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The retail industry has come to a consensus on the use of new ICT technologies, such as Cloud Computing, Big Data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to create innovative operational models. Customer targeting has been one of the main marketing dilemmas in the past years, and one of the solutions seems to rely on recent IoT advancement. This paper presents a smart shopping solution architecture that covers image processing techniques used for digital maps generation, smartphone indoor localization using BLE beacons, and indoor routing techniques for finding stores in a shopping center. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using BLE technology for indoor localization and the results after experimenting with several BLE devices and mobile application SDKs. Our objective was to advance an innovative solution based on computer vision techniques meant to ease the process of creating indoor maps by hand. Also, we focused on the development of best practices guide for using mobile applications in the retail industry and education of buyers, including an interactive questionnaire for getting feedback regarding improvement of Android application design. Furthermore, the solution can be used to orient and educate customers during their shopping activities for using smart mobile applications. Thus, our smart shopping platform is based on an enriched mobile application (MARA - Mobile Augmented Reality Applications) that offers a range of services and functions based on augmented reality through the implementation of communication interfaces with various IoT devices - beacons or smart parking sensors. WSNs plays a central role in the IoT environment, especially to the advancement of energy-efficient and low latency communications. Our smart shopping solution advances the integration of intelligent parking sensors based on LoRa communication. We will describe the integration of these sensors with TTN (The Things Network) global network and the methodology for LoRa data packages decoding and further integration with a WEB application.

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