Decentralized Pricing on Mobile Phone-based ESLs

Abstract

Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL) are the new way of displaying pricing in the stores. Going digital helps in improving store employee productivity and accuracy in pricing displayed in the stores. However not all retailers can invest in setting up expensive infrastructure for custom shelf labels at scale. This paper discusses about different ways to use low-cost mobile devices to overcome expensive shelf label infrastructure setup. In addition to that the paper proposes a way to overcome reliability of the low-cost mobile devices to display consistent pricing in the stores. With patchy network connectivity in stores devices can easily go out of sync and end up showing different pricing for the same items. The proposed solution uses an iBeacon/BLE based solution to make sure the mobile devices-based ESLs can build a consensus and show consistent pricing for the merchandise in the store.