Digital signage for retail means screens in a shop that show offers, prices and information, which you change from a laptop instead of a ladder. In most shops, three spots earn a screen. The first is the window, where it has a few seconds to stop someone walking past. The second is the till and the queue, where people stand still with time to read. The third is the shop floor, where it answers the questions a sales assistant would otherwise answer. One shop needs a screen, a small player box and software to put content on it. A chain needs the same in every store, plus one place to change it all. For what SignageStack does for a shop or a chain, see our page on digital signage for retail stores; this article is about what to put on the screens.
Below: each spot, how bright a window screen has to be, promotions with an end date, QR codes that link the window to your web shop, and many stores from one dashboard.
Where digital signage earns its place in a shop
The shop window
The window is the hardest spot and the most valuable one. The screen competes with daylight and with reflections of the street in the glass, and its audience is on the move. What works is one offer at a time, a price or a single line that can be read at walking pace, and a new picture every few seconds, because change is what makes people look. What doesn't work is a brand film with the point at the end, or a slide of small print.
At the till and in the queue
People waiting to pay actually read. This is the place for anything that takes a sentence: the add-on that goes with what they are buying, the loyalty scheme, the returns policy, a QR code for the guest Wi-Fi or for a Google review. Keep it close to eye level and within a few metres of the queue, where a 32 to 43-inch screen is usually enough.
On the shop floor
A screen on the floor does a sales assistant's simplest jobs: where the sizes are, what arrived this week, how the repair service works, what services cost. For a price list, a key-cutting counter or a phone repair shop can use the Menu board app. It is built for cafés, but items with a name, a price and a category work the same way, with categories shown as pages and your logo and brand colour on top.
How bright does a shop window screen need to be?
Brighter than you expect, and brightness matters more than size: a bright commercial panel at 43 inches reads better behind glass than a dim consumer TV at 65. A normal TV in a sunny window looks grey, washed out by the light falling on it and the street reflected in the glass.
Brightness is on the spec sheet in cd/m², also called nits. As a rough rule of thumb, screens made for indoor rooms are rated in the hundreds of nits and displays sold for windows in the thousands. LG, for example, lists a 55-inch model in its window-facing range at 4,000 nits. Before you buy, stand outside at the brightest time of day and look at the spot where the screen will go: whether the glass faces the sun decides more than any spec.
A few more things to settle for a window:
- Hours. A window screen often runs from opening time to well after closing. A consumer TV is built for a few hours a day, while a commercial panel is rated for 12 to 24.
- Heat. Direct sun on a screen behind glass makes it hot. Check the operating temperature on the spec sheet and leave air space behind the screen.
- Orientation. Portrait suits a tall window pane and a poster-shaped layout, and landscape suits a wide window. Decide before you mount, because the bracket, the cable length and the content all follow from it.
- After closing. In SignageStack, Working hours per screen put a display into standby outside the hours you set. Whether the window should stay lit in the evening is a business call: the street at eight o'clock may be your best audience, or empty.
- The display's own system. Many commercial displays run the manufacturer's system, such as Samsung's Tizen or LG's webOS. SignageStack has no app for either, so plan a small Android box on an HDMI input.
Our comparison of a digital signage display and a TV goes into the difference in more depth.
What to show on a retail screen
- The offer and the price, as the biggest thing on the slide.
- One call to action. "Scan to check sizes in stock" does more than three competing messages.
- Product video without sound. Uploaded video is downloaded to the screen once and cached, so a clip plays all week without streaming.
- Opening hours, especially when they change around holidays. The Text app puts a short message on screen without anyone designing a slide.
- A running line. The Ticker app scrolls short messages along the top or bottom of the screen, over whatever else is playing.
- The end of a sale. The Countdown app counts down to a date and time, ticking on the screen itself.
- Designs from Canva. The Canva app plays a design straight from your Canva account, though it needs the internet to play.
Everything drawn on the screen itself (text, QR codes, countdowns, the menu board) and every uploaded image and video keeps playing when the shop's internet drops. Apps that load live from the web, such as a web page, YouTube or Canva, are skipped until the connection returns. For more ideas, see our list of digital signage content ideas.
Running promotions by date
Retail runs on dates: the weekend offer, the two-week sale, the Christmas window, the day the new collection arrives. Whatever software you use, two questions matter. Can you prepare the next campaign while the current one is still running? And what makes the old one stop?
In SignageStack, it works like this:
- Prepare in advance. Build each campaign as its own playlist while the current one is still on screen. Duplicate last year's Christmas playlist and swap the pictures instead of starting again.
- Switch on the day. Put the new playlist on the screens and publish. Changes are pushed to the screens and arrive within seconds, and the player downloads new media before it switches, so a half-loaded video never plays in the window.
- Pause without deleting. Disable an item to skip it without deleting it, and the weekend offer comes back on Friday with one click.
- Count down. A countdown to the last day of the sale runs on the screen itself, so it keeps ticking offline.
The limit to know: SignageStack does not start or end individual playlists on dates by itself. Its timers apply to the whole screen. Working hours, weekly or between two dates, run in the screen's own time zone and are evaluated on the device. So a campaign change is something someone publishes on the day. Put the end date of every promotion in the same calendar as the price change at the till, because a window still advertising last week's sale is worse than an empty one.
When a campaign is over, proof of play shows whether it actually ran, screen by screen and hour by hour. That is useful when a supplier paid for the window and asks for evidence.
QR codes: from the window to the web shop
A QR code turns a screen into a way to buy, reserve or ask. Link it to the product page, to online stock, to click and collect, or to the booking page for a fitting or a repair.
The QR code app can open a website, call a number, start a text or an email, join a Wi-Fi network or open your Google review form. A caption beside the code tells people why they should scan it. The code is generated on the screen, so it works offline. To point it somewhere else, edit the app and publish, and the screen shows the new code within seconds.
To put the code next to the offer, use the Zones app. The Duo layout puts two panels side by side, with the offer in one and the QR code in the other.
Practical rules:
- Dark on light. A dark code on a light background is read by every phone. A light code on a dark background is not.
- Big enough, and tested. A commonly quoted rule of thumb is that a code can be scanned from about ten times its own width. Then test it anyway: stand where your customers stand, outside the window included, and scan it with an ordinary phone at the brightest time of day, because reflections on the glass can make a code unreadable.
- Long enough on screen. Nobody manages to scan a code that is up for three seconds in a rotation. Keep it on screen in a Zones panel, or give it a long slot.
- A page that works on a phone. The scan is only as good as the page it opens. Add a tracking parameter to the link so your web shop's analytics can tell visits from the window apart.
- Guest Wi-Fi only. A Wi-Fi code carries the password, so use it for a guest network and never for the one your till runs on.
Managing many stores from one place
The difference between one screen and forty is not the screens. It is knowing what each one shows without driving there.
- Name screens so a list makes sense. "Leeds, window left" beats "Screen 12".
- One playlist, every store. A playlist can play on as many screens as you like. Put the chain-wide campaign in one playlist on every store's screen, change it once, and every screen showing it follows within seconds. A screen can carry more than one item, so each store can add its own local playlist after the shared one, with its opening hours or a local event.
- See every screen. Each player reports in every 30 seconds, and the dashboard shows each screen's live status, when it was last seen, its player version and its platform. An offline report emails the addresses you choose, every 30 minutes up to once a day, with the screens that stopped reporting and whether they are back.
- Different hours, different time zones. Working hours are set per screen, in the screen's own time zone, so the store that opens late on Thursdays gets its own hours.
- People. Invite store managers and head office with their own logins and a role: Admin, Member or Viewer. Roles apply across the whole account rather than to one store, and there is no permission that limits a manager to their own store's screens, so agree who edits what.
- Proof. Proof of play covers each screen and the whole fleet, with a coverage matrix by hour and day, PDF export, and reports emailed on a recurring date to head office or to a brand that paid for space.
- Rollout. Install the same APK on every box and pair each one with the six-character code it shows. Run the whole setup in one store for a couple of weeks before ordering boxes for twenty.
SignageStack is priced per screen: €11 a month or €100 a year, excluding VAT, with no setup fee and no minimum. Enterprise adds volume pricing, a signed DPA, an uptime SLA and onboarding. Our breakdown of what digital signage costs includes the hardware too.
The hardware for a shop
Keep it plain:
- A commercial display for anything that runs all day, and a bright one for the window.
- A small Android box with Android 8 or newer, at least 2 GB of RAM, wired ethernet where you can get it, and automatic power-on after a power cut. A screen that needs a remote control after every outage will be dark at nine on a Monday morning.
- A mount you can reach without closing the shop, and a spare HDMI cable in the drawer.
Fire TV sticks and the Raspberry Pi are not qualified platforms. A TV's built-in browser can open the web player, which is fine for a trial, but it will not restart itself after a power cut or stay locked in full screen, so it does not belong in a window. Our guide to the Android TV box for digital signage lists what to check before you buy twenty.
Where to start
Start with one store, one screen and one spot, and if you have to choose, make it the window. Run one offer and one QR code with a tracking link for two weeks, and see what the window brings in. Try it on the screen you already have with the web player before buying hardware. The SignageStack trial gives you 21 days with every feature on one screen, and it needs no card.
