Digital signage
in Cork

What changes is what the screen is allowed to take attention away from. On a stall, the goods do the selling and anything that competes with them loses:

• Small and high, not large and central. A screen at eye level over the counter reads as a price board. One placed where the produce should be reads as a shop that is hiding something.
• Prices and provenance, not marketing. In a market the questions are what it is, where it came from and what it costs. Those change constantly, which is exactly what a printed card handles badly and a screen handles in seconds.
• Legible from three metres, in a bright hall. Market halls are lit far more evenly than a street, so contrast matters more than brightness.

The genuine advantage in this setting is speed of change. A trader adjusting prices as stock moves through the day can do it from a phone between customers, which no printed card allows — and by late afternoon, when the day's remaining stock is what needs shifting, that is the difference between a sale and a bin.

One caution specific to shared halls: sound is not yours to add. In a space with no walls it belongs to everybody, and it is the fastest way to fall out with the neighbouring traders.

What gets bought away is predictable:

• The considered purchase. Anything expensive enough to want to compare. People assume the choice is thinner here, and they are often wrong — but nobody has told them.
• The unusual size or variant. The assumption is «they won't have it», which is a stock question and answerable in one line.
• And whatever needs advice. If a customer expects to be talked through something, they go where they think the expertise is.

All three are answered by the same kind of content, and it is not promotional: say what you carry, what you can get and how fast. «We can have it Thursday» beats a discount, because the trip is not about price — it is about certainty.

There is an honest limit worth stating, because pretending otherwise loses trust: for some things the trip is genuinely the right call, and a business that says so about the two or three categories it cannot serve well gets believed about everything else. In a city this size that credibility is a real asset — people talk, and they remember who was straight with them.

Ask your next five customers whether they bought anything in a bigger city in the last month. What they name is the list of things your screen should be answering, and it is usually shorter than you fear.