If you have decided to switch from paper labels to electronic retail shelf tags in your business, rest assured that you have made a smart move. The electronic labels can help improve your margins and provide the following advantages.
One of the advantages of electronic retail shelf tags is accurate, reliable pricing. Using paper labels can lead to frequent and costly errors because of missing tags, shelf crawl or pricing that has not been updated. This can in turn lead to unhappy customers who feel like you are overcharging them compared to the price that you have indicated on the shelf. If the price is too high, it can means lower sales as well as excess inventory in your retail store. When you start using electronic tags, you will eliminate these issues by ensuring price integrity.
Another advantage of using electronic retail shelf tags is channel synchronization. With the electronic tags, the price on your shelf is the same as the price online, on the mobile app and any other location where you may be selling your products. Both your online and offline channels will be synchronized to ensure a unified experience for customers regardless of how they choose to engage with you.
Electronic retail shelf tags can also lead to improved productivity. There are times when price changes can come in large batches, something that can result into staffing problems in a retail store where paper tags are still used. Employees may be required to spend large amounts of time on tasks that they find boring. When you start using electronic labels in your business, your staff allocation will improve, and you will be able to use your employees to do what matters, which is engaging and serving your customers.
When it comes to the things that you can do to streamline operations in your retail business and become more successful, one of the things that you should consider doing is making use of electronic shelf labels. The ESLs are increasingly being used to display product prices in retail stores. It is a technology that can benefit you in the following ways.
First of all, using the electronic shelf labeling system promotes automated inventory management. For most retailers, inventory management is a major headache, and automating the process can provide a great deal of savings. The ESLs can integrate with sales management software that allows you to accurately track low inventory levels and get instant insight into when new stock is going to be available. Displays can also be configured to show QR codes which take consumers directly to an option for online buying.
Another thing benefit that you are going to get as a result of using electronic shelf labels is dynamic centralized pricing. All price points will be controlled and adjusted using software on a centralized workstation, which actively aligns with regional or corporate level pricing fluctuations. You will find this to be much more efficient, accurate as well as cost effective than doing price adjustments manually. With ESLs, it is possible to raise prices to match demand or lower them to match competitor’s prices.
Last but not least, electronic shelf labels provide in-store heat-mapping. When equipped with connectivity through technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, these smart labels can track how consumers move through a retail store. You can then make use of label management software to produce a heat map for the floor plan of your retail store, and in turn reveal high traffic and log the products that they contain
Using electronic warehouse shelf labels can help streamline the labeling process in your retail business. If you still use paper labels, you should seriously consider switching to the electronic shelf labels. The potential benefits that you can get from using ESLs include dynamic decentralized pricing, in-store heat mapping as well as automated inventory management. Of course, to realize these benefits, the ESL system needs to be rolled out over the right technological foundation. Low power consumption is a necessary condition in ensuring the cost efficiency of an ESL system. Your ESL system also needs to be scalable enough to incorporate a wide range many connected nodes while still being able to facilitate effective communication through your store.
To be able to make the most out of the electronic warehouse shelf labels, you need to choose a system that supports custom development. Apart from making sure that the ESL system suits your current inventory management practices, you also need to ensure that the system you will choose has a robust protocol stack that can be reconfigured to suit your changing needs. For example, while you may want to explore how customers can use their phones to interact with your ESLs directly, not all backends may support this kind of interactivity.
Another important factor to consider when choosing an electronic warehouse shelf label system is appearance. You do not want to be limited when it comes to the look of your labels. You need to have the freedom to choose between several sizes and the graphics should be as crisp and readable as you would like them to be. A good ESL system can even have attention-grabbing features such as blinking colored lights.
For more information on the benefits of electronic retail shelf tags, visit our website at SOLUM ESL
