The wave of digital transformation in retail and grocery stores has only accelerated over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. As customer expectations and purchasing behaviours evolve, supermarkets must keep pace in order to stay competitive. This involves bringing new technology to store shelves, updating outdated and inefficient practices with innovative digital solutions like digital price tags.-
Electronic price tags can do so much more than just display prices—they can provide incredible benefits for the grocery stores that implement them. Find out more!
Better efficiency and reduced labour costs
Supermarkets often need to change thousands of price tags per week. When this is done manually, the labour costs add up fast. With digital price tags, also known as electronic shelf labels, prices can be changed across the store in minutes. This drastically improves efficiency and frees up employees for other pursuits.
Since the advent of the pandemic, ordering groceries online has become much more popular. Supermarkets are now having to hire flocks of pickers to fulfill delivery and click and collect orders. A single order can take up to 30 minutes for a picker to prepare. Digital price tag technology includes geolocation to guide pickers on an optimized route through the store and help them easily find the aisles they’re looking for. Once there, the price tags will flash to indicate the exact location of the desired product, saving up to 10 seconds per pick.
Accurate pricing for improved customer satisfaction
Manually updating grocery store price tags is a long, arduous and detailed process that results in frequent pricing errors—up to 10% of labels may be missing, misplaced or incorrect at any given time.
This can cause significant dissatisfaction among customers and slowdowns at grocery store checkouts. If a customer gets to the cash and a product they believed was $3.50 is scanned at $3.99, they will be upset at being expected to pay more. The cashier will need to call for an employee to do a price check, and the six customers standing in line will be frustrated at the slowdown in service.
This kind of undesirable situation can be avoided with electronic shelf labels’ automated price updates.
Phygitalization: the harmonization of the physical and digital worlds
In a context where technology and digitization are becoming ever more important, phygitalization is a concept that seeks to bring the benefits of digital innovation to the physical environments of brick and mortar stores. Technology such as electronic price tags and digital signage in grocery stores and retail outlets can provide customers with access to more information and an experience that equals or surpasses that of shopping online.
Dynamic pricing for waste reduction
With digital price tags, supermarkets can make the most of dynamic pricing, adjusting prices as necessary to account for changes in supply and demand. This strategy can also be used to reduce waste in grocery stores. Wasteless is a dynamic pricing algorithm that can be integrated with digital price tags to display different prices for perishable foods based on their expiration dates. This incentivizes customers to purchase products that are nearing their sell-by dates, minimizing food waste and maximizing revenue.
Optimize your grocery store pricing with JRTech Solutions
JRTech Solutions is North America’s leading supplier of digital pricing systems from industry pioneer Pricer. Our electronic shelf labels and digital signage for grocery stores are designed to provide supermarkets with every advantage modern technology has to offer. If you’d like to increase efficiency, improve price accuracy and customer satisfaction, and reduce waste, contact us to optimize your pricing processes today!
