A good POS system is vital in the retail industry.
If you run a retail business, you certainly understand the need for a good point of POS software. The last thing you want is customers waiting impatiently in line while your staff manually enters purchase information into the system.
But a good point-of-sale system does more than just process payments and record sales. It can help you improve.
Inventory management that tells you what’s being sold and what’s not.
Profitability by showing which product lines are making you money.
Marketing by highlighting your customers’ buying habits.
Face-to-face sales by giving your staff a mobile catalogue.
If selling products is the core of your business, a good POS software should be the backbone.
Bring cash to your customers with mobile checkout
In traditional retail, people search for the product they want and take it to the checkout to pay for it. However, this model is rapidly changing.
Improve your staff’s sales skills
Knowledge is the key to sales. The more information you can give your staff about your products, the more confident they are in discussing them with customers. This can lead to increased conversion rates and happier employees.
Your employees may not be able to retain detailed information about your entire product range. But if they can’t hold the information in their head, you can put it in their hands. A high-quality, easy-to-learn POS software provides in-depth information about the products you sell, so they always have a catalogue. Each product can be displayed with relevant products, sales tips and sales advice. This helps your staff do their jobs better and generates more revenue for your business.
With good POS software, you can also see which employees are selling the most – so you can give them bonuses – and which ones are struggling and could benefit from extra support or training.
Reassure your customers
Some of your customers may question the idea of entering their credit card details into a smartphone or tablet. But with good checkout software, you can hide the app’s selection screen and make the tablet look like a single-handed point-of-sale device.
It’s important to earn your customers’ trust, but it’s even more important to respect and reward that trust. Choose a system that securely encrypts customer and banking information.
Simplify inventory management
Quality POS software has built-in inventory management or can be integrated with an inventory management application. This can help you figure out which are the best (and which are the least) selling products. This sounds simple, but it’s a big deal. A 2015 study showed that retailers lose $1.1 trillion in revenue each year due to overstocking and understocking.
You can dive into the data to find out which products sell well on which days, in which seasons and at which prices.
This helps you fine-tune your inventory management process. Your best-selling products will never run out, and shelf space will never be wasted on products that don’t sell. Combined with accounting software, the right POS system also gives you the following capabilities.
Understand the profitability of each product category
Examine the relationship between sales volume and price (to get to the top of profitability).
Determine when it is best to order stock and in what quantities.
Know your customer and increase sales
You can take this a step further by integrating POS system with your customer relationship management system. This allows you to start seeing patterns in their preferences and make smarter marketing decisions.
When your sales team can simply ask your customers by name, it can bring up their entire purchase history, preferences, interests and even their birthdays. This information can be used to develop customer loyalty programmers, special offers and promotions. This builds customer loyalty and helps you sell more products to each customer.
Keeping customers happy is vital to your business – after all, it costs many times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. With a good CRM system and smart loyalty rewards that are