Retailers will resort to source-tagging for RFID, and this will eventually lead them to apply compliance guidelines to get the required quality in RFID tagging, as per RFID expert.
"Retailers who have already adopted RFID item tagging, and who began by tagging garments will look forward to reducing its costs and increasing ROI. The primary opportunity for retailers to reduce their tagging costs is to push that process back to the suppliers, where tagging costs are much lower. Source-tagging of RFID can reduce the expenditure by around $0.15 per garment," George Hoffman, CEO of FineLine Technologies told fibre2fashion.com.
This will lead to vendors supplying apparel to the retailers in US and Europe to purchase RFID tags locally, creating challenges as its production is limited only to a few reliable suppliers. The case is also applicable to the vendors of apparel exporting countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam, he continues.
Majority of the RFID tagging is done by big-time manufacturers and retail shops of US and Europe. These are the people possessing knowledge and experience of RFID tagging. If vendors located at distant places are given this responsibility, there can be substantial confusion, he predicts. Given the cost of tagging, the tendency of cutting corners by using less costly and unapproved RFID tags will be likely.
He explains that this will eventually force retailers to implement RFID tagging compliance guidelines with source-tagging. USA and Europe are major markets for RFID, but this will change as source-tagging takes hold and purchasing of RFID tags moves to apparel exporting countries.
