A successful retail store strives on a range of marketing, administrative, and management skills. All of which can be performed by a retail POS system. You need to ensure you have enough inventory to meet purchase demands and keep records of monthly sales all at the same time. You have to remain on top of these tasks to ensure your business runs at top speed. However, even the most skilled and experienced business owner can use some help keeping all these different pieces together. This is why an efficient retail POS system can make a world of difference when putting to good use. Remember, the keywords here are ‘good use.’ Even the best POS systems for retail businesses only carry the business as far as you are willing to learn about it. This is why this guide is so crucial to helping you unlock the full potential of your POS solution. In this post, you will learn the following:
A retail POS system is a combination of software and hardware accessories designed purposefully to help with the management of retail businesses. The software side of the system is multi-functional, and so are some of the hardware parts. Besides processing sales, the POS software helps retail owners with employee and customer management, bookkeeping, and several other functions.
The list of functions is tall and keeps getting taller with new additions like CRM integration, and business intelligence. We’ll focus on the benefits and key features in the following sections. However, it is essential to know that there is a wide variety of POS solutions in the software market, of which Posvice software is a great option. They are not all the same and cannot all serve the needs of your business.
So, what’s the difference between a POS system for the hospitality industry and the POS system for retail? Typically, you’ll find multi-purpose or general POS options out there. It is sound reasoning to assume that they will cater to more needs especially since they were designed to serve across the board. But take a minute to ask yourself, would you rather have a specialist operate you or a general practitioner?
The trend in marketing, customer expectation, and other variables in business are constantly changing. That’s why the retail POS system is the system that can evolve with your business and evolving challenges it has to face both now and later.
When did you last visit a retail store? Was it an online or offline store? Daily activities at retail stores worldwide are buzzing with life and excitement. Given the festive season and the recent Black Friday, the tips for the right retail POS software played a pivotal role in helping businesses cope with the increasing demand of shoppers.
A lot of retail businesses are seeking ways to stay ahead of the cut-throat competition by leveraging technology and innovation. At the same time, maximize skinny profit margins. The impact your point of sale system has on your retail business may be much more significant than you know. To find out the retail POS system’s top features that can help your business do just this, keep reading.
At this point, it must be evident that the best retail POS systems bring in more benefits than helping at the checkout. Some of these extra benefits include:
- Product – customer management – They helper the modern retailer to track and safely record customer details automatically. This helps build a deeper bond with the customer and lasting relationship that results in repeat business.
- Sales reporting and analytics – Also offers retailers an opportunity to make intelligent business decisions backed by data and robust analytics. You are thereby making your business more competitive.
- Active inventory management – Puts stock control on automation. Hence, your retail business can maintain an updated count of products and when receive new shipments.
- Take your business anywhere – With a cloud-enabled retail POS system, you can manage, track, and monitor your business any part of the globe. You can gain full access to your records, inventory, staff productivity, and many other details about the daily, weekly, and monthly operations of your business.
- Quicker process for return goods – Retails sales on the internet are familiar with good return, purchase cancellations, failed deliveries, and many more. Therefore, the ideal POS system for retail businesses makes provision for these eventualities. You can see and process canceled well at the push of a button. Also, your stocks balance out once the cancellation order comes through.
- E-Commerce – The last but certainly not the least benefit enables retailers in any niche, market, or industry to quickly take their business to the internet. Hence, reaching a wider audience with an online store. There are more benefits. Together they give your retail business a competitive edge. Especially if you know specific competitive moves, you can make with the right retail POS system.
Many retail operators have run their business for years without a point of sale software. This is especially true in the case of single-store retailers. Sure the Excel spreadsheets have been useful. However, they can only go so far. Today’s retail operations demand more than sheets.
If your business would grow and survive the cut-throat competition of today’s business world, you must need a specialized software solution. Here are some excellent competitive advantages you stand to gain with a retail POS system.
More efficient operation – The system makes many aspects of the administrative tasks more efficient. You are hence freeing up more of your time to work on strategy, marketing, employee training, and other aspects of customer satisfaction like interactions.
Scale the Business – With insight into key performance indicators and other sensitive information to business development, you can capitalize this and form a better strategy or business that scales. You can identify your peak seasons, best selling products, and highest paying customers by region, sex, occupation, etc. This information can inspire your marketing approach and take your retail business to high heights.
Competition is steep, and if you are considering a retail POS system, this might be the best time to ride the high tide. Remember, if you don’t use one, your competitors surely will (or are already using the best retail POS systems).
The common misconception surrounding POS systems for retail is that one size fits all assumptions. Because of this, many retailers find “free” POS systems very attractive to choose from. Instead of going on about why it is the wrong choice, here are ten key features that should tell the modern retailer that a POS solution is worth their time.
Full offline functionality Offline functionality is vital for retail businesses. In essence, this implies that you can’t safely assume the internet will always function at its best. If you and your staff lose connection, your free or paid POS system should smoothly continue to capture customer data and process payments. Also, once the connection is restored, everything should sync automatically without the need for any technical or manual interventions.
Mobile Payment
You should get seamless mobile payments from all major payment platforms through or point of sales system. Else what’s the point? Because it speeds up check out and ensures customer queues don’t get too long. Which might hurt the customer experience during shopping.
Digital Receipts
We are in the digital age, and more retail locations are adopting digital receipts. Which shows that it might be working for them. Though the paper receipts haven’t phased out just yet, you can stay at the cutting with digital options through your retail POS system. These don’t crumble and cannot be misplaced. The records are permanent and backed up for any future references. And since customers can’t lose it, it’s a win-win.
EMV Payments
The modern retailer accepts and braces EMV payments (Chip and PIN). The recent decades have seen a significant increase in the usage of EMV chip credit cards. Therefore, you would be missing out on a lot of sales if you are using a POS system that doesn’t accept credit card payment. Whether it be free or not. You should consider changing it. Centralized Product Management With a centralized product management feature, you can get all your inventory, product pricing, and supply chain in the same place. As such, you are confident everything is going according to order. Right from the warehouse to the storefront, you can confidently rely on the details you have of your products.
Centralized Customer Management
An essential feature of the retail POS system is the capturing of customer data. With this information, you can track sales patterns, plan marketing campaigns, and many more. Though many POS systems for retail business (including some free solutions) allow customer data capture, they cannot seamlessly transfer this data to a CRM. The ideal POS system should enable a seamless flow of data across all key platforms so that you can fully benefit from the system and the data gathered.
Apart from these fantastic features, here, four equally crucial elements of your retail POS system must have to benefit your business fully.
Tax integration
Gift card creation
Sale rep record keeping
Coupons and discounts
These are the key features you should be looking out for. Not just the price tag of a retail POS system.
Shopping for the right POS for your retail business begins with a critical analysis of your business needs. Therefore, after you’ve thought long and hard about the needs of your business, you can decide which retail POS is right for you. Whether you need to upgrade an existing system or get your first one, the process shouldn’t keep you up at night.
Below are 12 factors you need to consider. These you guide you to make the right choice.
The compatibility with existing hardware
Overall set-up cost
Ease of use
Required training for staff
The ability of the system to support future growth
Inventory tracking capabilities
Assistance and ease of integration with third-party software
Quality of customer support
Reporting and data storage features
System ergonomics and usability (both for staff and customers – especially the disabled)
Support for cloud-enabled features
Out-of-box security features of both hard and software.
Over the recent years, the retail industry has undergone a tremendous amount of changes. Today, it’s common to find stores open beyond the standard 9-5. Not to mention online retail that is usually up and running 24/7. Therefore you need to select robust software with the support that helps you stay on top of the demanding changes you and your business might be facing.
When evaluating the POS system for retail business, you will find two standard pricing models. These are the subscription-based model and the perpetual license pricing models. - Perpetual license – With this option, you pay an upfront amount of money for the license of the software behind the POS system. Having paid in full for this license, you can use the software in perpetuity. Usually, this option comes with an on-premise POS system because it is a more traditional form of pricing model. - Subscriptions – With this model, you pay a monthly sum for the right to use the system. It could either be billed bi-annually, annually or monthly. Based on the budget your business has allocated for a retail POS system, you will be required to choose between these two options. Therefore you need to do thorough research to find the most popular system for your kind of POS. Next, you checkout software user POS reviews to know what their current and former clients have to say. After this, you can make your move and contact the various dealers for a quote. At this point, again, you need to take your time and carefully compare POS systems quotes for the most welcome package. It might seem like a lot of details and a lot of work. However, you will be saving yourself a lot of time and trouble if you put in the diligence at this point.
Learn More Compare POS SystemsYou may be wondering what’s the difference between an on-premise POS system and a cloud-based one.
For one, the differences stretch beyond the mode of deployment. However, you need to remember that there are pros and cons to each option. Hence your final choice is solely manner of preference and suitability. So there are obvious benefits of knowing the difference between these two options prior to purchase.
The main difference is the fact that the on-premises POS system (traditional POS) operates inside a localized network with local storage servers. Just like the software you install on your office computer. They save the data related to your business on a local drive or server. Usually, you purchase them upfront.
On the other hand, cloud-based POS software is the latest innovation in the POS market. By the use of cloud computing technology, these sophisticated systems allow you to access a dedicated POS platform with any geographic locations. This is provided you have an internet connection. They also have flexible pricing and usually adopt the subscription pricing model.
Nevertheless, if you would instead prefer recommendations, here are our top picks for retail POS systems for 2020
Here is a list of the top 10 recommended POS systems for retail business management in 2020 and beyond.
You can begin with this list and start narrowing down till you find the best fit. Ideally, we recommend business owner to request some days of demo or free trial from POS vendors before making any financial commitments.
Of the benefits and features of the retail POS system, the top for requested is inventory management, customer management, e-commerce, retail accounting. What are the top features of the modern POS system for your business? We would like to know. Comments in the comments section. Also, if there are any fantastic POS system s people in the retail industries need to hear about, by all means, tell us about them.