French Children'S Wear Retailer Launches RFID Sticker Membership Card

Since April 2009, Tape L Oeil, a French children's clothing retailer, has begun to provide membership cards with adhesive RFID stickers (which can be applied to mobile phones) as a pitional application for NFCRFID mobile phones.

With this membership card, customers can receive discount information at 130 stores under Tape L Oeil.

The membership card scheme is provided by Adelya, using Inside Contactless's RFID chip and reader.

"The main goal of Tape L Oeil is to build new, more interactive, more free, and more influential customer relationships," a spokeswoman for retailers said.

The company wants more than just membership card systems traditionally placed into customers' wallets.

The vast majority of industry observers predict that NFC phones will take several years to popularize in Europe.

Inside Contactless's EMEA Sales Engineer Carloman Grelu predicts that the NFC mobile phone market will start to grow strongly in 2012.

At present, although the system can not pay for NFC sticker, it can achieve this function in the future.

However, he said, retailers still have no specific plans.

The sticker made by FCI contains PicoPassNFC passive 13.56MHzRFID chip, and its 2 kb memory contains a unique ID code.

Customers can apply for TAOLeClub cards on the Internet or in the Tape L Oeil store, paying a membership fee of $4.39 per year.

The membership card includes a stripped sticker containing RFID tags, and the membership card box contains relevant information to show which types of discount can be provided (such as accumulation points based on store consumption) and card usage.

Users then log on to the TAO Le Club Department of the retailer website, enter the ID code printed on the card surface, and the user name, home address and other personal data, which are stored in the Adelya server running LoyaltyOperator Platform software.

When customers shop at Tape L Oeil store, he waved cards or stickers on the Inside ContactlessAccessoUSB desktop non-contact RFID reader, corresponding to the ID code of the TAOLeClub.

Then the customer calculates the score according to the purchase amount, and the integral is stored in LoyaltyOperatorPlatform, which can be used for discount information for future shopping.

In order to cash in the points, the shoppers only need to simply wave the stickers at the cash register when they receive the discount later.

At present, Grelu claims that Tape L Oeil sells TAO Le Club cards to 300000 customers, making it the largest NFC membership project in France.

"Innovation is the main benefit of this system," said Tape l l spokesman, who uses mobile phones as membership cards to earn points.

When NFC phones become popular, it will be a natural step to hand over the project to mobile phones.