Touch Scales in Retail from Label Printing to POS - A Complete Guide

What Is a Touch Scale?

A touch scale is a digital scale with a touchscreen interface, often featuring dual screens, making weighing faster and more user-friendly than traditional scales with buttons or dials.

These digital scales are particularly well-suited for high-traffic retail environments, such as grocery stores, supermarkets, and delis, where quick and accurate weighing is essential.

Retail touch screen scales use precise load cells that sense the force an object delivers to the scale to determine its weight. After being transformed into an electrical signal, this data is digitally processed and shown on the touchscreen.

After the store clerk selects the product type on the screen, the weighing scale calculates and displays the correct total price based on the weight, providing immediate and reliable weight readings along with accurate pricing.

The intuitive touchscreen interface allows staff to easily navigate features, even in fast-paced environments. Employees can quickly switch between product categories, adjust weight-based pricing, and access real-time data, streamlining daily operations.

Without relying on physical buttons or dials, workflow speeds up and the risk of operator error is reduced.

As touch scales become more widely used in the retail industry, their functionality continues to expand. Some models come with a built-in scale label printer, while others are used as POS scales at checkout counters, often equipped with a receipt printer. Let's explore the different types of retail touch scales available.

Types of Touch Scales in Retail

In the retail sector, there are a wide variety of touchscreen electronic scales available to meet different application needs, with common types including:

1. Touch Screen Label Printing Scales

Touch screen labeling scales are used for fresh food sections in retail stores, enabling staff to quickly and accurately weigh a wide range of perishable items like meats, seafood, poultry, fresh produce, and prepared foods like salads or deli sandwiches.

With just taps on the screen, store staff can weigh items, calculate the price, and instantly print a price label or tag. This seamless process ensures efficiency, accuracy, and smooth operation in high-traffic retail environments.

In practice, these digital scales can further be categorized into bench scales and hang scales.

Bench scales are typically used in areas where products can be placed on a flat surface, such as weighing meats or cheeses. They offer a stable and easy-to-read platform for high-volume use. On the other hand, hang scales are ideal for weighing bulkier or irregularly shaped items like large cuts of meat or fish.

2. Touch Screen POS Scale

Touch screen POS scales are integrated into POS systems, enabling quick and accurate weighing, pricing and checkout at the register. Equipped with receipt printers, they generate clear and detailed shopping lists and bills.

With a user-friendly interface, these scales allow staff to weigh multiple items quickly and generate accurate receipts on the spot. This all-in-one solution is ideal for enhancing efficiency and speeding up customer transactions in busy retail environments.

We recommend the HPRT C-R1 Intelligent Touch Scale, a versatile POS scale that combines weighing, printing, and checkout functions in one system. Built on a high-performance PC platform, it offers both Android and Windows operating systems, compatible with mainstream POS software.

Key features include:

● User-Friendly Design: 14-inch/15.6-inch LED backlit main screen with capacitive multi-touch technology and adjustable customer display, providing a wider view for customers.

● High Performance: The high-performance C-R1W model is equipped with an Intel J1900 quad-core processor, 4GB DDR3L RAM, and a 64GB mSATA SSD, ensuring smooth operation and quick data processing.

● Fast Printing: Comes with a 58mm receipt printer with a cutter, supporting adaptive print speeds up to 200 mm/s, with an easily removable module for convenient replacement.

● Safe and Durable: Made from 304 food-grade stainless steel, the scale can weigh up to 15kg and is designed to be waterproof, insect-resistant, and rust-proof, providing safer and more reliable food weighing.   

● Comprehensive Connectivity: Includes Ethernet port, serial port, four USB ports, cash drawer interface, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The HPRT C-R1 Intelligent Touch Scale is widely used in fruit stores, snack shops, grocery and vegetable stores, delis, seafood markets, farmers' markets, food chain stores, and other retail businesses that require integrated weighing and checkout solutions.

3. Self-Service Touch Scales

In large supermarkets, self-service touch scales are installed to boost weighing efficiency and reduce costs. These scales display a range of product categories, each with clear images to guide customers.

By simply tapping on the screen to select specific product categories and choosing the weighing option, these deli scales automatically weigh their produce and print labels, making the process quick and convenient.

With the advancement of AI technology, smart AI scales are gradually gaining popularity.

These digital scales are equipped with AI-powered recognition cameras, allowing them to automatically identify bulk and bagged items like fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods.

For example, the HPRT C-L9AI Image Recognition Scale offers an impressive product recognition accuracy of up to 99%, completing single-item weighing in an average of just 3-5 seconds, delivering remarkable efficiency.

Wrapping Up

Touch scales, with their fast, accurate, and efficient weighing solutions, are continuously enhancing the operational standards of the retail industry. Investing in high-quality touchscreen scales can greatly improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction in a retail environment.

Feel free to contact us, HPRT is here to provide you with the ideal retail weighing solution!