MediaMarktSaturn Brings Real-Time Pricing to More Than 1,000 Stores

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As retail pricing becomes increasingly dynamic, keeping physical stores aligned with online channels has become an operational challenge. For MediaMarktSaturn, manually replacing paper price labels across more than 1,000 stores was labour-intensive, difficult to scale and slowed the execution of pricing and promotional decisions.

Building on a technology partnership spanning more than a decade, MediaMarktSaturn and Accesa developed a cloud-based electronic shelf label (ESL) platform that automates price and product updates. Today, the platform manages up to 10 million label updates per day across 13 countries, reducing manual effort, improving pricing accuracy and giving the company the flexibility to introduce new in-store capabilities over time.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

For an organisation operating more than 1,000 stores across Europe, manually replacing paper shelf labels created a significant operational burden. Every pricing update required store employees to walk the sales floor, replacing labels one by one. It’s a repetitive process that consumed valuable time while increasing the risk of pricing inconsistencies between shelves, checkout systems and online channels.

Beyond operational cost, manual pricing limited business agility. Launching promotions simultaneously across countries, responding quickly to market conditions or introducing new pricing strategies became increasingly difficult. MediaMarktSaturn needed a scalable way to automate in-store pricing while supporting different countries, hardware vendors and local business requirements from a single platform.

ACCESA'S ROLE AND APPROACH

Accesa helped replace paper shelf labels and build a platform that has become a core component of MediaMarktSaturn's international omnichannel operations.

The team developed a central platform for managing pricing and product information across thousands of stores while accommodating different countries, hardware vendors and local business requirements. Accesa also supported the migration from legacy infrastructure to a modern cloud environment, improving scalability, operational resilience, and infrastructure efficiency.

As the platform evolved, Accesa continued to expand its capabilities, strengthen operational support and simplify the rollout of new functionality across the retailer's international store network. This allows MediaMarktSaturn to introduce new pricing capabilities faster while maintaining consistent operations across its store estate.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

The platform centralises pricing and product information across MediaMarktSaturn's international store network, replacing manual label updates with automated processes that can scale across countries and store formats:

  • Near real-time price updates across more than 1,000 stores in 13 countries.

  • Multi-vendor support, giving the retailer flexibility to adopt different electronic shelf label providers.

  • Central management of pricing, promotions and country-specific label templates.

  • Cloud-native platform supporting scalability and lowering infrastructure costs.

  • Reduced environmental impact as shelf labels go digital.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

The platform fundamentally changed how MediaMarktSaturn manages pricing inside its physical stores.

Instead of relying on manual label replacement, pricing updates can now be distributed automatically across the entire store network, with the platform capable of processing up to 10 million label updates per day. Shelf pricing remains closely aligned with central pricing decisions through five-minute update cycles, improving consistency between physical stores and digital channels.

Automation has also released significant operational capacity. Each store saves approximately 233 hours of manual work during label replacement cycles, allowing employees to spend more time supporting customers rather than performing repetitive administrative tasks.

At a strategic level, the platform gives MediaMarktSaturn far greater pricing agility. Promotional campaigns can be activated much faster, pricing decisions can be implemented consistently across countries, and new hardware vendors can be introduced without creating technology lock-in. Combined with lower infrastructure costs following the cloud migration and the elimination of large volumes of paper labels, the solution supports operational efficiency, sustainability and long-term scalability across one of Europe's largest retail networks.