Why are retailers looking at ESL now?
If you’ve found yourself at NRF or the Retail Technology Show, it would have been hard to ignore the number of stands promoting a range of ESL and digital signage solutions. Chances are, your key takeaway was that you should be investing in these technologies to stay ahead of the curve.
But what’s behind the recent adoption of ESL?
- Labour challenges: With rising wages and tight profit margins, maximising staff efficiency is crucial. Your frontline workers deliver far more value when assisting customers rather than being stuck completing manual labelling tasks.
- Competitive pressure: Retail changes quickly, so staying ahead means updating prices and promotions fast. ESL lets you change products and prices quickly and accurately.
- Pricing complexity: If you change prices often, traditional labels can slow you down. ESL allows you to update prices, markdowns, and promotions in the store quickly and easily.
It’s worth noting: ESL isn’t right for every business. If you rarely change prices, stock a limited range, or run few promotions, traditional labels might still make more sense. So, is ESL right for your retail business?
Work out what your current labelling is costing you
First, work out what your current labelling process really costs. Whether you use paper, digital, or both, you need a clear baseline. Many retailers underestimate these costs because they’re split across different teams and locations. Track these metrics:
- Weekly Labelling Hours: Time spent printing, applying, fixing errors, and replacing labels across all stores.
- Hourly Staff Cost: Average hourly rate for staff handling labelling tasks.
- Price Verification Hours: Time spent checking pricing accuracy (often significant and overlooked).
- Hardware Costs: Mobile printers, desktop/laser printers, plus ongoing maintenance and servicing.
- Annual Material Cost: Total yearly spend on labels and fixings.
- Central Coordination Costs: Head Office time spent creating, updating and distributing promotional material. We know of one retailer whose Christmas promotion documentation ran to 85 pages – all of which needed to be built, maintained and circulated to stores.
- Sales and Margin Data: Last year’s sales, average margin percentage, and total margin to quantify the impact of pricing accuracy.
To put this into context, a retailer operating a payroll of 15% versus revenue, with an average of 6,000 products across their stores, might spend 4 hours per week per store on labelling tasks. At the current minimum of £12.21 per hour, that’s over £25,000 annually per store on labour alone. Multiply this across multiple locations, add in materials, hardware, and Head Office coordination time, and the true cost of your labelling operation quickly adds up.
The key here isn’t whether traditional labels are good or bad; it’s understanding your true baseline costs so you can make an informed comparison. Once you have these figures, you can use them to calculate ROI and see exactly what ESL would mean for your business.
Identify where ESL will deliver the most value
After you know your costs, identify where ESL will have the most impact. Not every store needs ESL, but using it in the right places can increase revenue, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experience.
Here are the situations where ESL excels:
- Frequent Price Changes – When prices change frequently across many products, ESL dramatically reduces the time spent updating labels.
- Complex Promotional Strategies – ESL lets you update prices and offers instantly and accurately, which is great for dynamic pricing and short-term deals.
- High Labour Costs – In stores where wages and overheads like National Insurance are eating into margins, freeing up staff from manual pricing tasks means you’re getting better value from every hour you’re already paying for.
- Compliance Challenges – Stricter pricing regulations and labelling requirements make accuracy non-negotiable. ESL ensures compliance across all stores without the manual burden of updating thousands of labels.
- Multi-Store Locations – Maintaining consistent pricing across multiple locations becomes straightforward when changes can be pushed centrally.
Building an ROI calculation
Once you’ve gathered your costs and context, you can build a realistic ROI projection. Be honest about what you’ll need to invest and what you’ll save. If you overpromise, stakeholders lose trust, but a careful estimate based on real data builds confidence.
We’ve created a calculator to help you see the financial impact of ESL on your business. To access this tool, please contact us directly or click here. It will show you:
- Resource Savings: Labour hours freed up and material costs reduced
- Sales revenue uplift: Expected increase from improved pricing accuracy and promotional agility
- Sales margin uplift: Additional margin from reduced pricing errors and optimised pricing.
- Operational efficiency gains: Total operational efficiency across your operation.
- ROI in years: How long until the investment pays for itself
- Total annual benefit: Your net annual gain once the system is paid off.
Many retailers achieve payback within 18-36 months, with ongoing annual benefits significantly exceeding the initial investment. The calculator gives you the specific numbers for your business, making it straightforward to present to stakeholders.
Start with a trial store
Next, test your business case with a trial store. Rolling out to one location before going company-wide lets you validate assumptions and gather real results.
A trial store delivers several benefits:
- Validates ROI assumptions: You’ve projected labour savings, improved pricing accuracy, and efficiency gains. A trial lets you measure these in practice and refine estimates before a full rollout.
- Identifies practical challenges: Every retail environment is different. A trial reveals integration issues, workflow adjustments, and training requirements you might not have anticipated.
- Builds internal buy-in: Seeing ESL working beats spreadsheets and presentations. Sceptics often become advocates once they’ve experienced the operational benefits first-hand.
- Reduces perceived risk: For stakeholders concerned about investment, a trial provides a controlled test without burning through the entire budget.
Pick a representative store, not your most complex location. You want to prove the concept in realistic conditions, not set yourself up for failure by choosing the hardest test case. Or, if you have a new store opening scheduled, consider launching ESL there from day one. It’s far simpler than retrofitting an existing location and gives you a clean implementation to build from.
Plan for the trial to last at least 2-3 months so you can see a full cycle of promotions and price changes. This gives enough data for your business to make a solid decision about wider rollout.
Present the strategic benefits
Beyond financial ROI, ESL delivers strategic advantages that strengthen your competitive edge. These benefits might not appear on a spreadsheet, but they influence stakeholder decisions and address long-term business goals.
We’re particularly excited about what ESL is achieving beyond simple price changes:
- Build customer trust with pricing accuracy – Accurate pricing builds confidence and reduces friction at checkout. No more “Price on shelf doesn’t match till” complaints. More than this, ESL offers the potential to show much more than just pricing. You can enrich your labels with enhanced product details, inventory levels, and warranty information.
- React to competitors in real-time – React to competitive pricing in real-time. Implement complex promotional strategies without operational burden. Promotional prices can be scheduled to deploy at a specific time, on a specific day, and as often as needed.
- Unlock dynamic pricing and automated markdowns – ESL digitises your in-store pricing, enabling automated regular price changes, markdowns, and clearance. There’s even more potential to react to market changes with dynamic pricing and build events into your pricing strategy.
- Cut paper waste and hit sustainability targets – For high-volume labelling operations, ESL can significantly reduce paper consumption and help you meet sustainability goals. Modern ESL uses e-ink technology with batteries that last up to 10 years.
- Open the door to future retail innovations – ESL infrastructure supports additional innovations like digital signage, inventory visibility, and personalised promotions. The programmable buttons with customisable coloured LEDs open opportunities for click-and-collect, shelf replenishment, and customer assistance calls.
Address common ESL concerns upfront
Even with a solid business case, ESL is a significant investment, and it’s natural to have concerns. Here are the questions we hear most from retailers that are considering ESL:
“How long does implementation actually take?”
It varies depending on your store size and SKU count, but as a guide, one person can typically install around 100 electronic shelf labels per hour. A smaller store with 400 SKUs might be done in an afternoon, while a larger store with 8,000 SKUs could take just a few days with a dedicated team or 2-3 weeks if completed alongside other tasks. The real timeline depends on your system integration and staff training. Yes, there’s disruption, but it’s manageable if you plan around quieter trading periods. We’ll support you through the entire process from initial survey to final setup, making sure the rollout fits your schedule.
“What about staff resistance to change?”
Some team members worry that ESL means job cuts or adds complexity to their role. In many cases, stores are working with lean teams where every hour counts, so this isn’t about doing more with less; it’s about making expectations more realistic for the team you’ve got. ESL removes time-consuming work so your existing staff can focus on customers without being stretched impossibly thin. Involve store managers early, let them see the trial results, and give staff proper training. Most resistance fades once people experience how much easier their day becomes.
“Will integration cause headaches?”
This is where our Retail IQ platform makes a difference. ESL needs to talk to your pricing system, POS, and potentially your inventory management system. Retail IQ handles the data flow between your central systems and the ESL network. We’ve already integrated with various retail platforms, so we know what’s involved. During the planning phase, we’ll map out your specific integration requirements and give you clear timelines.
Making your recommendation to stakeholders
You’ve done the groundwork, and now you need to get it approved. Different stakeholders care about different things, so tailor your pitch:
- Finance wants ROI, payback periods, and cash flow impact. Show them the numbers.
- Operations care about labour savings and the amount of in-store disruption. Show them the efficiency gains.
- IT needs to know about the integration complexity, support requirements, and reliability. Show them the technical plan.
- Store managers just want to know if the solution will genuinely make their lives easier. Show them the feedback from the trial store.
Getting ESL Started with TPP Retail
ESL changes how you handle pricing and store operations. It’s a substantial investment but approached sensibly; the returns are real. We’ve seen retailers cut their labelling resource by 100%, achieve near-perfect pricing accuracy, and free up frontline workers to help customers instead of being tied to manual labelling tasks.
The key is building your case on actual costs, your operational realities, and what you’re genuinely trying to achieve. Don’t chase ESL because it’s the latest thing or because your competitors are doing it. Do it because the numbers work, and it solves problems you’re actually facing.
If you want to explore ESL for your business, we’ll help you calculate ROI, plan a trial and navigate implementation. We also provide ongoing support, management, and analytics to keep everything running smoothly.
