How the Right Retail Weighing Scale Can Speed Up Your Checkout Process

Retail weighing scales are the solution for faster checkout processes in any small business selling items by weight. Why? Let’s discuss.

Why Checkout Speed Matters in Retail

The worst part of shopping is queuing up to find out exactly how much you’re about to spend at the register. This is worse still when the process takes a while. As an owner or employee of a small business selling products based on weight, you’ll want to ensure checkout is quick and painless for your customers. As their last impression of your establishment, it will be a big influence on their overall satisfaction and could influence whether they return.

Common Checkout Bottlenecks

What typically causes a slowdown at checkout? There can be multiple reasons why your checkout process is slow when handling items priced by weight:

1. An inexperienced cashier, unfamiliar with the system
2. Manually looking up pricing
3. Mislabeling or human error
4. The system being slow to load or unresponsive, either from an old machine, the lack of reliable internet connection or the need for a software update

These can all be solved by working with a reliable retail weighing scale.

What is a Retail Weighing Scale?

A retail weighing scale is a scale that’s been trade-approved to price items by weight commercially. Though any trade approved scale is technically sufficient, certain retail weighing scales like Adam’s Swift Price Computing Scale can make transactions faster and smoother.

Key Features of Retail Weighing Scales that Improve Efficiency

When you’re in the market for a retail weighing scale, there are certain features you can look for that will speed up your checkout process.

Integrated Price Computing & Price Look-Up Function

The biggest benefit of a price computing scale like Swift and Kern’s RPB is that they’re able to calculate the price the customer must pay based on the product’s weight, without you doing any of the work. The weight, unit price and price to pay are then displayed to both you and your customer for full transparency.

This works so well because of their expansive internal memories, called Price Look-Ups (PLUs). Simply assign a custom number to each of the products you sell by weight and input the price per unit. For example, you can set the price of apples as £2.38 per kilogram. Then, when a customer approaches with a bag of apples, you can recall the product quickly, weigh the apples and get their price to pay in seconds.

Easy-to-Use Interface

You might think that it would be difficult to recall items on the spot, but retail scales are designed to make the process easy with full numeric keypad and specialised buttons. Let’s follow along with Adam’s Swift:

1. Press [PLU+]
2. Press [6] to Recall, then press [Tare]
3. Enter the two to three-digit recall number, then press [Tare]
4. Weigh the item and record the price once stabilised

It’s just four steps! This is excellent for streamlining the training process, so none of your new employees will flounder.

Connectivity

You can even build your own quasi-receipt by connecting your retail weighing scale to a printer. After weighing each product and getting your customers’ price, you can choose to print the results for a fully traceable interaction.

Fast Stabilisation

A retail weighing scale’s stabilisation time represents how long it takes from placing an item on the pan to when the result is stable, as in it isn’t going to change, and it’s ready to be recorded. Of course, the faster the scale stabilises, the faster you can record the results and complete each transaction.

Best Retail Weighing Scales from Inscale

Here are the retail weighing scales we recommend to speed up your checkout process.

Kern RPB Retail Scale

Capacities: 1.5/3kg – 15/30kg

Readabilities: 0.5/1g – 5/10g

Kern’s RPB Price Computing Scale is a solid option for businesses selling a low quantity of items by weight, with its 10 PLUs. With an auto-clear feature, the unit price entry automatically sets to zero when the scale is unloaded, improving the speed of checkouts. Connect the Kern RPB with a printer via its RS-232 interface for easy records and traceability.

Swift SWZ Price Computing Retail Scale

Capacity: 1.5/3kg – 15/30kg

Readabilities: 0.5/1g – 5/10g

Adam’s Swift series of retail weighing scales are an impressive choice for any small business selling products by weight. With its dual range-capacity, you can get different levels of precision depending on how much weight is on the pan, expanding its versatility.  With 161 PLUs, you can store all your best-selling products and then some in its extensive memory. Choose between models featuring a pillar displaying both total weight, unit weight and total price and a pillar-less model with a similar rear display for higher customisation.

Need help deciding which retail weighing scale is best for you? Contact the Inscale team.