I’ve written blogs before on poor ticketing and these have generally been aimed at poor Promotional signage. However, as Tesco found out today on Monday 13th Feb 2017 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-38893887), it’s not just Promotional Point of Sale that causes PR nightmares, it’s promotional price ticketing.
Over the past few years, more and more retailers have been implementing promotional shelf edge ticketing – shelf labels that contain not only traditional product description and price information but also the promotional offers and savings available. In some cases, this also extends to allergy and financial information – something a retailer really doesn’t want to get wrong.
This week, Tesco has become the latest major retailer to be highlighted for having incorrect shelf edge information on display where customers are being short-changed by promotions that have expired or changed. I rather suspect they are not on their own in this because if you walk into pretty much any retailers stores you can probably find incorrect ticket information somewhere on display – whether it be price, offer, content or brand related.
When I started in retail, it used to be that someone would go out onto the shop floor with a price book and check the prices across the whole store on a cyclical basis – Week 1 would be Canned Veg, Canned Meat, Soups and Biscuits, Week 2 would be Bread, Milk, Canned desserts and Baking, so on, and so forth until at the end of week 7 the cycle started again. All that protected you from being taken to court for bad pricing practices was an illegible signature on a wall chart and a few ticks on the page of the price book.
Wind forward 30 years and nothing much has changed – the book has been replaced with a hand-held terminal and a member of staff walks the shop floor scanning the barcode of the product (or on the label) and enters the price shown on the ticket – it’s an advance of sorts but as the BBC shows this week, it’s not as ‘fool proof’ as most retailers would like.
Well, let me tell you some good news….it doesn’t need to be like this. RMS have been experts in Point of Sale and Shelf Edge management for many years and have rewritten the rule book where price checking is concerned. By combining Task Management from their Unified Comms module with their Print Controller Price Checking module, pricing due diligence has at long last entered the 21st Century.
Each user responsible for price checking is sent a task detailing which sections (or products) they are required to check according to the price checking schedule or promotional activity plan – and here is the big difference – instead of scanning the product and entering the price (or confirming the price shown on the PDT matches), each Shelf Edge Ticket or piece of Point of Sale contains its own unique barcode – this barcode validates that each shelf ticket is the most up to date ticket available at the time the scan is conducted.
From a productivity perspective, the user simply scans the product and then the barcode on the ticket (or just the ticket if you prefer) – should a ticket be incorrect then the user is alerted and a replacement ticket automatically created. The same process can also be used when deploying new promotional material where the user is informed which promotional tickets need to be removed or replaced and the user scans the new ticket to confirm it has been placed.
Contact us today to learn how smart price checking can help your business avoid a PR nightmare.
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