One of goals of packaging is to catch consumer’s eye, encouraging them to examine and explore package and its contents. A quality coating further increases shelf appeal by imparting additional tactile elements and adding snap to printed graphics. The most common types of coatings used today are UV and aqueous. Both are available in a range of finishes from matte through satin to gloss, expanding design flexibility beyond choice of inks.

A coating also protects package from rigors of assembly, fulfillment, shipping and distribution, safeguarding it from fingerprints, abrasion and scuffing. UV and aqueous coatings both demonstrate excellent abrasion and block resistance; in some cases, effectively eliminating need for shrinkwrap or other protective layers.

Which is best coating for a job? That depends as much on job as it does on coating. Expectations of performance, appearance, quality and cost are variables to weigh when making a decision. Other factors to consider include operator experience, job latitude (tolerance), storage conditions and performance requirements. We’ll begin with a comparison of UV and aqueous coatings, and then discuss most appropriate applications of each.

Aqueous coatings are approximately 60% water and 40% solids. During drying process, liquids evaporate or are absorbed by substrate, leaving solids to form a thin film. Aqueous coatings are clear and odorless when dried, and are also available in FDA-approved formulations for use in food packaging.

Historical existence of industry is clear by definition itself. Today it has a wide scope which spans from house hold items such as bread, sugar to electrical and electronic items, jewelry etc. Stores also range from large supermarkets to small village boutiques.

Retail industry drives economy of a country. While manufacturing industries create goods and services that people need, retail industry provide a marketplace where people as consumers, have convenient access to those products and services.

The retail sector is one of largest industries worldwide. And it is second-largest industry in United States both in number of establishments and in number of employees. Retail trade accounts for about 12.9 percent of all business establishments in United States.

Wal-Mart is world's largest retailer and world's largest company with more than $256 billion (USD) sales annually. Wal-Mart employs more than one million associates in United States and more than 300,000 internationally. The second largest retailer in world is France's Carrefour.

Customer handling is a critical aspect of retailing since it deals with customers directly. Retail Information Technology, commonly known as Retail IT has become very important in this sense, since traders have understood ease it could give for large volume of customer handling. Computerizing retail stores became a common practice some years ago, but research and development in areas have not ended. IT evolves day by day, and it is wrong to believe that technology, which we use today, is best, since development is never-ending. Therefore, even for retail industry, application of advanced IT solutions would go on.

A basic retail system would have a Point-of-Sale (POS) system to sell goods to customers. This can be considered as front-end of retail system. A POS would normally allow cashier to issue goods and tender. The back-end of system should manage stores, update accounts, allow periodic reports etc. The system should be able to handle customer returns, apply special discounts, handle special categories of customers etc. A good retail system should be competent in enabling users to tender in different types. The number of new tender types is on rise with advancement of technology.

As an example, few decades back, cash was only mode of tendering, but later, payment types such as credit cards came in to play and systems in future would need to handle tendering offered through mobile phones(May be a payment order bound to a bank sent through a SMS(Short Message Service) of mobile phones).