This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine's special section, FOCUS: Photo Kiosks, February 2007.
Billions of transactions take place every year during the holiday season at self-service check-out lanes and kiosks. But the self-service technology that created the biggest wave during the 2006 holiday season was photo kiosks.
An estimated 400 million personalized greeting cards were made during the 2006 holiday season, a 48 percent increase over the approximately 270 million made in 2005, according to the Photo Marketing Association.
About 50 million of those greeting cards were made on kiosks in 2006, up from the 34 million in 2005.
Dimitrios Delis, PMA director of market research, attributes the growth in kiosk-generated greeting cards to the proliferation of photo kiosks in retail locations and to the sophistication of photo services they provide.
Online retailers that have photo offerings also are generating traffic, he said.
One device printing fewer holiday greeting cards is the personal computer. Delis said the decline is due to the sophistication of photo kiosks and their offerings of more diverse holiday messages.
The self-service difference
Overall, it is unknown how well kiosks in general did during the 2006 holiday season. The National Retail Federation said those numbers are difficult are track, but kiosk use most likely increased in relation to the increase of customer traffic during the holiday season.
The nature of the retail kiosk isn't especially suited for holiday use, said Evan Schuman, president of The Content Firm and writer/editor of Storefrontbacktalk.com.
"There's nothing about (kiosks) that are holiday oriented except stores are jammed. And to that aspect, kiosks are more important, but the functions don't change," he said.
One area kiosks might have helped the holiday shopping crunch is in customer service.
"Almost every retailer is looking at this as they have staffing shortages and other things," Schuman said. "Kiosks cannot run off and hide, and you don't have to go hunting for it. Kiosks are becoming a critical tool."
