Since the late 80’s most retailers have used shelf edge tickets/labels (SET/SEL’s) to display pricing to customers and inform staff where products go on the shelf. It’s been a retail constant since shops moved away from serving customers over a counter to open merchandising, yet incredibly the humble shelf edge ticket has hardly evolved at all – Shelf Edge Tickets are still mostly churned out from the retailers’ EPoS system using very basic software with fairly unimaginative designs.
Black and White tickets printed on pre-perforated paper with the occasional pre-coloured box for the price to stand out is about as creative as it gets….Barcodes, Product numbers, Truncated descriptions, maybe a couple of boxes to help maintain shelf location and the number of facings (and if legislation requires unit price information) however in reality, very little over the past 35 years has really moved on. Thankfully, this is changing as a result of work that RMS has been doing to help retailers bring their shelf edge labelling bang up to date.
Metro’s Print Controller brings significant advancements over legacy ticketing solutions – For a start, tickets can be printed in full colour rather than in plain boring Black & White. Tickets can also include additional visual content in terms of product imagery, brand logos, or product scenes that promote the emotional connection with a product – think for example the sight of lovely rich gravy being poured over some roast meat. Trials undertaken earlier this year showed that by including colour and product imagery on tickets saw sales increase by between 6% and 30%.
Tickets can also include QR codes, product review scores and comparative pricing from other retailers all designed to build confidence, promote the value and assist customers in finding out more information about the product – something we refer to as ‘The Connected Shelf’.
Perhaps the biggest change however is the ability for the shelf edge ticket to include promotional offer information rather than this being displayed on traditional separate Point of Sale material (that often goes missing or contains a raft of exclusions for the customer to work out) – we believe in keeping things simple so if it’s on offer, the ticket will say so.
A further advantage to this approach is that retailers can reduce the cost of producing larger format Point of Sale material and only use this on Promotional End Displays or to call out exceptional value for in-aisle deals.
Available as an embedded client for those retailers who want to keep SET/SEL production within their current EPoS solution, as a standalone Cloud-based solution (both provided on a simple SaaS basis) or as a delivered service via RMS’s Print 2 Go facility, RMS are the only Ticketing software provider to offer three choices of how to get better ticketing in-store.
To find out more about Print Controller and how it can work for your stores contact us today
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