How Can Grocery Stores Use ESLs?

While many businesses in the retail industry have enthusiastically taken to using electronic shelf labels (ESLs), grocery stores seem to be falling behind for one reason or another. However, using ESLs has a lot of advantages that can highly benefit a grocery store. After all, the latest ESLs are no longer just for digital signage and have evolved to perform functions that help streamline inventory management, enable dynamic pricing, and much more. Keep reading to learn more about the many ways that grocery stores of any size can leverage the use of ESLs.

While electronic shelf labels now have a wider range of capabilities, there is no denying that easy price changes are still a major advantage. Manually updating in-store and online prices is now becoming too costly, especially when grocery stores often have to change thousands of paper price labels in a single month. In order to reduce solid waste and keep labor costs down, it is best for grocery stores to automate their price management operations by using ESLs.

Another benefit of using ESLs to manage pricing is that doing so allows grocery stores to leverage dynamic pricing. This is when a retailer can change their prices to match current market demands to maximize their sales and bridge margins. Since employees usually do not have enough time to manually implement price changes as quickly as the current market dictates, using ESLs are a great way to address this issue.

Updating prices on electronic shelf labels takes mere minutes to do and can be done without having to make new labels every time. Aside from giving grocery stores a competitive edge, automated price management also helps build a loyal and trusting customer base. Shoppers are more likely to return to a grocery store when they know that they’re getting the best prices possible.

In addition to reducing labor costs and improving price management, inventory management is another advantage of ESLs. Products going out of stock and restocking them efficiently are a constant issue that grocery stores are always trying to address. Fortunately, electronic shelf labels can help with this problem. Aside from simply showing the price and name of a product, ESLs can also be used to communicate details like stock levels, dietary information, and when the product was stocked at the grocery store. This information can be beneficial to both customers and staff.

Shoppers can learn more about a product right at the shelf edge and be persuaded to buy that item. In case of low stock levels, the customer can simply press the button on the ESL to alert a staff member to restock the product and place an order for a new shipment. When this kind of information is readily available with the use of ESLs, inventory is better managed and incidences of shortages and food spoilage can be reduced.

In the advent of online shopping, many grocery stores have begun creating a website or internet platform where people can do their groceries from home or work. Providing this shopping channel has increased in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as people were not allowed to leave their houses. Additionally, on-demand shopping apps are allowing other people to do others’ groceries for them alone with regular customers in the brick-and-mortar stores. While this can mean more sales for grocery stores, these new channels can also complicate the shopping experience for customers.

Some problems that can come up include inconsistencies with in-store and online prices and personal shoppers getting lost in the store while fulfilling orders. Electronic shelf labels can provide a solution for these problems. Firstly, ESLs make it easy to keep prices uniform across store channels and by making it easier to locate products. Since ESLs are connected to a software and centralized database, staff can easily double check to ensure that prices in-store and online are the same. Moreover, updates are quicker with ESLs so any pricing errors can be corrected within a few minutes.

For assisting personal shoppers, staff can use electronic shelf labels to easily find and locate products within the grocery store. They can utilize the multicolored LED lights to pick out for the order or they can use the digital map on the software that’s created by the ESL network. Not only does this help personal shoppers complete orders faster, but staff members are also able to provide attentive customer service too.

With each new innovation, ESLs provide more value than ever before. Choose the best ESLs in the market for your grocery store by choosing SOLUM electronic shelf labels. Our products are backed by Newton technology and go beyond just providing store signage, it’s a digital solution. To learn more about Newton TOUCH and our other products, contact us today.