Digital signage for shops and supermarkets

In a store, not every screen serves the same intent, and forgetting that leads to the same loop playing everywhere.

• The storefront and entrance attract: a strong promotion, the offer of the moment, a short message readable while walking.
• The end-cap sells a specific product, right when the customer is in front of it: a short video outperforms a poster there, because it catches peripheral vision.
• The till fills waiting time: loyalty programme, services, upcoming operations. It's the only spot where a long message gets read.

This becomes the central issue once you're past a few stores. Head office needs to be able to roll out a campaign across the whole network at once, guarantee it shows everywhere and stops on the planned date. The store, in turn, needs to keep control over its local promotions, stock-outs and specific opening hours.

Screens are grouped by tags (chain, region, store, location), and broadcast priorities settle disputes: a scheduled national campaign takes precedence when it's due, local content resumes afterward. Larger networks rely on the Enterprise plan, which adds hierarchical accounts, reporting and API access.

Price is a store's most sensitive piece of information, and the most expensive to keep up on paper. Two media complement each other: the screen for promotions and highlights, the e-paper label for the shelf price, right next to the product.

E-paper labels fall under the Lite licence, cheaper than a full signage screen. They're not meant to replace screens: they solve the problem of price consistency between shelf and till, which is as much a compliance issue as a commercial one.

The economics are easy to work out: count the time spent each week printing, cutting and swapping paper labels whenever prices change, then compare it to the cost of a licence. In a store running weekly promotions, the maths quickly tips toward electronic labels — and that's before even counting the pricing errors avoided.

A store doesn't see the same footfall at 9am, 12:30pm and 6pm, and the customers aren't the same either. The time-based schedule lets you align the display with these times: everyday products in the morning, quick-lunch offers at midday, evening promotions for working customers stopping in after work.

Peak periods are prepared in advance and trigger on their own: sales, back-to-school, end-of-year holidays, anniversary events. This is where digital signage stands out most from paper — not through visual quality, but because a campaign stops itself on the planned date. A promotional poster left up three weeks after an offer ended is the most visible, and most common, sign of poorly maintained signage.