The Price of Inaccurate Promotions for Retailers

With global inflation on the rise and a cost of living crisis affecting many regions, retail discounts and promotions are likely to see an increase in take up as consumers look to stretch their budgets further.

In-store promotions can account for up to 45% of a retailer’s revenue and help them win and keep new customers. Getting them right can have big repercussions.

Unfortunately, getting them wrong can too.

Keeping track of what’s on your shelves, the quantity of products, plus checking and updating price labels is difficult and something that is usually performed manually by store associates.

Accurately updating the offers and promotions for thousands of SKUs can be time-consuming and fraught with errors. Employees have to manually compare the price on the shelf with that in the system. Even with the best will in the world, errors slip through the basket, causing friction for customers and issues at the checkout.

When discrepancies happen, customer trust is eroded – the exact opposite of the experiences your prices and promotions are meant to achieve.

57 percent of customers are losing faith over pricing inconsistencies and inaccuracies and only 1 in 5 would shop again at the same store after being overcharged.

Source: TotalRetail – Analogue to Automated: Retail in the Connected Age

At a time when there is a land grab for loyalty and pressure on margins, retailers can’t afford to lose customers or miss out on sales opportunities.

Not executing promotions as planned can result in thousands of dollars lost through undetected undercharges and refunds. And the expected sales lift never materializes as promotions are executed late or terminated early.

But there still aren’t many retailers out there that can shout about how slick their pricing and promotion efforts are.

It’s OK. We will let you off on this occasion. We only introduced ShelfView earlier in 2022.

What’s ShelfView?

ShelfView is a smart data capture analytics solution that enables real-time shelf visibility and automatically analyses price labels and promotion displays. It helps store associates get their job done faster with less strain and guaranteed accuracy.

As the video below shows, it can work with existing smart devices to automate the process and make it simple and easy for any staff member to handle price and promotion updates.

It uses smart data capture to scan shelves and retrieve the data from barcodes and run optical character recognition on the price and promotion. It then syncs with the database and runs a comparison of the two while giving the store associate real-time feedback on the label accuracy with AR overlays.

The associate can then either choose to fix incorrect labels there and then with an integrated mobile printer, or run a report of all those that need corrective action to be updated at a more suitable time.

It can run on any smart device that employees are familiar with, reducing the time they spend on pricing and promotion allowing them to be better leveraged for other critical tasks.

As well as being more efficient, it delivers guaranteed accuracy which drives revenue. In a POPAI compliance report, promotions received a 21% sales lift when displays were compliantly executed.

Accurately placed, priced and promoted inventory is key to delivering a consistent in-store and online customer experience. Essential in today’s omnichannel world.

So no more excuses. Correct your prices, or pay the price.

Head over to our ShelfView page to learn more and how to get started with accurate promotions.