iSEE tap: turning
a shelf tap into campaign analytics

iSEE Store Innovations is a US design and manufacturing company based in St. Louis, founded in 2010. They build retail display solutions for convenience and grocery stores, from suction-cup cooler-door racks to shelf and countertop displays, for brands and retailers who want their product to break through the clutter at the point of decision.

One of their products is iSEE tap, a line of displays with NFC built into the hardware: a shopper taps their phone to the shelf and gets offers, brand content, or loyalty rewards delivered straight to the screen.

The concept was straightforward to describe and harder to build. iSEE wanted to embed NFC tags into their displays. A shopper walking past taps their phone to the shelf, the same interaction as scanning a QR code, and lands on a product page: a new drink, a promotion, whatever the brand on that shelf wanted to show.

The point wasn't the redirect. It was the data behind it. iSEE wanted to understand interest in a product: who scanned, where they were, and whether that interest rose or fell over the run of a campaign. The working assumption was that a person who taps a shelf to learn about a product is a person who might buy it. To act on that, iSEE needed every scan captured, attributed to the right campaign, and turned into something a brand could read at a glance.

We built an admin platform and analytics system. The idea came from iSEE's marketing lead, who had been handed the project to turn into software. He brought a reference, a service for building custom QR and NFC links, and we worked the design out together over several sessions of an hour and a half each in Figma, rather than designing in isolation and sending it over to review. iSEE handled the physical side, the NFC tags and their programming, and we built everything that turned a tap into a measurable event.

The tracking ran on a pair of URLs for each campaign. One was public, the link a shopper's phone actually opened. The other was internal and hidden, unique to us, and the two were linked. When someone tapped a shelf, the hidden URL fired first. We recorded the event in our database and in Google Analytics, and it then handed the shopper off to the public URL, the page the brand wanted them to see.

The platform was roughly 90% analytics, built around a few core pieces:

Campaign management. iSEE created advertising campaigns with defined start and end dates. Each campaign's ID was embedded into the NFC tag alongside the link, so a single tag was tied to a specific, time-boxed campaign.

Scan tracking. When a shopper tapped a shelf during an active campaign, we captured the event: precise geolocation down to the area, device type, operating system, and more. Scans outside a campaign's active window did not count toward its analytics. Start and stop controlled exactly when data collection was live.

Dashboards. Captured events became charts and graphs: total interest over a campaign, the shape of that interest over time (an early spike, a slow decline, or flat throughout), and where geographically the scans came from. A brand could see which cities and regions cared about a product.

Two roles, two views. iSEE's own admins had a dashboard with filters, showing totals, breakdowns by individual campaign, and the fuller picture. The brands running campaigns logged into a separate view that showed only their own data.

The platform let iSEE run NFC campaigns and read the results without touching raw data. A brand could launch a product, put it on a smart shelf, and watch interest build or fade across cities and regions over the campaign window. iSEE could see across all of it, and each brand saw only its own.

The project ran in two phases. We delivered an MVP and put it into production. Three to four months later iSEE came back for a second phase, and by this point the product had been renamed isee tap.

The second phase was mostly about running campaigns with less hand-holding. We added scheduled campaigns in two forms. One ran on dates: set a start and an end, and scan collection turned itself on and off automatically. The other ran on a cap: set a start date and a scan limit, say ten thousand, and the campaign closed itself the moment it hit the number.

We also added a fallback URL for the window after a campaign ends. While a campaign was live, a scan led to its landing page, a specific product for example. Once it closed, the same tag sent people somewhere still useful, like the brand's homepage, instead of a dead link.

Artwork came in too. A brand could upload its own design for the NFC tag, and iSEE printed it as the branded wrapper that went on the chip. Around these, we added smaller things: downloadable QR codes, a campaign image that showed up on the analytics dashboards like an avatar, and a feedback form so a brand could submit what it wanted from a campaign and have iSEE's admins set it up instead of configuring it themselves.

The platform went live and ran real campaigns. There was appetite for a third phase and the marketing lead was positive about it, but he wasn't the decision-maker. With production analytics showing modest scan volumes, iSEE's leadership chose a different direction and put the project on hold.