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Shelf-edge digital price tags invade the South of France

Will miniature digital signage displays replace the printed shelf-edge price tag?

June 22, 2012 by Christopher Hall — w, t

More than 30,000 digital signage price tags have invaded the shelves of a hypermarket in the South of France, with pint-sized shelf-edge digital screens displaying prices and relevant information at the point of decision.

Altierre Corp., a provider of ultra-low-power wireless technology that enables e-signage and dynamic pricing solutions for retailers, recently announced it has completed the installation of its technology throughout an E.Leclerc hypermarket in Saint-Jean-du-Falga, France. The store represents Altierre's first international deployment, but its two-color screens already have begun being deployed throughout a major U.S. retail chain.

The E.Leclerc installation includes Altierre's wireless infrastructure and more than 30,000 digital price tags, enabling digital marketing and dynamic pricing throughout the store.

The two-color miniature digital screens make providing relevant information on every item in a store possible and practical, Altierre Chairman and CEO Sunit Saxena told DST in a recent interview. And while they would most likely usually be used to display static pricing and product information, they do have some animation capabilities and could provide some dynamic content, Saxena said.

These smaller displays fill a niche that the more usual, larger-screen LCD displays simply can't, Saxena said. It's just not practical — or really possible — to put that many relatively expensive displays and run power to them all in a big box retail store.

"So our thought process is really this, when you've got thousands of items in a store, there's information that's attached to every one of these items, whether it's pricing or promotions or CPG content or information about the material or country of origin or whatever," he said. "That kind of information is most relevant at the point of display of the product, as opposed to putting it on one large screen near the entrance or at some key point of the store, the content there is different."

If a retail location has 10-, 20- or 50,000 items in a store, trying to put information on all those items on one or a few screens and hoping it sticks in a shopper's mind is a lost cause, he said. Plus, digital is just more dynamic than using a paper sign that has to be changed out every time a price changes or a promotion ends.

"This is kind of like having a salesman by the product and telling you about it," he said. "You've got a sign that kind of operates like a paper sign, but it's alive ... and it can be put right where the product is."

In addition to a total of 556 hypermarkets and supermarkets in France, E.Leclerc operates 110 stores in five other European countries – Spain, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia and Poland. And Saxena said the mini-displays would be going into more E.Leclerc's soon.

"Our store is fully deployed and functional with this system, which has been very well received by our store employees and customers," said Patrick Sobraques, owner of the Saint-Jean-du-Falga E.Leclerc store.

The Altierre wireless technology solution is bi-directional (two-way communication); requires only two or three access points for supermarkets under 5,000 square meters; and comes with 5- year battery life warranty on dot-matrix LCD screens. The deployment includes price tags inside cold and freezer cases where temperatures run as low as -20°C, the company said.

The return communication from the tags is critical in digital price tag/sign applications, the company said,because it confirms that every single one of the 30,000 price tags has received the correct price. Altierre's wireless technology is field proven and is already installed and running in more than 1,000 stores in the U.S.

Point-of-decision displays also offer a similarity to the Web, Saxena said, like the way Google or Amazon display information about a searched for item in a sidebar next to the product. And the information on them can be changed chain- and store-wide from a central headquarters location.

"These become like miniature crude black-and-white websites ... except that they're sitting in bricks and mortars all over the place," he said.

And they also could work well in tandem with larger, full-color digital signage screens. For instance, if a customer is standing at a point of wait such as a pharmacy counter or customer service counter, Saxena said, it makes sense to put in a large-format screen there — one that directs shoppers to go look for promotions that could be highlighted on the smaller, shelf-edge screens, such as a flashing heart icon for heart-friendly foods.

"In terms of the color and the large-format digital signage, they're not mutually exclusive," he said. "Both can co-exist, and there's a need, I believe, for both ... So these two can work in conjunction where the bigger screen can point you to the smaller and those can take you to the next step in terms of relevancy."

Read more about retail digital signage.

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