Guangzhou March 4–6 China’s major vending and unattended retail exhibition will bring together manufacturers, technology suppliers, and international buyers as automated retail continues expanding beyond traditional vending machines. By Craig Keefner | Kiosk Industry Event At a Glance — The 14th Asia Vending & Smart Retail Expo (AVE 2027) is scheduled for March 4–6, 2027. Dates March 4–6,… Read More »
Singapore is best viewed as a technology validation market rather than a miniature version of Southeast Asia. A kiosk that works in Singapore has passed a useful test. It has not earned an ASEAN passport. That distinction should guide the deployment strategy. A pilot can establish whether the hardware, payments, software integrations, accessibility features, and support procedures work… Read More »
By TingTing with Craig Allen Keefner Japan offers a useful lesson for self-service buyers: a compact kiosk is not just a smaller cabinet. Japanese railway stations, restaurants, and convenience stores all have to fit the transaction, the payment devices, an accessible approach, and the maintenance workflow into limited space. How operators and manufacturers handle those trade-offs is more… Read More »
SLX On Air has linked more than 200 screens in cafés, clinics and clubs to the phones of the people around them. After a long pilot phase, it is now open to businesses across India. NEW DELHI, 1 October 2026 — When a café puts up today’s special, the people who live and work around it can now… Read More »
Where It Works, Where It Fails, and What Buyers Need to Measure Why use machine vision instead of a $20 barcode scanner? Because the barcode fails more often than the vendors admit. It fails on produce. It fails on damaged packaging, on multipacks, on the item the customer sets down at the wrong angle, on baskets too large… Read More »
There is no such thing as one “Asia payment configuration” for kiosks. A self-order kiosk designed around Alipay and WeChat Pay in China can be wrong for India, incomplete for Japan, and unusable in parts of Southeast Asia if the payment stack, language, receipt flow, and local integration are not designed for the actual market. That sounds obvious,… Read More »
Buying a kiosk directly from China can reduce cost, shorten the path to a custom form factor, and give an operator or integrator far more control over branding, peripherals, and physical design. It can also create an expensive support problem if the buyer treats the transaction as an enclosure purchase instead of a controlled commercial-system program. The key… Read More »
It Is Learning Where People Matter The latest discussion around U.S. fast-food restaurants “returning to people” should not be read as a retreat from self-order kiosks, mobile ordering, or restaurant automation. This discussion was triggered by NOA releasing survey. More accurately stated: According to the National Operators Association, a McDonald’s franchisee group, guests in a recent survey described… Read More »
From Vietnam Plus — While traditional electronic kiosks mainly provide information lookup or queue-number services, the new AI kiosk applied by Dong Tien commune in Thanh Hoa province incorporates technologies such as AI, a conversational virtual assistant, voice recognition, natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR), and connectivity with the VNeID digital identity platform and the national… Read More »
https://retailsystems.org/new-retail-supermarket-of-the-future-according-to-alibaba-in-china/ Alibaba’s “New Retail” Continues to Influence Asia’s Supermarkets While many Western retailers are still balancing e-commerce with physical stores, China has spent years refining a different model. Alibaba calls it “New Retail”—the seamless integration of digital commerce, physical shopping, fulfillment, payments, and AI into a single customer experience. The best-known example is Freshippo (Hema), Alibaba’s chain of… Read More »
