Digital signage for retail stores.

Where the screens go

A shop has three places where a screen earns its wall space, and each one is read in a different way.

The window is read in passing, by people who have not decided to come in. It gets a few seconds, from the pavement, through glass. One offer, one price and one reason to step inside is the whole job. Portrait suits it, because it fills the height of the window the way a poster did, and it belongs close to the glass, facing the street rather than the shop.

The wall on the shop floor is where the sale lives once people are inside — the wall in the picture above, with the promotion, the time left on it and a QR code. In a boutique it is the wall the eye lands on from the door. In an electronics shop it is the wall behind the products, where a product video can run beside the price.

The counter is read by people who are standing still. In a convenience store that makes it the place for a price list — coffee to go, the hot counter, the things people add at the last moment. In any shop it is the place for the review QR code and this week's new arrivals.

How big, and which way up

Measure from where people are when they read, not from the middle of the shop. Across a shop floor, four or five metres away, that usually means a 55" to 65" screen; at a counter two or three metres from the queue, 32" to 43" is enough. The hardware guide has the full table.

The window is the exception, because sunlight beats size. A bright commercial panel at 43" reads better behind glass than a dim consumer TV at 65", and a window that takes the afternoon sun will wash a dim screen out completely. If one screen in the shop deserves the money, it is the one in the window.

Decide portrait or landscape on the day you mount the screen. The mount, the cable length and every design you make follow from it. In SignageStack the orientation — portrait or landscape, either one flipped if the mount needs it — is a setting on each screen in the dashboard.

Writing a promotion for a screen

A poster in the window has all day to be read. A screen gets the few seconds it takes to walk past it, and it shares them with everything else in the playlist.

• One offer per slide. “Winter coats, half price” and the day it ends. A slide with five offers is read as none.
• The offer bigger than the logo. People stop for the discount; they already know whose window it is.
• Say when it ends. A sale with an end date, or a Countdown beside it, is a reason to come in today instead of some day.
• Design for the screen, not for paper. A portrait design for a portrait screen, with type large enough to read from where people actually stand. In Canva, start from the screen's shape rather than from a paper poster.
• A QR code with a reason. “Scan to see every colour in our web shop” gets scanned; a bare code does not. The QR code app has a caption for exactly this.
• Keep the playlist short. Someone walking past sees one or two items. If the playlist has ten, most people never see the one that matters.

A sale, from the first day to the last

Before it starts, build it once: the sale design in Canva, a Countdown set to the hour the sale ends with a message for zero — “The sale is over. The new collection is in.” — and a QR code that opens the sale page of your web shop. Add them to the playlist and leave them switched off.

On the morning it starts, switch them on and publish. Every screen showing that playlist, in every branch, changes within seconds.

While it runs, change the design itself. Edit the discount in Canva and the screen catches up on its own; there is nothing to upload again. A line on the Ticker, such as “Last sizes in the sale”, runs along the bottom of the screens without touching the design.

When it ends, the countdown reaches zero and shows its message, but the promotion stays until you switch it off — the player does not take content down by date. Make it part of closing up on the last evening. If a supplier paid for the promotion, export the playback PDF for the screens it ran on: it shows when and where it played.

Prices: typed in, not read from the till

SignageStack does not connect to a till, a POS or a stock system. A price on a screen is the one somebody typed, so choose one place for prices and keep them there:

• The Menu board app as a price list. Items, prices, photos and categories, typed in or imported from a CSV. Categories become pages, so a long list gets more pages rather than smaller type.
• A Google Sheet as a live table. If your prices already live in a spreadsheet, the screen shows the sheet and follows it when it changes.
• The price in the design. Fine for one promoted product, awkward for a list.

Whichever it is, whoever changes a price at the till changes it on the screen at the same time. A screen that disagrees with the till costs more trust than an old paper sign ever did.

Mistakes that are easy to avoid

• A dim TV in a sunny window. It looks fine in the evening and disappears at noon.
• A sale still on screen after it ended. It leads straight to an argument at the till.
• Ten slides in the window. Nobody walking past stays for all of them. Two or three, with the main offer first.
• A QR code nobody can reach. A code above head height behind the counter does not get scanned. Put it where people stand still — in the queue, by the fitting rooms, beside the product.
• A screen nobody checks. Every player reports when it was last seen and what it is playing. A look at the screens list in the dashboard finds a dark screen before a customer does.