Photo Kiosks Reviewed

Posted Nov 30th 2004 8:37PM by Amit Malhotra

While all the attention is accorded to online printing and the intricacies of printing on home printers, the Photo Industry says that most prints are done at the digital photo kiosks found in your neighbourhood drugstore. Here is a review of some of the commonly found kiosks

seattle pi review

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. Pxidigital� retail trial
Greenwood Plaza, North Sydney, 4th April - 6th May, 2005.

Greenwood Plaza principle driver is from the Railway Station-Nth Sydney Station Ramp and shopping arcade being the major access point to and from North Sydney CBD with approx. 25,000 rail commuters per day traveling to and from work each day (50,000 visitations total passing by per day). Same profile each day with approx. 40% of the traffic passing our test site each day. The majority were rushing to work and rushing to catch trains home. Traffic flow between 9am-12 noon and 2pm-4.30pm minimal past our site, although in other area�s food court etc �excellent traffic flow that comes in from many entry/exit points.
12-2pm approx. 1,000-2,000, mainly Optus and other office workers getting lunch.

Preliminary results only.

Surveyed over 200 customers.
1. Ease of use - over 90% very good
2. Value - over 90% very good
3. Quality of prints - over 90% very good
4. Overall experience - over 90% very good
5. How often would you use an instant print kiosk - over 60% often.
6. If offered enlargement 8"x10" option - over 60% occasionally.
7. Time taken to print - over 90% very good.
8. Additional notes - most thought our offer was superior to Kodak kiosks.

What we learnt:
It was the first time we put our kiosk that was �retail ready� before the public. Prior to this we had done beta testing only at Australia Square, George Street, Sydney and with various wireless Telco�s in Europe/Australia/Japan.

Out GUI needed some modifications, mainly moving buttons - by grouping we saved approx 15 seconds in turn around time per customer. Our average order 30 prints. (national average 15 prints) We had many comments about the size of the numbers on customer prints button, so we doubled the font size, resulting in no further issues.

We wanted to test our Express Print Option - over 60% chose this option - it is a 3 step print option. Once the customer hits express its a 3 minute process to print 40 better than lab quality prints.

Our customer turn around is twice if not 3 times faster than competition kiosks because of the combination of the above and by combining two high-speed engines.

We found the GUI tools were used by customers generally the 2nd time when they returned to do further printing - we were not charging for these options. Feedback on these enhancement options were that some competitors charge up to 49 cents for each modification per print. An example of our customers indicating our options were so easy to use was our red eye removal where one simply rubbed the eye on the image with your finger and in a split second its removed, this had great positive feedback. Kodak has a box that has to be moved to each eye, this takes additional time.

Despite the five free print offer only 50% of customers had time to deal with the survey - would expect better results in regional mall where customers are not in such a hurry.

Many came back a 2nd time once they had got their 5 free prints. The 5 free prints will become our standard launch plan but limited to 2 weeks at each location. Its also a good chance to overcome customer past poor experiences with other instant kiosk quality/speed.

Many customers through past poor experiences at kiosks would not accept that our sample prints actually came from our kiosks - an educational/mall marketing assistant would be required at each installation for min, of 2 weeks to overcome this problem through customer demonstration.

Camera/phone - over 60% could not use their transfer options - i.e. infrared or Bluetooth - need to train demo staff on handset tools. This is a short-term problem as over 90% of camera/phone's sold in Japan have removable media - memory stick, mini SD card. Within 2 months in Australia, new handsets will have this option. The replacement market of approx. 5m camera/phone handsets will convert to removable media within 12 -18 months.

This will become a serious new market. Therefore have not factored in any real income - for our business modeling maybe 5-10 customer per day doing 5 prints approx.

Because of the nature of the Greenwood Plaza traffic flow where a number of groups were handing out flyers we could see in the first week the passing rail commuter traffic were in too much of a hurry and not interested in taking flyers. Thus, we decided not to do this at Greenwood on a continuous basis as we were marketing to the same commuters each day.

In future Pxi locations will adopt lead-time marketing strategies, such as placing ads in local newspapers with coupons to bring in for free prints etc. With on site staff dressed in Pxi ID, who should be up beat, friendly and charismatic Pxi employees,for the first two weeks of all installations.

With any offer in this space customers are not walking around with their media in their pockets (camera/phone handsets aside), therefore it could take 2-3 weeks to get any real reaction from a 5 free print offer.

Our typical location is a sub/regional shopping mall with a minimum of 10 million annual shopper visitations. Greenwood Plaza was useful for our retail/wireless Telco presentations and VC presentations. We had planned to trial a kiosk in the Telstra Shop-Nth Sydney in tandem with the Greenwood Plaza trial but due to a delayed eftpos line connection this was put on hold. Greenwood Plaza was chosen for logistic reasons and during the quiet periods this allowed us time to modify and fine-tune our offer in terms of both assessing pricing and GUI. Ease of access for our SW/technical team was also a consideration.

As we discovered at Greenwood Plaza (potential medium term site)many customers begged us to leave our trial kiosk running, some in the space of 5 weeks came back up to 6 times. Thus once customers had used and discovered the quality and ease of use of our product and our competitive pricing they kept returning. Some kiosk competitor's are charging up to 50% more per print. We need to highlight our pricing offer as its currently very low key on our touch screen slides - have plans to incorporate a 42" plasma screen as well to market the offer. There is a significant opportunity to assume the leadership role in the imaging industry-our competition are running in-store systems-more complex GUI-mostly that require out side assistance-asking for outside assistance in this sector is not "cool".

We discovered at Greenwood in talking to customers for 5 weeks, they don't care about what technology is being used, as long as the image quality is good, and mostly these customers(over 50% had used Kodak/Fuji kiosks) could see our image quality and thus where able to make comparison to prints from other sources-i.e. we had one young Women-who had done some wedding prints at Kodak kiosk was not happy-prints not in focus/sharp-did only 10 prints-by chance came by got our 5 free print offer-tried us-then printed over 200 prints, our image enhancement SW also make a significant difference in our offer, and helped in the perception of quality.

On Tuesday evening i took my daughter to Christo's over at Paddington/five ways for a birthday dinner-walked in the waitress-came up me and said"what have you done with our pxi-took my friends back there the other day and it was gone"

Having spent all this time with our customers listing/watching/talking to them-we where even on first name terms with 20 or so, the customers overwhelmingly indicated they want: convenience, simplicity (ease of use!) ,speed and good quality.."That's it !

Women are our primary target audience for our pxi rollouts in the world and future usage, and the young mothers of the world, especially is looking for convenience.

Many customers indicated with our offer, quality, speed, pricing why bother to print at home.
Contact Barrie Harrop
m+61418818423.