Electronic shelf label (ESL) software is just as important as the hardware  

More and more retailers are considering electronic shelf labels (ESLs) as part of their digital transformation strategy. From operational efficiency to sustainability, the benefits of digitising your price labels are difficult to dispute. However, there are important considerations before selecting your ESL hardware provider.

Providing a unified customer experience, pricing precision, ease of data preparation and design, and future-proofing your business are all critical aspects to keep in mind. This is precisely how Last Yard can help you succeed with ESL.

Deliver a unified customer experience with a single platform

Are you beginning your digital transformation journey? Thinking about phasing out paper ticketing and replacing it with ESLs? When you have multiple stores, each carrying hundreds of thousands of products, the risk and investment required to switch over to ESL can be daunting.

Even if most retailers deploy an ESL system one store at a time, they must overcome the challenge of running a paper ticketing system alongside an ESL system. This can prove costly in a variety of ways: staff education, label template design, and all the pricing and compliance rules duplication required to ensure your labels are correct and consistent with other customer-facing mediums.

The Last Yard platform works seamlessly with all your price-integrated customer touchpoints: paper to digital, in-store to online.

This includes paper ticketing, ESL, digital shelf edge displays (DSEs), TV screens, digital billboards, customer facing displays (CFDs), and social media. Gain the flexibility to digitise your pricing one shelf at a time or effortlessly run hybrid paper-and-digital stores, Last Yard is your single source of product and price truth, ready to deploy anywhere.

Pricing precision with ESL the first time

One of the benefits of ESL is that pricing errors can be fixed quickly. However, retailers know such errors can have a significant impact on their bottom line, making them crucial to fix at the source. Last Yard’s  proven expertise delivers price accuracy across various industries, including grocery, pharmacy, liquor, and specialty.

Our Last Yard team understands the complexities of running multiple, overlapping promotions across store networks. With over 20 years of experience in retail, our strong customer relationships are built on a deep understanding of their businesses. This allows us to build your pricing rules engine and source of truth specifically for you, making sure the data received by your ESL is always correct.

The Last Yard platform’s templates and rules are not hard-coded and can be changed in minutes, without custom development, allowing you the flexibility to adapt as the demands of your business and relevant legislation change over time. By working with Last Yard, retailers can trust that their pricing and product data is accurate, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their business.

Design your ESLs in-house and cut out the intermediary

When you work directly with an ESL hardware provider, they will be responsible for executing your label designs. If you’ve been involved in the design of paper tickets, you know this can be a time-consuming, challenging exercise.

You are working with dynamic product, pricing, and promotional data. Your template layouts must account for various product name lengths and descriptions. Various types of promotions each deserve special attention to increase sell-through. All of which has to be communicated to  a third-party, inevitably creating delays. 

The Last Yard platform includes Template Designer, a simple drag-and-drop design tool that seamlessly integrates with your product data. It empowers your team to design ESL templates in-house with minimum lead times. It is so easy to use, the Head of IT of an automotive parts retailer created an ESL design template for Mother’s Day in just 5 minutes: