The past lives of retail labels
In fact, the retail label has been born thousands of years ago, the specific age has been impossible to verify, but we all know the idiom "interpolation first sale", which refers to the story of the end of the han dynasty nearly two thousand years ago as an idiom to demonstrate the original form of the retail label - grass label. At that time, "retailers" selling goods only needed to put a straw on the goods to indicate that the goods were for sale, which implemented the most basic retail label function, which could be regarded as the version 1.0 of the retail label.
With the gradual development of commodity economy in human society, retail label version 1.0 can only express the single information of "for sale", but cannot present the detailed information such as price and weight, so retailers begin to look for the 2.0 solution. Wood, silk brocade, leather, metal, paper The combination of paper and printing eventually led to retail label 2.0.
Today, with the explosive development of commodity economy, the version 2.0 of retail label in the form of paper and printed matter also faces many challenges. Among them, the biggest one is the expansion of retail scale and diversification of customer interaction mode, which makes retailers have to spend a lot of manpower and resources to change labels frequently. At the same time, with the rise of online retail mode and the intensified competition in the retail industry, brick-and-mortar stores are generally facing the pressure of survival, and the cost of a large number of label changes cannot be underestimated. As a result, with the development of the electronics industry, retail label version 3.0 came into being -- smart label with electronic display device as the main display body and intelligent Internet technology.
Electronic retail labels have been widely used in the United States, Europe and other markets, helping foreign retailers solve problems such as high labor costs and frequent price changes. In China, we are still in the transition period from the 2.0 era of retail label to the 3.0 era. Paper retail label is still full of our life, and smart label is in the ascendant. It is mainly used in innovative experience stores of new retail innovative enterprises and traditional business supermarket, new convenience stores and so on. Just as the 2.0 version relies on paper and printing to solve the problem that the "grass-standard era" is unable to deliver the detailed information of commodities, the 3.0 version hopes to solve the problem that the 2.0 version is unable to synchronize information online and offline in real time through paperless, intelligent and interconnected network.
Hippopotamus fresh idea notes
E-paper drives smart upgrade of retail labels
With the development of Internet technology, the current low power embedded processors, communications chips and cloud computing, big data technology is mature, smart labels intelligent and LianWangHua has basic implementation, such as box Ma Xian gave birth to the wisdom of "Internet full-on" retail gurus such as, smart tags have begun pilot application, as part of the intelligent retail system dynamic display a lot of goods details data, and smart update label information according to the situation.
But only in the "paperless" direction, retailers have encountered technical difficulties. The widespread and mature use of liquid crystal displays in the consumer electronics field has natural defects in the retail label application - the need to lay power lines leads to high shelf renovation costs, not low power consumption is neither environmentally friendly nor economical.. Retailers are in urgent need of a new display technology to achieve low power consumption, low cost of intelligent label display scheme.
The electronic ink technology developed by the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) in the end of last century entered the vision of retail practitioners. The biggest feature of this display technology is bistable, that is, there is no power consumption when the static image is displayed, only very low power consumption when the image changes, which can realize environmental protection and energy conservation. At the same time, compared to the LCD screen, the e-ink technology and paper have a super wide perspective, no backlight, can also easily achieve flexible screen. It can even be said that e-ink technology is the application of smart label tailor - made display technology.
Born out of the inventor of e-ink technology, E Ink yuantai technology has been keenly aware of this application trend. Through close cooperation with the Internet of things technology partners, it has jointly launched a series of smart label solutions based on e-ink technology, and has been applied to many new retail enterprises, including ma xiansheng. Smart labels in these corporate stores, often battery-powered, are small enough to display large quantities of product information without the need for a special installation and simple placement.
E Ink electronic shelf label based on E Ink technology
Combined with wireless transmission technology, these e-paper labels can allow retailers to adjust product prices and promotion information in real time in the back-end system according to product sales volume, online and offline consumer behaviors, and be reflected in the front of the store quickly, so as to remind consumers of sales promotion information at any time and instruct employees to restock or tidy the shelves. At the same time, with the development of color e-ink technology, smart label is also moving from the black and white era to the color era, supporting retailers to present promotional information with a more eye-catching interface, and more suitable for freezers and cryogenic e-paper, flexible to support various application scenarios.
E Ink's new retail app on display at this year's mobile world congress in Shanghai
China is one of the fastest growing markets for Internet of things technology and the most important innovation space for smart retail technology in the future. Through current application attempts, the combination of electronic ink technology and Internet of things technology is gradually becoming the standard of the new retail era. At the same time, China also has the largest and most mature online retail market in the world. With the saying of "online replacing offline" being replaced by "online combining with offline", the smart label will shine brightly in the application scene that integrates online and offline closely.
We can also foresee that as machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies enter the new retail field, there may be new retail solutions with strong computing power and artificial intelligence in the future, enabling consumers to have unprecedented new shopping experience.