Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM JUNE 2019 60 I t's no secret that the advent of the Internet, e-commerce, and digital marketing has revolutionized retail. Business is now conducted literally at the speed of light, giving a home-field advantage to online- only merchants like Amazon. One of the most valuable assets in Amazon's digital toolbox is dynamic pricing, which allows it to change retails on the fly in response to inventory levels and marketplace dynamics like a vendor promotion, a competitor's positioning, or even a price adjustment by an Amazon reseller. For years this gave e-tailers a critical merchandising advantage over brick-and-mortar merchants, who continued to update price tags by hand. And worse for multi-channel retailers, it also created glaring discrepancies between online pricing which could be updated instantly, and in-store price points, which often lag current promotions. What's more, the quickening cadence of vendors' retail promotions is making the need for a real-time pricing solution increasingly urgent for dealers who print their tags manually and must constantly replace them to keep floor pricing accurate. For a small number of BrandSource members, this all started to change about three years ago when SES-imagotag, the world's largest maker of digital price tags, began exhibiting at the group's buy fairs. Its electronic shelf labels, utilized by top retailers across the world and in more than 17,000 stores, level the playing field by allowing retailers to reset their showroom pricing with the click of a button. As Jim Ristow, CEO of BrandSource parent AVB explained at the buying group's Summit show in Nashville this spring, electronic price tags help dealers do much more than save on paper, printing and labor costs — they reduce lost sales and missed margin opportunities due to mispriced products that don't reflect the latest vendor rebates or price moves by competitors. "You can follow the vendor road map and pre- program it so prices go down when a sale goes on, or you can track box pricing," he said. Despite SES-imagotag's big-box client roster, business development director Adrien Boudier noted that the 25-year-old tech firm has always served independent merchants in Europe and brought the same smaller-dealer solution to BrandSource, including plug-and-play set- up, an easy-to-operate interface, and a complete Cloud-based platform. Hardware installation takes about half a day, he said, and the entire fully automated system can be implemented in three weeks or less. The only problem: it was prohibitively expensive. The high cost of the e-paper shelf labels and SES-imagotag's backroom integration made renting the equipment almost mandatory. "They weren't cheap," recalled Darrell Haslett, marketing/ merchandising VP at Dick Van Dyke Appliance World, the four-store BrandSource dealer that was among the first to sign on nearly three years ago. Haslett determined that the Springfield, Ill.-based business was losing about $2,000 a month due to pricing errors alone, but that B U Y I N G G R O U P N E W S ELECTRONIC PRICE TAGS PROVE INDISPENSABLE FOR BRANDSOURCE DEALERS

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