Screens at the till: what to show while people queue

The best things to show by the till are things a customer can act on in the next minute or two: something sold at the counter, a multibuy, gift cards, your loyalty scheme, next week's event. Someone in a queue has time to read a few slides and their card's already in their hand, so the screen should suggest something they can say yes to when they reach the front. Save the long brand video for somewhere else.

Why the till is its own spot

A window screen gets a glance from someone walking past. A till screen gets people standing still, a couple of metres away, with nothing much to do until the person in front has finished paying. That changes what you can put on it. You can use a bit more text than in the window, a slide can carry a small detail (a price for two, a date), and a QR code has a fair chance of being scanned.

It also changes who's watching. The staff on the till see that screen, or at least hear it, for their whole shift. Keep that in mind when you pick music and video.

What works on a till screen

Start with whatever lives on or behind the counter: batteries, gift wrap, a coffee to go, the chocolate bars in the box by the card machine. A photo and a price is enough, and the customer can add it without leaving the queue. Multibuys work for the same reason. "Any three for £10" takes a second to read, and there's usually a stand next to the queue where they can grab the third one.

Gift cards earn a slide in the weeks before Christmas, Mother's Day and Father's Day, when plenty of people in the queue are already holding presents.

Your loyalty scheme or app is a good fit too. Show it with a QR code and leave that slide up longer than the others, because people need time to get a phone out and open the camera. Make the code big enough to scan from where the queue stands, which is further away than it feels when you're designing it at a desk.

Then there are the questions your staff answer all day long: the returns policy, click and collect, Sunday opening hours. Put them on the screen and some people will have their answer before they reach the front. Things coming up fit here as well, like a late opening or a new range landing next week. And if you're hiring, the till queue is full of local people who like the shop enough to be standing in it.

What doesn't work

Long videos with a story are wasted here, because people get to the front halfway through. Avoid sound altogether if you can (the person on the till will hear the same loop for eight hours). And don't advertise things you can't sell at that till, or the customer asks for it and gets a no.

The price on the screen has to match the till

A price on a screen is a price you're showing customers, so if the screen says £2.50 and the till rings up £2.80, you've got an unhappy customer and a queue waiting while it gets sorted out. Keep prices in one place so you only ever change them once.

In Casty that means a dataset (a small table of products and prices) or, for a cafe counter, a menu board, which holds categories and products with their prices. Change the price in the table and every layout that shows it updates without anyone touching the design. With a menu board you can also mark a product as unavailable when it runs out. The menu boards guide and the datasets guide show how each one is set up. (Menu boards are switched on per account, so ask us if you don't see them under Library.)

Where to put it

Behind the till at about head height, facing the queue, is the usual spot. Check two things before you fix it: that it isn't in the staff's eyeline while they serve, and that the queue can see it from where it forms. If your queue runs along a wall or snakes back through the shop, a screen part way along the queue route can work better than one at the very front.

On a counter, a smaller screen angled towards the customer works for a single till. Keep it well clear of the card machine so nobody's reaching round it.

Indoors you don't need a high-brightness display. A commercial screen, or a TV with a player plugged in, does the job. In the Casty demo, Northgate Store in York has a screen at the till as well as one in the window. The two do different jobs, so give them different content.

How long the loop should be

Keep it short. Someone queueing for a couple of minutes should see most of the loop, and a loop of six to eight slides at eight to ten seconds each runs to about a minute. Give QR slides fifteen seconds or so. In a Casty playlist each item has its own duration, set on its Advanced tab, and the total running time shows at the top of the editor. How long each slide should stay on screen goes into timing in more depth.

A short loop does mean regulars see the same slides a lot. Changing two or three of them each week keeps it from going stale without rebuilding the lot.

Change it through the day

What people buy at the till changes with the time. A convenience store might push a meal deal at lunchtime and wine offers after five. Dayparts in Casty are named slots in the day (Lunch, Evening, whatever suits you) that you define once and pick when you schedule, so the till screen switches over on its own. The same idea is covered for food menus in dayparting menus.

If a supplier is paying for a spot by the till, schedule their slide as an interrupt layout with a set number of seconds per hour, and run a proof of play report at the end of the month to show them it ran.

Let the shop floor update it

The person who knows the chocolate has sold out is usually the one on the till. We can set up a login for a supervisor that only lets them change one playlist, from a simple page: they drop a new image into a spot, or replace one, and that's all they can touch. Spots you want to keep fixed show as locked. See adding people to your account for the kinds of access we set up.