Electronic shelf labels come of age

Although avail­able for many years, UK super­mar­kets have shown lit­tle enthu­si­asm for elec­tron­ic shelf labels (ESLs), unlike many of their coun­ter­parts around the world. The rea­son for the lim­it­ed take-up, despite the many advan­tages that ESLs offer over tra­di­tion­al paper labels, has been the rel­a­tive­ly low qual­i­ty of the solu­tions avail­able.

How­ev­er, this is now chang­ing as a grow­ing num­ber of the biggest and best-known UK retail­ers and their cus­tomers are poised to ben­e­fit from a new gen­er­a­tion of ESLs.

The easy-to-deploy and cen­tral­ly man­aged labels enable retail­ers to con­trol and dri­ve in-store pric­ing and pro­mo­tions with speed, agili­ty, and con­sis­ten­cy. Ful­ly graph­ic and avail­able in three colours, the labels offer far supe­ri­or image qual­i­ty and tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties, such as the option of inte­grat­ed Blue­tooth low-ener­gy bea­cons, and are already play­ing a promi­nent role in cre­at­ing more inter­est­ing, inter­ac­tive and engag­ing expe­ri­ences in the store of the future.

“There’s real momen­tum behind ESLs today. We have designed our ESL solu­tion to meet the needs of the mod­ern retail enter­prise and we are excit­ed to con­tin­u­al­ly devel­op our solu­tion in part­ner­ship with our tier-one cus­tomers,” says Andrew Dark, CEO of Dis­play­da­ta, the world’s lead­ing provider in the design and sup­ply of ful­ly graph­ic three-colour elec­tron­ic shelf labels.

Dis­play­da­ta was the first to intro­duce a ful­ly graph­i­cal three-colour label with print-qual­i­ty image, to deliv­er pric­ing and pro­mo­tions that catch the atten­tion of cus­tomers. The com­pa­ny recent­ly signed a con­tract with Kau­fland Group, which has more than 1,250 stores and is part of the Schwarz Group, own­ers of val­ue gro­cery chain Lidl among oth­ers.

The key dri­vers for this trend, accord­ing to Mr Dark, are trans­paren­cy and integri­ty.  “Retail­ers want to earn con­sumer trust – that means match­ing the real­i­ty of pric­ing with what they say in adver­tis­ing.  But updat­ing labels is a labo­ri­ous task that is unloved by staff,” he says. “There’s now a sim­ple real­i­sa­tion that the chal­lenge involved in try­ing to price match with a paper-based sys­tem across sev­er­al hun­dred if not thou­sands of super­mar­kets is just not human­ly pos­si­ble.”

With the growth of omnichan­nel retail­ing, the same is true of main­tain­ing con­sis­tent pric­ing across a web­site and stores. “Online you’ve just got one price to change, but it’s more chal­leng­ing to make that same change in hun­dreds or thou­sands of bricks-and-mor­tar stores,” says Mr Dark.

“It’s about tim­ing and accu­ra­cy. With no-lim­its pric­ing, you can price as quick­ly and accu­rate­ly in-store as you can online, ensure prices are con­sis­tent across chan­nels and build con­fi­dence with cus­tomers that they’re get­ting the best price, avail­abil­i­ty and ser­vice – always. What’s more, dynam­ic pric­ing makes it eas­i­er to price by events, time of day and store loca­tion, respond to com­peti­tors’ activ­i­ties, clear over­hang­ing stock and reduce waste.”

Displaydata’s wire­less net­work is com­plete­ly secure, while its intu­itive but robust soft­ware enables cen­tralised man­age­ment of any num­ber of labels across any num­ber of stores from a sin­gle serv­er at the company’s head­quar­ters. Instead of replac­ing pieces of paper on shelves, staff can be rede­ployed to help cus­tomers and to main­tain inven­to­ry lev­els in dis­plays.

Tier-one retail­ers around the world that use Displaydata’s tech­nol­o­gy appre­ci­ate the software’s ease of use and its abil­i­ty to con­nect to cen­tral enter­prise resource plan­ning (ERP) and data sources.

A num­ber of Displaydata’s cus­tomers are also look­ing at how to use its labels with low-ener­gy Blue­tooth bea­cons to send per­son­alised offers to cus­tomers’ smart­phones at the moment they’re think­ing about a pur­chase. In the always-con­nect­ed world of the inter­net of things, ESLs are inte­gral to deploy­ing price and pro­mo­tion­al strate­gies in engag­ing ways that appeal to today’s tech-savvy cus­tomers.

Over the last few years, Dis­play­da­ta has been entire­ly focused on exports thanks to the rapid­ly grow­ing demand for its ESLs around the world, which are wide­ly acknowl­edged to be the clear­est, bright­est and most eye-catch­ing on the mar­ket. But now that has changed.

“Until now, Europe has been 10 to 20 times ahead of both the UK and the US, but as a home-grown suc­cess sto­ry, we’re pleased to be final­ly help­ing more UK stores suc­ceed,” says Mr Dark. “With retail con­tin­u­ing to be ever­more com­pet­i­tive and shop­pers demand­ing more from phys­i­cal stores, UK retail­ers have realised that ESLs offer a new way to dri­ve sales, pro­tect mar­gin and reduce costs.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.displaydata.com