At last week’s EuroCIS trade show in Dusseldorf, Chinese firm Hanshow released an IoT platform to increase retail digitalisation.

European retailers are some of the world’s earliest adopters of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) to reduce operations costs as a foundation for retail digitalisation. Hanshow says its All-Star IoT platform is poised to drive Europe’s brick‐and‐mortar retail into a new era of efficiency and profitability.

Entering the European market in 2016, Hanshow has been a driver of retail transformation with nearly 100 million ESLs installed on the continent. At EuroCIS, it displayed a range of AI-powered shelf monitoring, self-checkout trolleys and in-store marketing, shaping smart stores of the future.

Chief among the technologies presented was the All-Star IoT platform, focusing on the retail industry and designed to help retailers expand and upgrade their digitalisation. All-Star provides one-stop IoT from device management to digital operations upgrades, helping retailers quickly establish IoT equipment management capabilities and flexibly build business applications and integrate customised business connections to boost operation efficiency of smart stores and elevate the in-store experience.

This covers key functions such as pricing management, inventory management, picking, geolocation, dynamic pricing, promotion boards, interactive marketing, digital payment, people flow analysis and automatic monitoring patrol.

The All‐Star platform works as an integrated system for the management of a store’s entire digital devices, providing SaaS and private deployment, both of which support unified user authentication and third-party application access integration with an open API based on HTTP.

Correspondingly, one of its key product innovations is to solve the problems arising with the amount of IoT devices all operating on different networks and communicating on different transmission signals, as one store may require a handful of login systems with operations personnel trained in each. Therefore, each retail management platform may now be accessed through All-Star for a holistic integration of all the core business operation processes, simplifying the maintenance of these devices.

In tandem with the All-Star system, Hanshow has developed a communications protocol that uses one transmission frequency to communicate with all its IoT devices, easing the burden on the range of signal frequencies previously needed.

“Hanshow has developed All-Star and the rest specifically with global retailers in mind to achieve a more holistic form of digitalisation,” said Shiguo Hou, Hanshow CEO. “These new software and transmission technologies all combine to help retailers in Europe move into an exciting new era of digitalisation. This unlocks great new opportunities. We’re just seeing the beginning of what’s possible.”

Hanshow develops and manufactures electronic shelf labels and digital store technology. It offers a series of customised IoT touchpoints and digital store technologies that deliver customer‐centric insights, helping retailers streamline operations, optimise pricing strategies, and offer consumers a more personalised experience. Hanshow serves over 30,000 stores in more than 50 countries.