In the fight to stay competitive brands are using every possible weapon at their disposal. A relatively recent weapon of choice is the impressive large scale touch screen kiosks that let customers go online to shop whilst still instore.
What it does
In-store Touchscreen kiosks are the Ferrari of in-store, online experiences. Perfect for letting customers explore a brand’s online products in high resolution and at super speed. If brands are going to introduce customers to their website, they might as well make a brilliant first impression..
Who is using it?
Kiosks have become common place in stores like Tesco, Marks and Spencer and DFS.
What its great for
- It makes a website look really impressive and really engages users who try to use it.
- The site’s web code should also ideally work with touch events so visitors can swipe around the site. Using things like swipe enabled carousels and view pagers are immensely fun on these impressive devices.
- Retail stores are getting smaller and can’t possibly stock everything. Using Kiosks allow visitors to browse the website to find stock in nearby stores, or order directly for home delivery.
- Sales staff can use them as a valuable selling tool, to provide more information.
Drawbacks
- In order to make best use of the large real estate brands need to have a responsive website
- Customers can experience “kiosk fright” – which is a bit like stage fright. When they are engaging with kiosks, people have a tendency to draw attention to themselves and can feel awkward. I am surprised more stores haven’t made more private browsing areas so people can shop without being a focus of attention.
- These can be expensive to purchase / lease.
- There isn’t a huge amount of data around at the moment about how effective these kiosks are. Even the people who sell them aren’t able to provide concrete statistics.
Here is a video I made recently showing a responsive site, for Fudgeurban that is designed to go all the way up to a massive screen size.
Thanks to touch2view for the image