The benefits of Scan & Go technology

Scan and go technology is a development that is being adopted by brands across the globe, but what benefits can it provide to retailers?

Scan and Go technology is starting to revolutionise the way that customers interact with brick and mortar stores, eliminating the need for checkouts and enabling retailers to focus personnel and investment on other areas of their stores and business.

Scan and go technology is a development that is being adopted by brands across the globe, but what benefits can it provide to retailers?

First, one must understand exactly what scan and go technology is: in a conventional retail scenario, when customers visit a store and decide to make a purchase, they generally need to locate and visit a checkout to have their selected items scanned and then pay for them. With scan and go, shoppers use their own mobile phone to scan the items and then pay on their device at the click of a button. They can do this from any location within the store, eliminating the need to find a checkout and then queue up for service.

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Cost Savings

By offering scan and go, retailers can reduce (or remove) the tills in their stores. This removes the investment in the tills themselves and their associated ongoing licences, maintenance and running costs. What’s more, the personnel that have previously been required to operate these tills can be re-deployed on to the shopfloor to add value to the shopper experience and provide personal advice, knowledge and maintenance of the environment. The best scan and go solutions can be maintained easily and cost-effectively as they are cloud-based, with troubleshooting conducted remotely.

What’s more, having digital receipts held conveniently within an app also avoids endless paper receipts and eradicates the cost (both monetary and environmental) of printing them. 

Efficiency Improvements

Customers are increasingly demanding a seamless experience in stores, and removing points of friction from the sales process enables more and faster transactions. Scan and go technology enables the shopper to transact at their own pace without the need to wait in line.

Scan and go technology can also increase efficiency for the retailer, as stores can be designed and optimised to attract customers and provide better experiences for them, enticing them to continue returning to the store. Requiring fewer tills creates more space in the store, and using scan and go technology gives retailers access to priceless data on the exact shopping habits of their customers, enabling them to tailor experiences for the consumer.

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Promotions & Loyalty

Scan and go doesn’t have to just be a passive part of the shopping experience. The technology can be used by shoppers to access enriched product information, reviews, ratings, tutorials, and more. Retailers can also use scan and go to provide and highlight promotions, and they can also integrate the technology with their loyalty scheme to offer a convenient digital loyalty card. Proximity-based in-store advertising can be utilised to push personalised notifications and adverts depending on where the shopper is. These notifications can be used to drive a more personalised exchange with the customer, enabling the retailer to retain existing customers for a better consumer lifetime value.

Customer Empowerment

Within a competitive retail environment, customers seek retail experiences that offer differentiation, often choosing stores that empower them and offer them the ability to buy on their own terms. Using scan and go technology effectively puts the till in the customer’s pocket, enabling shoppers to scan their own items and pay when they want to, from anywhere in the store.

Scan and go solutions have many benefits for both the consumer and the retailer, and it’s a technology that needs to be considered in the fast-growing world of retail technology.