Self-Checkout Retail Terminals: Benefits, Detriments, and Opportunities

MAYNARD, Mass. - March 14, 2013 - PRLog -- The customer checkout process is a high priority for merchants in part because it affects the customer's shopping experience. The merchant does not want the customer's final interaction during shopping to be unpleasant.

Merchants invest significant time and money to optimize the checkout process and ensure that it is expedient and secure and offers sufficient customer service to leave the customer with a positive impression. Increasingly, retailers are finding this can be accomplished with self-checkout terminals.

Mercator Advisory Group's new report, Self-Checkout Retail Terminals: Benefits, Detriments, and Opportunities, analyzes the inherent positive and negative aspects of self-checkout solutions and determines which merchants have the most to gain by adopting them. The report also details the current market for self-checkout terminals, including profiles of current products from the four largest solution manufacturers, and provides an outlook for how technological developments will affect self-checkout in the future.

"The benefit of self-checkout terminals to both merchants and consumers has led to a rapid increase in the number of such terminals," says Dave Kaminsky, senior analyst in Mercator Advisory Group's Emerging Technologies Service and author of the report. "The technology is young, still growing and improving quickly. That growth, paired with the developments in the payments ecosystem surrounding it, will lead to sustained increase in demand over the next few years."

Highlights of the report include:

- Analysis of the benefits and detriments of self-checkout, including the extent to which the benefits profit the merchant and the detriments can be negated

- The characteristics required for a merchant to take advantage of the opportunities offered by self-checkout, and profiles of the industries most likely to include merchants with such characteristics

- Explanation of the current market for self-checkout solutions, with profiles of products available from the four largest manufacturers of self-checkout solutions

- The likely effect of innovations and economic developments in the near future on the demand for self-checkout, from both the merchant and the consumer perspective