Guide
Electronic shelf labels vs paper labels
We sell electronic shelf labels, so treat this with the scepticism it deserves — and then check the numbers yourself. Electronic labels are not better than paper in every situation. Whether they are better in yours comes down to how often your prices change.
The deciding variable is how many individual shelf labels someone changes by hand in a typical week. Put your own figures into the ROI calculator rather than taking our word for it.
Side by side
| Dimension | Paper labels | Electronic shelf labels |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Close to nothing. A printer, card stock and the tickets you already print. | A real investment: implementation, and either a monthly service that includes the hardware or an upfront hardware purchase. |
| Ongoing labour | Every price change is hands-on: print, sort, walk the aisle, find the facing, swap the ticket. | A price change is made once in the system. Labour moves to binding new products and occasional label maintenance. |
| Update speed | As fast as someone can walk the store. A large repricing is a scheduled job, often out of hours. | A change is pushed to the labels bound to that product without an aisle walk. |
| Price consistency | Depends on the process holding. Missed tickets are the usual cause of a shelf price that no longer matches the till. | The shelf edge is driven by the same product data as the till, so the two are less likely to drift apart. |
| Promotions | Each start and each end is its own print run and its own aisle walk. | Offers can be applied and withdrawn without printing anything. |
| Operational complexity | Nothing to learn. Everyone already knows how it works. | A platform to learn, a mobile app for binding labels, and a POS connection to set up and keep working. |
| Maintenance | A printer, and consumables. | Labels are physical devices on the shelf: they can be knocked off, damaged, or need replacing over time, and coverage hardware has to keep working. |
| Failure mode | A wrong ticket stays wrong until someone notices it. | A label that has lost its binding or its connection shows a stale price until it is picked up. Different problem, not no problem. |
The variable that decides it
Almost everything above reduces to one question: how many individual shelf labels does someone change by hand in a typical week? Paper is cheap to start and expensive to run; electronic labels are the reverse. The more label changes you make, the more the running cost dominates, and the more the upfront investment has something to pay itself back with.
That is arithmetic, not a sales argument, and it can come out either way. Put your own figures into the ROI calculator — it subtracts the recurring PriceFlow cost from the labour saving and will tell you plainly if the savings do not cover it.
When paper is still the right answer
- Prices rarely change. A store that reprices a handful of lines a week will not recover the investment from labour savings, and should not pretend otherwise.
- A small, stable range. Fewer facings means less to keep in step, and the manual process stays manageable.
- You are about to change the store. A refit or a range overhaul is a bad moment to fix labels to shelf edges that are moving.
- The shelf edge is not the bottleneck. If pricing errors and slow promotions are not costing you anything, there is nothing here to fix.
When electronic labels start to make sense
- Frequent price and promotion changes. Weekly promotional cycles across a large range are where the manual process hurts most.
- A large number of facings. The labour cost of a manual reprice scales with the number of tickets; the cost of a digital one does not.
- Shelf and till prices drifting apart. If missed tickets are a recurring problem, the shelf edge is the process to change.
- More than one store. Applying a change across sites at once is worth more than it looks on a single-store spreadsheet.
- More detail on the ticket. Where more products need unit pricing or multiple prices displayed, generating tickets from data beats maintaining them by hand. See the April 2026 Price Marking Order changes.
What we would not claim
Electronic labels do not eliminate shelf-edge work — they change what it is. New products still need binding, labels still get knocked off, and someone still has to care whether the shelf edge is right. They do not make your pricing compliant with any regulation, and they do not remove the possibility of a wrong price on the shelf. What they change is how much manual work stands between a price decision and the shelf edge.