benefits of having pos in your retail store

5 Benefits of having a Point of Sale System in your Retail Store

Retail is a tough industry and as any owner would know it becomes a juggle to stay operational when dealing with tight margins, increasing competition and managing all the different moving parts.

Point of Sale systems can be a great tool to help manage the overwhelming tasks at hand for all business owners. A POS platform can help ensure your business delivers high customer satisfaction, track inventory efficiently, as well as giving owners deeper insights into sales reports which helps to identity weaknesses and growing trends.

But even with all these benefits, around 50% of single-store retailers are still operating without a POS system in place, which could be because of the overwhelming feat it is to find the right POS system for each individual business.

With this in mind we have identified 5 must have features retail businesses need within a Point of Sale platform.

Sales Reporting

Having an insight into reporting and analytics allows retailers the transparency they need to analyse their stores sales data and evaluate performance. So having a POS system with in depth reporting capabilities not only allows you to automatically keep track of high selling items it also helps to track your stores overall revenue. This can include being able to see the exact profit on particular products or lines. Therefore having this kind of insight allows you to identify, focus and expand on those top selling or top earning products.

Arming your business with this knowledge eliminates the need for guess work, and gives owners the true data picture on how their store is performing. So make sure when you are selecting a POS system, you find one that delivers on reporting and data.

Customer Loyalty

Statistics show it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer than it does to keep an exisiting one, so implementing a customer management program for those regulars is a must for retailers. The easiest way is to have a customer loyalty program. Some Point of Sale systems have a simple one built in, but if not having an application that can seamlessly integrate with your software is a must.

The benefits of being able to manage your customers within your POS allows you to collect appropriate data like personal information and sales histories which will then allow you to tailor your offerings to each of your individual customers.

Being able to identify these key customer behaviours lends to strengthening the transparency business owners need to analyse data and grow.

Inventory management

Maintaining and managing the stock on hand within your business is a vital part in the success of your store. Too much stock can restrict cash flow and cause trouble if emergent issues arise that need payment, and not enough stock can lead to frustrated customers not being able to purchase the item they were after. This balancing act can be tricky, and is affected by numerous factors but having an electronic, up to date inventory system can help take the guess work out of it. Being able to identify trends or purchase cycles through reports will help to make sure you are ordering appropriately. While having stock levels available electronically will allow you to see stock levels in real time at a glance.

Hardware

Another important aspect in the retail industry is the hardware you run your software on. Hardware can help you save time, have a quicker and easier check out process, reduce human error and increase your all round efficiency. For example being able to use barcode scanners can greatly reduce the time it takes to manually search for a product. This can also remove the need to manually enter the selling price, eliminating entering errors which can lead to customer frustration and even a loss in a sale.

The hardware component can make up the largest chunk of your expense when it comes to installing or upgrading your point of sale system and for good reason. Since POS related hardware products are generally tried and tested against the rigours of commercial use, quality products are essential. But what if your exisiting hardware is all in good working order and you don't have a need for upgrading your hardware? Well finding a system that can reuse that hardware is an absolute must when you are on the quest for a new system.

E-Commerce

Online shopping and digital commerce has been experiencing rapid growth for a number of years and a lot of retailers are now choosing to have an online presence as well as a physical one. In doing so it gives you more sales channels to work with and expand your audience and reach. So in this instance, an extremely important factor is having a POS system that can integrate with an e-commerce platform. Having this integration allows you to keep track of your stock even when you are selling out of two different areas in your business. Stock levels will be continually updated when a product is sold or when a purchase order is received so that your online store will always have the correct amount of stock available. This eliminates the issue of someone purchasing a product online and when you don't physically have the stock to complete the order.