Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Self-checkout kiosk sales are project to still go strong this year, with the IHL Group calculating that self-checkout sales will hit about $740 billion in 2010. That’s a roughly 9.7 percent increase from last year. The interesting part, though, is that IHL is now predicting “a significant slowdown” in units forecast for 2013, along with their sales. Two years ago, the group projected $1.6 trillion by 2013, a figure that has now dropped to $1 trillion. The culprit? PDAs.

“The speed in which mobile devices are being adopted by consumers and how that is causing retailers to rethink kiosk deployments going forward is reducing that forecast significantly,” said IHL President Greg Buzek. “What is happening is that retailers who were extremely bullish on kiosks we believe are second guessing installing new kiosks in favor of looking at mobile apps. That revenue doesn’t pass directly to the mobile devices, at least for a while. Instead, it moves back to traditional staffed methods of transactions while retailers wait for the revenue through mobile devices to take off.” (Note: The National Retail Federation recently published a white paper on mobile retail best practices. Nothing surprising or new here, but if you know of anyone new to the mobile retail space who wants a good guide to quickly get up to speed, it’s an excellent start.)