FIVE DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR SELF-CHECKOUTS (SCOs)

As the adoption of self-checkouts (SCOs) among retailers continues at pace, many retailers are looking to make the most of their SCOs and ensure that they are driving the efficiency gains and cost savings they can deliver. Research by Capital One Shopping indicates that 10,000 retailers have installed self-checkouts globally since 2024, and they predict that by 2030, more than 24,000 stores will have installed SCOs. This predicted growth in SCO adoption is set to direct a significant focus toward self-checkouts being at the centre of the modern checkout experience, with checkout zones being adapted and remodelled to support SCO adoption.

The popularity of SCOs can be attributed to their capacity to help retailers solve a wide range of pressing challenges, from rising costs and increased customer expectations to shrinkage and staffing issues. Self-checkouts are at their most effective and are best able to help solve retail challenges when they are created using a design-led approach. SCOs developed with a design-led approach deliver the best possible user experience to shoppers and increases in sales, profitability and efficiency to the retailers that adopt them. When SCOs are intelligently designed, they can contribute to delivering an exceptional customer experience. This can help to boost not only sales but also customer retention.

Adopting a design-led approach to self-checkouts (SCOs) can be very beneficial for retailers as it maximises the benefits that SCOs bring. Find out more about the design principles that can help you make the most of SCOs, including focusing on usability, delivering speed & efficiency, achieving strong security and incorporating adaptability & futureproofing.

KEY SELF-CHECKOUT PRINCIPLES

Following some key self-checkout design principles can make all the difference to the effectiveness of your SCOs and their capacity to help retailers meet pressing challenges. Although many different design principles influence self-checkout design, a few are particularly important to creating exceptional SCOs that delight customers with an excellent customer experience, increase efficiency, and boost the bottom line. Incorporating these key design principles into the design of your SCOs will help you capitalise on the benefits they bring.

FOCUS ON USABILITY

Usability is crucial to the success of self-checkouts as it determines the quality of the customer experience and should form a key part of SCO design. Many SCOs deliver advanced and innovative functionality with exciting hardware and even AI-powered features, but few can deliver this alongside excellent usability. Many self-checkout manufacturers focus on user interface design and software. However, these are just two areas of usability. While user interface design and software are important, focusing too much on these areas alone often leads to the hardware and overall design of a self-checkout being overlooked. This invariably limits the potential to deliver the best possible usability with your SCO solution.

By carefully selecting your SCO hardware, you can significantly enhance its usability so that it can successfully serve and delight your customers in every interaction. It is important to consider how the selected hardware can help customers check out quickly, easily and in an accessible way. As SCOs facilitate the completion of the checkout process, they incorporate various hardware items, from the PC that powers them and their touchscreen to the barcode scanner and chip-and-pin payment terminals.

The touchscreen is a key focus point for usability, as it is the interface customers use to interact with SCOs. It is very much at the heart of every customer interaction, and selecting a high-quality touchscreen will help deliver excellent usability and exceptional customer experiences. A quality touchscreen provides excellent responsiveness to facilitate easy interactions, complete the checkout process quickly, and maintain a high throughput in the checkout zone.

In addition to the touchscreen, SCOS depend on several other key hardware items to consistently deliver excellent usability within the retail environment. The scanner/barcode reader is key to helping customers easily scan their shopping. Bi-optic scanners are particularly effective at providing easy and efficient product scanning, as they combine a horizontal and vertical scanner, which helps products be scanned from various angles and orientations. This delivers enhanced usability and a smoother checkout experience, especially as customers may not have as much scanning experience as a checkout assistant would.

Collecting payments is perhaps the most essential function of a SCO as it completes the checkout process. When it facilitates efficient digital payments, it can help maintain customer flow through the checkout zone. The chip-and-pin payment terminal facilitates the fuss-free collection of both contactless and non-contactless payments. Helping customers pay in their own way is a great way to deliver exceptional usability. Many chip-and-pin payment terminals are height-adjustable and tiltable, which helps to provide an easy and accessible payment experience to a wide range of customers.

Usability has been a key focus at Pan Oston for many years across our product families, including our self-checkouts. We have earned a reputation for award-winning SCO designs and have won a Red Dot Design award for our SLIM Balance SCO. Our specialists design and manufacture SCOs that deliver exceptional usability and accessibility for international retailers. Whether you opt for a standard configuration SCO from our award-winning SLIM and ESSENCE families or develop a completely tailor-made solution, you can be assured that usability will be at the core of your chosen solution. Why not find out how we use retail-grade hardware and award-winning design to deliver exceptional SCO solutions for international retailers? Please review some of our recent case studies today or contact our specialists.

DELIVER SPEED & EFFICIENCY

SCOs that are speedy and efficient are well placed to deliver an excellent user experience to your customers. By reducing the time to complete each interaction, you can maintain great throughput through your checkout zone and prevent queues and customer frustration from developing. Delivering the best possible speed and efficiency requires an intelligent approach to design that focuses on streamlining and simplifying checkout processes with smart hardware and design. There are many ways to achieve greater speed and efficiency through SCO design, including suitable support furniture and intelligent lighting.

The design and choice of support furniture and its impact on the speed and efficiency of the checkout journey are often overlooked. It is not just its practical implications; the support furniture can often give customers valuable visual cues, influencing which SCOs they choose and whether they even use a SCO for their specific shopping trip. If your SCO is not wall-mounted or integrated into a counter, there are many support furniture options. These include pedestals, side shelves and front shelves. The chosen shelving options can determine how your self-checkouts are used. SCOs with more shelving or basket space will encourage customers with larger baskets/shopping sizes to use a SCO.

Meanwhile, those without shelving, like our ESSENCE Express, will encourage use by customers with less shopping. Many retail checkout zones will use a combination of different SCOs, some with more shelving and basket space for larger baskets and some with limited or no shelving and basket space for smaller or no baskets. Introducing a combination can help to divide up SCO shoppers and direct them towards the SCOs that most suit the size of their basket/shopping. It is a surprisingly easy way to improve speed and efficiency in a practical way.

No successful SCO is complete without intelligent lighting options that can help guide and direct customers on their journey through the checkout zone and inform retail assistants as to the current status of each SCO. Incorporating an intelligent LED light controller allows you to program the lights on your SCOs to direct customers queuing to the next available SCO and retail assistants/SCO hosts towards customers who have encountered an issue during the checkout process. For customers, this reduces unnecessary queuing and searching for an available SCO and ensures that retail assistants know when they require assistance. This increases both the throughput through the checkout zone, which brings valuable efficiency gains, while also increasing the speed at which customers can access support from a checkout assistant or SCO host.

At Pan Oston, we deliver speedy and efficient checkout experiences with intelligent and award-winning SCOs every day. Our experience and expertise, gained from supporting leading international and national retailers, leave us well placed to help you deliver speedy and efficient SCO solutions to your business. Why not contact us to discover how our award-winning designers can help your business with SCOs?

ACHIEVE STRONG SECURITY

Shrinkage and theft remain significant issues for retailers, which has established a need to address both through intelligent technology and design. Fortunately, several different technologies can help. However, if they are adopted without considering user experience, they can undermine the usability and accessibility of SCOs. Striking the perfect balance between maintaining strong security and usability can help protect your bottom line while delivering a great customer experience in the checkout zone.

Intelligently designed security scales powered by AI can help detect instances of fraud and mis-scanning, which can reduce shrinkage. Many security scales can be mounted underneath the packing platform, which allows an additional security feature to be introduced in an unobtrusive way that does not negatively affect the usability of your SCOs. As the scales are designed to integrate seamlessly into the existing design of an SCO, they do not affect the checkout operation and ensure that the checkout process remains as smooth as it is secure.

SCO security can be enhanced further by adding a top-mounted camera, seamlessly integrated into the flag of the SCO. This camera will provide real-time images of the checkout process and detect potential instances of theft using AI-powered computer vision technology. As many customers are accustomed to CCTV in retail stores, adding a security camera at a SCO is generally well-accepted and not viewed as a barrier to usability in the checkout zone.

Both the security scales and top-mounted camera with AI-powered computer vision technology work efficiently in the background and are largely invisible to most customers. They are designed only to interrupt the checkout process and flow when instances of fraud, theft, and mis-scanning are identified, maintaining a smooth checkout flow for most everyday customers. This ensures that customers do not have to sacrifice convenience at SCOs to maintain security.

At Pan Oston, we have been passionate early adopters of security technology, including security scales, top-mounted security cameras powered by AI and computer vision technology. Our adoption of AI theft prevention technology in our SLIM Balance SCOs has been recognised by a prestigious Red Dot Design award for a ‘sleek, futuristic-looking self-checkout unit’. Find out how you can achieve strong security with your self-checkouts by discovering our innovative self-checkout solutions, designed with security in mind.

INCORPORATE ADAPTABILITY AND FUTUREPROOFING

As retail technology changes and evolves so quickly, your SCO solutions need to incorporate adaptability and futureproofing if they are to serve you well, not just for today but also for tomorrow. Innovative new technology is constantly being introduced, but if you have a SCO solution that is not adaptable or futureproof, you will soon be limited in what you can adopt and offer customers. Having to completely replace your SCOs ahead of schedule to adopt new technology is expensive and often unnecessary, especially when many solutions offer the adaptability and futureproofing you need.

Adaptability should not be an afterthought in modern SCOs; it should be integral to their design. Modular self-checkouts offer the flexibility in design and future upgrades so they can adapt to your changing needs. Their modular, component-based design makes hardware changes and upgrades easy and largely hassle-free. It is not only possible to upgrade existing hardware components, but you can also add additional functionality to your SCOs with new components. This results in significant cost savings and minimising downtime and disruption to your checkout zone. Your SCOs really can be future-proof and able to serve the customers of tomorrow.

Even greater adaptability can be achieved when you choose a SCO solution that is hardware and software independent. This leaves you free to choose the hardware and software suppliers that best suit your business, rather than having to choose based solely on compatibility and available hardware integrations. The benefits of such adaptability are significant when you first configure your SCOs, but even more so when it comes to upgrades and repairs, as you can change hardware and software suppliers if required.

Every retail format is different, and no two checkout zones are the same. Retailers require SCOs that adapt to every store format and store footprint. SCO manufacturers that offer a complete range of SCO solutions that suit varying store formats and footprints can provide the ultimate adaptability to retailers. At Pan Oston, we have a SCO for every store, with our award-winning SLIM family boasting four different models to suit different self-checkout applications and store sizes and ranging from the SLIM Express for convenience retailers with limited checkout zone footprints and SLIM Flat for retailers with shoppers that have medium sized baskets through to the SLIM Curved and SLIM Bench, which are designed with supermarkets and large retailers in mind. In addition to this, our Red Dot Design award-winning SCO, the SLIM Balance, is available in large and small models to suit every checkout zone.

Our SCO solutions are renowned for offering exceptional adaptability and futureproofing to retailers and businesses. Every Pan Oston SCO is designed and manufactured following a modular principle to enable easy upgrades and repairs using the most common hardware options available. They are also entirely software and hardware independent, allowing you to choose the suppliers that best suit your business. Smart hardware integrations ensure that you remain ready for the future and able to adopt state-of-the-art technology as it becomes available. A significant number of different product configurations are available without changing the core design and function of our SCOs, giving you great flexibility without substantial costs. Why not discover the almost endless self-checkout possibilities offered by our SLIM SCO and ESSENCE SCO?

DELIVERING AWARD-WINNING SELF-CHECKOUTS WITH SOLID DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Pan Oston has created innovative design-led self-checkout solutions for established retailers since 1969. Our award-winning design team creates innovative SCOs that deliver exceptional checkout experiences, improve efficiency, and increase sales. We provide modern yet functional design every day to international retailers. Our design proficiency has been recognised with multiple Red Dot Design awards, including for our SLIM Balance SCO.

Discover how our two self-checkout product families, SLIM and ESSENCE, deliver innovative design-led SCOs for retailers. Our SCO product families offer exceptional usability, speed & efficiency, strong security and adaptability & futureproofing capabilities. Alongside our SCO product families, we offer completely bespoke self-checkout solutions with our Tailor Made products. Whichever Pan Oston solution you choose, you will benefit from a combination of award-winning design, hardware independence, easy servicing and innovative technology that will future-proof your checkout zone.

Retailers that partner with Pan Oston benefit from our extensive experience and expertise gained by supporting retailers since 1969. Our growing team of over 200 specialists support international retailers with innovative design-led SCO solutions.

CONTACT OUR SELF-CHECKOUT SPECIALISTS

Our self-checkout specialists are ready to help you develop an innovative self-checkout solution that suits your retail formula and footprint. Why not contact us to discuss how we can delight your customers with a design-led SCO solution?