The invention concerns a method for updating association data between articles in a retail area and locations of said retail area, said method comprising the steps according to which, —a reading device acquires a sequence of tag identifiers comprising at least two tag identifiers of which the electronic shelf tags are adjacent, one of said adjacent electronic shelf tags being said electronic shelf tag to be located, and another of said adjacent electronic shelf tags being an electronic shelf tag of which the location is known, the reading device transmits the sequence of identifiers to a computer system that updates the association data from the sequence of tag identifiers, by determining: the articles associated with the tags of the sequence of tags, the respective locations of said articles from the order of the tags in the sequence of tags.