From electronic price tags and AI scales to wireless printers and POS cashier equipment, from smart cold chain and intelligent logistics systems to remote management and omni-directional marketing solutions Returning to the China Retail Expo after two years, Numerical Intelligence's hardware and software covered almost the entire retail business line.
"If we had $10 million, we might consider investing in online channels or supply chain transformation." The answer of a retail giant when talking about digital transformation, but reflects the current industry digitization there are different levels of different links, such as the front-end stores in the information technology.
Wang Tianjiao, the relevant person in charge of Hanshuo Technology, told Titanium Media App, "In the past few years, only stores with Internet genes or some image stores will have the need for electronic price tags." Electronic price tags, or electronic shelf labels, are electronic display devices placed on shelves with the function of sending and receiving information.
In her view, the average penetration rate of electronic price tags in the global retail industry is only 10%, and the Chinese market is a little lower. This also means that the future development of electronic price tag space is huge.
Electronic price tag has long entered the domestic super
Mention of price tags, the traditional impression of consumers is "black on white", initially handwritten cardboard, randomly placed on the shelves, and later printed paper, neatly inserted in the card slot. 2021, a # original supermarket price tags is the topic of the electronic screen # on the hot search, a lot of people only to find out that the original paper price tags have long been quietly turned into a small "screen".
Retail show has learns that the history of electronic price tags can be traced back to the 1990s in Europe, in Germany's Metro supermarkets and France's Carrefour supermarkets, there have been electronic price tags, just because of the high cost of production, and no large-scale commercialization. Until 2007, with the application of new technologies, electronic price tags cost significantly reduced, the market began to expand rapidly.
Spread to the domestic is in 2011, at that time, "price fraud door" just happened soon, Walmart will be located in shenzhen shangmihu store installed electronic price tag, a total of 5000 pieces of miscellaneous food concentrated in the price change more area. Subsequent years, including Suning Appliance's Tesco Life Plaza, Anhui Lecheng Supermarket, as well as Wumi Group and other retailers have also eaten the "crab".
In 2016, the concept of "new retail" came out of nowhere, not only incubated the box horse and other new forms, but also to promote the traditional stores to accelerate the "online and offline integration", the industry's digitalization on the agenda. Electronic price tags, as a necessity for the digital transformation of stores, began to be favored by more and more domestic retailers, with shipments rising from 2 million to nearly 10 million pieces in five years.
Retail show has learns that the electronic price tag product itself is also constantly iterative update, the current market can see: LCD full-color screen, electronic paper segment code screen and electronic paper ink screen three.
Among them, LCD full-color screen, as the name suggests, display color, rich content, but reflections are serious, power consumption; electronic paper segment code screen can be displayed on both sides, but the screen format is fixed, can not be freely modified; and electronic paper ink screen, although the color is single and one-sided display, with close to the display effect of paper, as well as power saving, durability and so on, to become the most common choice for retailers.
From price change, positioning to inventory management
So, what role does the electronic price tag play in the digitalization of the retail industry, and what position does it occupy?
The relevant person in charge of CR Vanguard has publicly stated that employees used to need to manually print and replace price tags, while electronic price tags can update price changes in real time, "What price we set in the system, the electronic price tag will display what price in real time", which takes only a few tens of seconds, and will not mislead the customers because of the failure of employees to replace the price tags in time. customers.
With technological breakthroughs, electronic price tags can carry more comprehensive product information through QR codes, color blocks and other elements. For example, the new Nebular Pro series products recently released by Hanshot Technology have been upgraded to display in black, white, red and yellow on top of the original three-color electronic price tags, increasing the possibilities for retailers to practice creative advertising and marketing.
"Before the electronic price tag, yellow was used by major supermarkets as a special color for promotions, and consumers have also formed a certain perception that when they see a yellow label, they know the item is on sale." Wang Tianjiao said.
What is more worth mentioning is that the electronic price tag can also be combined with Bluetooth AoA base station, ERP system to realize the item positioning, inventory management and other functions of medium and large supermarkets. The person in charge of the box horse has mentioned that, with the electronic price tag, online, such as orders, order pickers can be completed within 4 minutes of picking, "selected a certain commodity, passing through the shelves of thousands of products, the electronic price tag indicator will automatically light up." Previously, an average of 15 minutes to complete a single.
In addition, electronic price tags can be reused, which is conducive to retailers' energy saving and cost reduction. Hanshuo Technology has done statistics, the use of electronic price tags, a supermarket operating 20,000 categories of goods, labor and printing paper alone can save hundreds of thousands of yuan a year.
"In store digitization, the software system feedback to the retailer is the overall book data, specific commodity data to rely on electronic price tag, inspection cameras and other hardware in the front-end collection." Wang Tianjiao said that the electronic price tag is an important part of retail digitization - commodity digitization.
There is still room for imagination to increase the penetration rate
However, the electronic price tag in China's retail market penetration rate is not high, a consulting organization research shows that 3% -5% or so, in contrast, France's electronic price tag market penetration rate has reached 50% -60%.
Wang Tianjiao believes that this has a very big relationship with labor costs. "The high labor costs in Europe and the United States, the use of electronic price tags can reduce the use of manpower, while the domestic as well as Southeast Asia and other regions of labor costs are still within control." Meanwhile, the popularization of electronic price tags in the domestic retail industry has been delayed by the epidemic. "In the past two years, the electronic paper industry chain has been hindered, the plant can not be built, the film supply is not available, you can not get the module, and there is no whole machine."
Another electronic price tag manufacturer from Guangzhou said that the low acceptance of customers in the early stage, mainly due to the price is expensive. Just take 2020 as an example, the retail price of a single 2.13-inch electronic price tag is between 50-60 yuan, and the deployment cost of a store with a thousand SKUs is around 100,000 yuan. Nowadays, it observes that hardware costs are trending down and the market is maturing, "Compared to price, many merchants care more about whether the product is convenient to operate and comprehensive to manage."
"The epidemic has ultimately played a catalytic, accelerating role in the digital transformation of retail enterprises." They agreed that under this irreversible megatrend, the future growth of China's electronic price tag market is imaginative.
Especially when it is integrated into comprehensive retail digitalization solutions, China's digital retail industry is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the future, with the digital retail market size expected to reach 5% of total retail sales for the whole society by 2026, compared with 1% in 2020, according to a report by the Prospective Industry Research Institute.
(source:https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20230427A08SGR00)