Digital Price Tags for Grocery Stores: 4 Benefits for Supermarkets

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 This involves bringing new technology to store shelves, updating outdated and inefficient practices with innovative digital solutions like digital price tags.-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!

Smart Shelves: What is Smart Shelving?

Like most industries today, the retail sector is grappling with the rise of the digital era, which has brought profound changes to business operations and customer expectations. While it may seem daunting, retailers must dive into the process of digital transformation in order to remain competitive. Fortunately, with new technology come innovative solutions that can truly revolutionize every aspect of business and are well worth the effort put into the transition!

In this article, discover the concept of smart shelving and find out how these digital solutions can help retailers!

What are smart shelves?

Broadly speaking, smart shelving is the implementation of new technology in retail to optimize the shopping experience. There are a variety of devices that can be installed on and around shelves to keep track of inventory, manage prices, collect data and provide insights into customer preferences and shopping patterns.

Types of smart shelf technology and how they work

Shelf sensors

There are a few different types of sensors that can be used on store shelves. Weight sensors can track inventory as products are removed and detect when items are out of stock. This makes it much easier to manage inventory and determine when restocking is needed, improving customer satisfaction by avoiding situations where items are unexpectedly sold out. 

Bluetooth and NFC (near-field communication) can be used to detect shopper proximity and the amount of time they spend in front of the shelf, collecting valuable data about their habits and preferences. Furthermore, if desired, this technology can interact with an app on customers’ phones, showing them personalized promotions based on their previous purchases.

Shelf cameras

Shelf cameras have a variety of applications in retail. Cameras can be installed on opposite shelves to monitor the products in real-time, detecting any gaps and notifying staff accordingly. They can even verify planogram compliance, making sure that every product is in its proper place on the shelves. 

Our AI-enabled technology tool, Pricer’s Shelf Vision, is specifically designed and tailored for retail businesses. The Shelf Vision, which on the surface looks like an electronic shelf label (ESL), is actually composed of a sophisticated wide-angle camera that uses a wireless optical system and IoT capabilities.

Meanwhile, front-facing cameras on smart shelves can assess shoppers’ gender and age ranges, facial expressions and moods, providing retailers and manufacturers with important data about customer demographics and how they respond to products, advertising, etc.

Digital signage

Digital signage is the smart alternative to paper posters. Much easier to change and update than their traditional counterparts, digital signs can be used to showcase high-profit-margin products and limited-time deals. They can feature ads, product demonstrations and video testimonials, and even offer interactive options for customers!

Smart signs immediately grab customers’ attention and influence their behaviour and decision-making, all while providing them with a more enjoyable shopping experience.

Electronic shelf labels

Electronic shelf labels (ESLs) are smart replacements for the paper labels that traditionally display the prices of products. They are all connected to a central system and can be updated automatically, removing the need for manual price changes.

Many electronic shelf labels on the market are equipped with flashing lights, but only Pricer digital price tags from JRTech Solutions can guide staff to the correct location when restocking products or picking for click and collect orders. These features can significantly reduce the need for staff and the associated costs at a time when labour is at a premium.

Benefit from smart shelf technology with JRTech Solutions

JRTech is the leading supplier of electronic shelf labels and smart shelving solutions in North America. We are proud to provide retailers with proven technology from industry pioneer Pricer to help them digitalize and meet the needs of the modern world of phygitalization! Contact us today.