The Building Block of Retail Digitalization: Electronic Shelf Labels

What Is An Electronic Shelf Label?

An electronic shelf label, or ESL, is a battery-powered IoT device designed to replace traditional paper price tags, showcasing product pricing and additional information. These digital price tags offer retail stores a variety of features aimed at improving operational efficiency, minimizing pricing errors, and cutting labor costs by allowing for remote updates of entire electronic shelf label systems from centralized servers.

Hanshow's Stellar Pro ESL Series features replaceable batteries

This digital price tag technology has been around for several decades, with the earliest models using liquid crystal displays, similar to a calculator display. However, in recent years, electronic shelf labels have undergone significant evolution, transforming into highly efficient, stable, and colorful devices employing electronic e-paper to deliver high-definition digital price tag displays. Despite this advancement, they maintain minimal power consumption while increasingly expanding their capabilities to perform a variety of tasks.

Stellar Pro ESL installed on store rails

Electronic shelf labels are now driving pricing systems for retailers around the world and Hanshow has become one of the industry’s leading developers of this technology with Hanshow electronic shelf labels in over 30,000 stores around the world.

• How Does An Electronic Shelf Label Work In-Store?

An electronic shelf label is mounted on a shelf edge just like traditional price tags but is digitally bound to both a product’s SKU and the store’s backend pricing management system. This allows for full remote management of the price and product display information.

The digital price tags communicate with backend management systems through a specially calibrated wireless signal transmitted through ceiling-mounted AP devices (image on the right below).

Electronic shelf labels are battery-powered, with a display screen made of e-paper that sustains screen display without power consumption. This means electronic shelf labels only require energy when altering the screen display or communicating with AP wireless devices.

Most digital price tags feature a simple microprocessor and coin batteries that can be removed by opening the device’s plastic casing. Hanshow’s next-generation ESL Nebular, however, adopts a sturdier design. Hanshow Nebular features a smaller, flexible battery within a full uni-body case, enhancing the stability of internal components and safeguarding the electronic shelf label against potential damage from dust and water intrusion.

• Electronic Shelf Label – The Booster of Store Operation Efficiency

The unassuming electronic shelf label can completely transform a store’s operations with an increasing array of benefits for retailers. The most immediate impact of these electronic shelf tags is that they allow for remote and instant price updates all through a backend system. In a traditional setup, store employees need to print, match, and manually replace paper labels and then update that information in the store's ERP system – a high resource, time, and cost-intensive task. Electronic shelf labels allow this whole process to be completed from a laptop in minutes and can even be done on a scale of entire international networks with hundreds of stores when using a SaaS cloud management approach.

Backend system of ESL management with real-time monitoring

In addition to stores no longer needing to purchase paper, ink, and printers for their price labels as well as freeing up a tremendous amount of staff time from price updates, electronic shelf labels also offer other increasingly sophisticated benefits as follows:

1. Navigation and LED lighting for order picking: The electronic shelf label's navigation function generates a picking route and this combined different colored flashing lights signal to delivery order pickers exactly where to find their next item. This has been shown to dramatically reduce order picking and delivery times.
2. Enhanced product information for customers: More product information for customers can be provided through expanded display options.
3. Improved employee well-being: By eliminating menial tasks, digital price tags enable staff to focus on more meaningful work, enhancing their well-being.
4. Waste reduction: Electronic shelf labels eliminate the need for paper labels and with increasingly longer product lifecycles, devices like Hanshow's Nebular or Stellar Pro series with a lifecycle of up to 10 years.
5. Enhanced store appearance: Electronic shelf labels contribute to a more modern and sleek aesthetic, aiding in planogram management.
6. Elimination of pricing discrepancies: Electronic shelf labels ensure consistency between the label and the register(a major headache for both retailers and customers).
7. IoT integration: Serves as the building block IoT device for communication with expanded retail digitalization technology from AI shelf monitoring to just-walk-out fully autonomous stores.

Refrigerated shelves equip with digital price tag solution

How Long is the Electronic Shelf Label’s Battery Life?

The battery life of electronic shelf labels varies depending on the label’s make and model, usage intensity, size, battery type, communications signal strength, location temperature, and many other factors.

The more times the digital price tag is updated, the more energy it needs to expend and, therefore, will have a shorter battery life. The industry average coin battery ESL has a lifespan of around 3 to 6 years, but replacement batteries can extend their life.

Easy replacement of battery with over 10 years of lifespan

Advancements in battery design, component composition, and wireless communications technology have led to increasing lifespans of ESL in today’s market. Hanshow’s Stellar Pro series has a battery lifespan of up to 10 years when the ESL is updated two times per day. Additionally, Hanshow's Nebular digital price tag features a smaller, flexible LiMnO2 battery and enhanced internal circuitry, resulting in an extended battery lifespan compared to standard ESL products.

How Does Electronic Shelf Label Save Money for Retail Stores?

The electronic shelf label system saves retailers money in numerous ways. The biggest cost savings come from significant reductions in labor time needed to update price labels. Unlike paper labels, which necessitate staff to type, print, and manually replace each label with every price change, electronic shelf labels enable this process to be completed remotely with a few clicks on a laptop. Furthermore, with a cloud-based SaaS system, this can be executed across entire store networks.

Digital price tags also save money by eliminating the need to purchase paper and printers for paper price tags. Over the course of a roughly 10-year ESL lifespan, these are substantial savings in supplies purchasing.

Moreover, the adoption of electronic shelf labels enhances operational efficiency by facilitating more automated inventory and stocking management.

ESLs – as the building blocks of retail digitalization, are paving the road of store transformation towards a more intelligent and automated operation mode while also providing a unique customer shopping experience with up-to-date price display, detailed product information, and point-of-sale convenience.