The storeMate MSE customer hand scanner is easy to use because of its intuitive and clear graphical user interface. When introducing storeMate MSE to a store, customers can be explained its functionality in under a minute.

The user interface shows the items that the customer has scanned so far, and the current subtotal, number of items and discount total. A single button allows for voiding an item. If supported by the store database, optionally a second button allows the customer to view additional item information, like allergy information, nutritional value, etc.

The user interface is multi-lingual: when the customer's preferred language is available in the customer database, the user interface shows all texts and messages in that language. Otherwise the self-scanning system's default language is used.

The software of the customer hand scanner is designed with push-marketing in mind: when connected to a marketing system, it can display commercial messages that are pushed to the device. The customer is in control however: he/she can choose to either ignore or view the message, to prevent annoyance in case suddenly a message pops up.

When the customer scanner is used for partial inspection of the customer's items (as opposed to the storeMate Mobile Assistant), the display indicates the proposed number of items to scan and the number of items still remaining.

The cashier may choose to scan fewer or more items than proposed, and may optionally abort the inspection (depending on configuration). When the cashier is finished, the self-scanning system indicates whether the inspection was successful, or whether discrepancies have been found, in which case all items must be rescanned for inspection.

storeMate MSE currently uses Motorola hardware for the customer hand scanner, but the software is designed to be fully portable to hardware of other manufacturers.