Historically simple shelf edge price tickets were printed in store and all other point of sale printed materials was printed centrally and distributed to each store individually. Economically the model made sense and worked for most retailers. However in today’s world the process is too slow for marketing and commercial functions to get their offers in store quickly enough. Typically it takes about a week, sometimes much more, from Marketing deciding that they want to promote an offer to that offer becoming available to customers in-store. With the number of products on offer in many supermarkets at over 30% and rising this time delay is unacceptable from both a commercial and a competitive perspective.
Why does it take so long? There are variations between retailers but once the commercial decision to make a promotional offer has been agreed the launch of a promotion typically follows these steps and elapsed times.
Details of the offer are sent to the team who create the art work
The art work is created (1.0 day)
The Marketing team check the accuracy of the artwork and make corrections (0.5 days)
The finally agreed artwork is sent to the central printer (1.0 day)
The central printer prints all the materials (0.5 days)
The printed materials are packed and a box is sent to each store (1.0 day)
The store unpacks and sorts the material (0.5 days)
Store staff correctly place all the materials in-store with locally produced price tickets (0.5 days)
Point of sale IT systems are updated and the offer goes live to customers
A major feature of in-store printing is the production of emergency tickets or POS to replace damaged or lost tickets. These can be produced on demand using the very latest information because it’s accessed directly from the head office database not from pre prepared PDF’s. This means more product selling time and not having to take products off the self whilst waiting for new tickets from central printing. Of course local printing is also very helpful to produce professional looking Manager’s specials which help the products sell much quicker than hand written signs.
In conclusion most retailers need both in-store printing and central printing but how they use them varies dependent upon factors such as market conditions and authority levels given to in-store staff. It’s from this basis that Pierhouse designed their NetTickIT software. The overall objective is to meet the flexible needs of retailers to print where they want and when they want and get the best results from their in-store marketing.
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