of the retail workflows requiring age verification.

Using a smartphone is a great way to verify IDs as part of retail compliance regulation ID verification across these workflows, with speed and accuracy.

ID scanning is also crucial when it comes to the last mile and proof of delivery. A good example of this is age verification for alcohol delivery – critical in many markets including the US.

Scandit integrates high performance, secure ID scanning into mobile and web-based apps. It accurately and compliantly captures and parses identity data. This keeps data secure and maintains an auditable record.

See how fast and accurate Scandit ID scanning works:

Verify age using all types of ID documents

By combining barcode scanning and text recognition technology, Scandit ID Scanning supports the following ID documents:

Passports, ID Cards, and Visas with Machine Readable Zones (MRZ)

Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD) including ID cards, visa stickers and all passports. These documents are standardized by the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization).

Drivers Licenses and ID Cards with PDF417 Barcodes

PDF417 barcodes are used on all drivers’ licenses in Canada and the USA, along with US Military IDs. Many countries also use PDF417 barcodes for citizen ID cards.

ID Cards and Drivers Licenses without Machine Readable Data

Data from the front of drivers’ licenses in the EU, UK and US (and other drivers licenses and ID cards) is captured using OCR to scan the visual inspection zone.

All of this is done directly on the device so there is no need to connect to an external database and no internet connection is required.

Our ID documentation database is continually updated. For example, we monitor changes to driver licenses in all US states so the parser is continuously updated. This approach is replicated across all ID types.

With Scandit’s Native or Web SDK, it is easy to add ID scanning to your apps. Scandit ID scanning is supported on iOS, Android, Web and all major cross platform frameworks.

From Instacart to Valora – ways ID scanning is used

Here are just a few examples of how retailers have been using Scandit’s ID verification in their applications to ensure retail compliance.

Instacart – Age Verification and Proof of Delivery

Instacart uses Scandit’s ID Scanning SDK in its Instacart Shopper order picking app. The Instacart marketplace is supported by a community of hundreds of thousands of personal shoppers that handpick and deliver customer orders.

Instacart shoppers download the Instacart Shopper app onto their mobile device to accept, pick, and deliver customer orders.

Here, ID scanning is used for age verification for home delivery and curbside pickup. It works in combination with the delivery label scan to alert the driver when verification is required.

Crucially, it records proof that the scan has been made correctly.

Valora – ID Scanning for self-checkout

Valora operates 2,700 small scale convenience stores across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, offering fresh food and snacks. It brought in Scandit when the business launched Valora Avec, a 24/7 small-format store.

To maximize space, Valora removed the checkout area and created a mobile self-scanning app to handle the payment. Scandit’s ID Scanning capabilities were used to allow customers to quickly onboard with a simple scan. It means a customer can sign-up with a simple scan and make a purchase through the app in just minutes.

Implement ID scanning in less than four weeks

E-commerce shopping continues to rise. In response, retailers have been slowly ramping up their fulfillment options, dark store operations, IT systems, and delivery capacity.

With Scandit, additional capabilities like ID scanning and even a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy allow retailers to scale up and down quickly and easily. We believe a store can do this in just a few weeks, from the initial decision to implementation.

Integrating the Scandit SDK is a very simple process. In doing so, your application will have access to both Scandit’s high performance smart data capture and ID scanning capabilities. Our enterprise-level support is also on hand to help at every stage.

When you bring a reliable and accurate ID scanning into a retail app or web app, it gives retailers real-time access and control over compliance data as it comes in, capturing an auditable trail of verification data to ensure all sales and deliveries of age-restricted goods are compliant with country-specific retail compliance regulations. A fast and efficient service is always good for customer satisfaction too.

Whether it’s business as usual or a holiday season, be prepared and be compliant when it comes to the sale of age restricted products.

Why not try our demo here: Native SDK Demo App or Web SDK Demo or get in touch to discover how we can help you to meet your retail compliance targets.