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Customer: INTERSPORT
Country: Greece
Sector: Consumer goods
Number of stores: 10 during 2020 with several more planned
Type and number of ESLs per store: 1000 SmartTAG HD Tall (mostly) and some SmartTAG HD LARGE in other stores
Customer since: 2020
Price updating used to be a time-consuming task for the employees at INTERSPORT’s footwear departments in Greece and was therefore mostly done during the sales periods. This led to unefficient price management and resulting in income losses. With the modern ESL solution prices are now managed in seconds on a daily basis. A solution that adds a wow factor for modern customers also brings an extra dimension to the experience.
Aggelos Stefanou, IT Manager at INTERSPORT Greece, Cyprus and Balkans, is more than certain that the company did the right thing when choosing a scalable and future-proof Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) system that provides for instant price changes.
“For stores like INTERSPORT and the whole retail industry, price management is extremely critical. Today we perform price controls daily in the morning before the opening to secure that the prices are up to date. At the same time, we never have pricing mistakes. Previously price changes were a time-consuming task, especially during the sales periods. Imagine the employees’ smiles when they saw all prices on the new electronic shelf labels being updated in only a few seconds,” he says.
Aggelos Stefanou was also the person taking the initiative to do a pilot installation together with Pricer’s partner Novatron.
The huge amount of hours spent only on changing the prices, with everything from checking the prices, printing the paper labels and putting everything up in the right place was a big issue for us, and we realized that the employees could spend their time better serving our customers and doing other in-store tasks. We also wanted to minimize the price errors and be able to synchronize prices according to online offers or competitors’ campaigns”, he says.
Dynamic pricing and interactive QR codes
After a demo of the dynamic pricing solution made to the management team, they decided on doing a pilot project in the flagship store at The Mall of Athens, which was conducted in 2019.
“We immediately saw the speed and reliability of the solution. The only challenge was that we at first didn’t realize how to stick the actual price tags in the footwear section, but Pricer’s partner, who was responsible for everything from planning to implementation and training, delivered a customized rails solution which corresponded to our demands”, says Aggelos Stefanou.
Price changes are driven by different factors such as sales periods during Black Friday or summer sales, but also by online prices and campaigns done by competitors. Being able to quickly react and have active price management is therefore crucial to surviving in today’s retail environment.
With the new ESL solution, the INTERSPORT stores check the prices every morning and make necessary adjustments in just seconds of time. Previously, during the sales periods, the store employees had to work the whole night before a sale to change the prices, and the same at the end of the period. Now a file is sent directly into the system and the prices change automatically.
The biggest result is that every store saves one month of working hours per year, time that they can spend doing more value-added tasks such as helping customers.
From the customers, the reactions have only been positive and Aggelos Stefanou would even call the digital look of the shoe walls a wow factor. Compared to the old paper labels the digital ones have a nice layout and also feature a QR code with different functions, depending on the user.
The store employees see the stock in real-time when scanning the code, whereas the customers are redirected to the web. They can find out more information about the shoe or even place an order should the size or model they are looking for be sold out in store.
Further expansion
INTERSPORT is planning to install Pricer’s solution in four more countries in the region to increase the efficiency in all stores. They are also looking at solutions to be able to use ESLs in other departments with shelves.
For more information, please contact us here or at info@pricer.com.
November 2020
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