No screens to power, no cabling down the aisle, and no second price database to keep in sync. Here is the whole system, end to end, including the parts vendors usually leave out of the brochure.
An e-paper label is not a small screen. There is no backlight and no refresh cycle. Charged pigment particles are pushed into position once, and they stay there whether the battery is connected or not.
That single property is what makes the economics work. A label that only spends power when the price changes runs for five years on a coin cell. A label with an LCD behind it needs to be powered continuously, which means wiring, which means the install cost goes up by an order of magnitude and you can no longer move a shelf without an electrician.
It is also why the labels stay readable in a power cut, under bright store lighting, and at the oblique angle a shopper actually looks at a shelf edge from.
OmniTag offers full-color LCD for a handful of signage positions where motion matters. Everywhere a price lives, e-paper is the right answer.
OmniTag sits downstream of the system that already owns your prices. It never becomes a second source of truth, because the day those two disagree is the day the project failed.
Battery-powered displays clipped to the shelf edge. They sleep between updates and wake on a scheduled listening window to check for a change addressed to them.
PoE units on the ceiling grid. One access point covers roughly a 40 m radius of open salesfloor and drives up to 15,000 labels.
Templates, promotion rules, freshness clocks, store hierarchy, user roles and the audit trail. One login whether you run one store or four hundred.
Three ways in, in order of how much work they are for your team. Most grocers start with the flat file they already generate for their existing tag printer and never need to move.
Drop your existing price-change extract on an SFTP endpoint on whatever cadence you already run. We map the columns once. If it drives your tag printer today, it drives OmniTag tomorrow.
Push a price change the moment it is approved and the shelf reflects it within seconds. This is how competitive matches and intraday markdowns get to be worth doing.
Pre-built integrations for the common grocery and retail platforms, including the item, price, promotion and loyalty records rather than price alone.
A 12,000-label store, from signed order to running on its own. The store stays open the whole time.
We walk the building, count the labels by size and department, and place access points against the ceiling plan. You get a hardware bill of materials and a fixed install quote.
Week 1 · half a day on siteYour price file gets mapped, and we build the label templates per department so the 2.9" in grocery and the 4.2" in produce follow your brand and your unit-price rules.
Weeks 1–3 · remotePoE units mounted to the ceiling grid off your existing switches. One overnight, no aisle closures, no new cable runs to the shelf.
One nightCrew works one aisle at a time: clip the label to the rail, tap it with the NFC tool to bind it to the item, move on. The aisle is live before the crew leaves it.
3–5 days on siteBoth systems run for one ad cycle so you can prove the shelf matches the register. When it does, the printer stops and the paper never comes back.
One ad cycleYour team gets the console, the exception report and the escalation path. Store two runs off the same package, and the survey step gets much shorter.
OngoingEvery ESL vendor demos the price change. These are the questions that decide whether you still like the system three years in.
The console reports remaining life per label, so replacement is a planned aisle pass rather than a blank tag someone notices on a Saturday.
Anything that did not confirm a change appears in the console with its aisle and position and retries automatically. You get a list, not a surprise at the lane.
Move a label, tap it to its new item, done. No cabling, no service call, no waiting on anyone to come out.
AES-128 on the label link, TLS to the cloud, role-based access in the console, and a full audit trail of who changed which price and when.
If the uplink drops, the labels keep showing the last confirmed price. Queued changes flush when the link returns, in order, with the audit trail intact.
Labels are cheap to replace and bind in seconds. Locking clips are available for high-shrink categories where a shelf-edge device would otherwise walk.
The label link is a low-duty-cycle 2.4 GHz protocol designed for very short, infrequent bursts, not a continuous connection. Labels are asleep the overwhelming majority of the time. The RF plan produced during the site survey accounts for your existing wireless so the two coexist rather than compete.
Coverage, not label count, usually decides it. A typical 40,000 sq ft supermarket runs three to five access points; racking, freezer cases and refrigerated walls absorb signal and add units. The site survey gives you the real number before you buy anything.
Yes. The console has a template designer per label size, and you can hold different templates per department, per store banner and per promotion type. Unit-price formatting, legal text and your brand marks are all under your control, and we build the first set with you during onboarding.
Whatever you put in the template: unit price, member price, origin, allergen line, planogram position, a QR code that resolves to your product page or an add-to-cart, stock status, and a promo reason line. The four-color panels give you black, white, red and yellow to work with, so hierarchy is real rather than implied by font size alone.
It creates the inventory for it. Once every shelf edge is addressable and every endcap is a display you can change from a console, brand-funded placements become a scheduled campaign rather than a print job. Plenty of grocers fund a chunk of the hardware this way, though we would rather you buy it on the labor case and treat media as upside.
Keep one. There will always be a temporary sign, a clearance table or a department that has not been converted yet. What goes away is the daily print run and the person who walked it.
Half a day in your building gets you a real access-point count, a label count by department, and a fixed install quote. No obligation to buy anything from it.