Business efficiency is among top priority for any profit oriented retail business owner. Today, almost all modern shops use point of sale systems as they become more and more readily available. The modern business owner using an advanced point of sale today has more control over their business operations. They can tell in real time what is happening in their business when they are not arround.
Understanding your business is crucial to your decision on what kind of Point of Sale to acquire for your business. Today, we are focusing on a retail business shop. A retail shop where goods are bought in wholesale then sold in a retail fashion. An advanced POS will offer the following key features:
1. Inventory Management and Tracking.
With a good POS, inventory management should be smooth and a joy to the business owner. This implies that your Point of Sale should double up as a Stock Management Tool that gives you the ability to monitor every happenings on your valued inventory. Inflow of Receivings (goods bought) verses Outflow of Sales (goods sold). It should be at your finger tips about how your business is performing as to whether you are headed for a profit or otherwise. All these may be displayed in a tabular format or in beautiful graphs that are easy to comprehend.
2. Customer Retention.
Your Point of Sale should be able to capture customer information and behaviour. This would mean that your inventory purchasing will always be informed by your customers. You will be able to buy what customers like enabling you to make more sales in the long run. You don't wan't to run into a situation where a customer comes into your shop not to find what they are looking for. This is because it will make you risk losing that potential customer by dissapointing them for not having what they want. Next time when they wish to buy the same thing, they may think you don't have it and opt to go to your competitor instead. A good point of sale will save you from such a loss.
3. Customer Loyalty System
Talking of customer data, the information extracted from customer data is capable of making you have an effective customer loyalty program which will make your retail business retain loyal customers by giving them goodies like gift cards and so on. Customer loyalty makes you have a good relationship with your customers which will surely result to your business success in the long run.
4. Quick Checkout
You definately don't wan't long queues of customers waiting to be served since some of them can give up shopping with you especially when the trait becomes monotonous. The Sales Module of your POS system should be running super fast enabling the checkout process to be very quick minimising any time wastage. Eliminate any manual process that could be delaying the sales process. Let the software do the job.
5. Staff Management
If you have hired staff, you need to be able to monitor their sales activities. As an administrator you should be able to create employee accounts, give them required permisions, disable their accounts and so on. You should have the power to control their activities while at work like setting performance targets for them and knowing who performs best and so on ensuring maximum productivity. You need to be able to do these when even not physically at the shop.
6. Ease of Use
Your choice of POS should be such that it will be asy to use even with non tech-savvy employees as it may be the case. The user interface should be elegant and easy to navigate. Life should be easy free from complicated software especially for a small businesses. If you acquire Advance POS or OSPOS from me for instance, you will get a free training until you and your employees until you become abreast with every aspect of the software of choice.
7. Product Variation
If you are dealing with products that come in different styles and variations, your point of sale system should be able to capture all that. Examples may include same product from different manufactures, same product of different colors, sizes or textures. Your inventory management module should be able to track all those dynamic aspects of the products you are dealing with.
8. Barcoding
Among the fast checkout techniques includes product having barcodes for easy product identification and especially during checkout. The point of sale should be able to easily generate barcodes for labelling on the products. This helps also in tracking products since the system can tell whether the product has been sold or not.
9. Bulk Imports
Whether it is inventory uploading or otherwise, adding inventory onto the database should not be a tedious process. Hundreds or thousands of data on files such as csv or xlsx should be uploaded quite easily by the Point of Sale system.
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