Two Way Radios for Retail Stores & Staff Communication

Recreational handsets are designed for a camping trip, not for sixty trading hours a week. The housings do not survive repeated drops onto hard floors, the batteries lose capacity quickly under daily charging, and the audio struggles the moment there is trolley noise or music behind the speaker.

Digicom supplies commercial and government grade equipment only, all of it ACMA type-approved for use in Australia. In practice that shows up as a fleet that is still in service in its third year rather than one you replace every peak season. If cash flow is the constraint, leasing spreads it out rather than dropping the specification.

Licence-free UHF channels are open to anyone, which is workable for a small store on a quiet street. Inside a shopping centre it is a different story, because the tenancy next door, the centre's own contractors and the food court operator may all be on the channels you picked.

A private ACMA licence gives your stores frequencies nobody else is using. We hold the accreditation to arrange and manage that for you, and we will tell you honestly if your situation does not warrant the cost.

Within one tenancy and its immediate back of house, handsets talking directly to each other are normally fine. The places that catch retailers out are basement car parks, cool rooms, shared service corridors and multi-level department stores where a slab sits between the floor team and the stockroom.

The answer depends on the building. Sometimes it is a better antenna, sometimes an on-site repeater, and in a large centre it can be a cellular solution that fixes staff radios and customer mobile coverage together. We cover that on in-building cellular for supermarkets and shopping centres and more broadly under improving cellular coverage.

The value is speed and discretion. A team member who notices something can pass it to the floor and to the door in one transmission, through an earpiece, without approaching anyone or drawing attention. Everyone gets the same description at the same time instead of a whispered relay.

Where a retailer runs contracted guards or an internal loss prevention team, we put them on shared channels with store management so there is no gap in the handover. The security page covers how those teams are equipped, including body worn cameras where evidence matters.

We will not put a number on it without knowing your floor and your roster, because a boutique and a hardware warehouse are nothing alike. The method is to count the roles that get interrupted during trade: registers, floor sections, the stockroom, click-and-collect, receiving, and whoever is running the shift.

Then add spares. A fleet supplied with no spares becomes a fleet with holes in it, and the holes always appear during peak. Send us a floor plan and a roster and we will size it properly, or start with a free system evaluation.

Conventional radios do not span suburbs, so a chain needs a second layer. Push-to-talk over the 4G and 5G network gives area managers, national loss prevention and the operations desk one talkgroup that reaches every site, with nothing installed in any tenancy.

Because it interoperates with in-store fleets, an operations call can reach a store manager who is out on the floor carrying a normal handset. See Motorola WAVE PTX for how the layer works.

Commercial radios are built to be repaired, which is a large part of why they cost more up front. Batteries, antennas, belt clips and speaker mics are all replaceable items, and most faults we see in retail are wear rather than failure.

We run our own repair centre and servicing from Sydney and support chains across Australia. For multi-store operators we can hold a small pool of swap units so a store is never short during peak trade.