Retail store owners operate on tight margins and have to manage a lot of products. Due to this, using manual methods to track all these processes and records become very difficult as time passes. Because of the tedious and time-consuming nature of tasks such as inventory management and sales reporting, small retailers often miss out on opportunities to grow their business. A point-of-sale (POS) system is a great tool to overcome this hurdle—but finding the right POS for a small or medium business (SMB) is no easy feat.
We recommend five must-have POS features to look for in a system. By implementing these features, small retailers can eliminate the most manual and tedious steps from their processes, resulting in more time and resources to focus on growing key parts of their business such as improving customer experience or attracting customers.
1. Sales Reporting & Analytics
Sales reporting and analytics allows you to capture and analyse your store’s sales data. It gives you a real-time snapshot of the performance of your store through various metrics. Relying on concrete data rather than guesswork enables you to make more informed decisions to increase sales and profitability.
Not only does it automatically keep track of your top-selling products, but also shows how much revenue you make on each product. This helps you identify and focus on driving sales to your top-selling products.
2. Customer Management
Customer management applications collect data on your customers’ purchase histories, allowing you to identify your most valuable shoppers based on their expenditure, while tracking the entire retailer-customer relationship. A good retail customer management system can help drive loyalty and create new customers for your store. The POS payment systems also provide valuable intelligence around buyer behaviour that can create an effective customer loyalty program.
3. Inventory Management
Inventory management helps you keep track of your complete catalogue of products, whether on display or in the warehouse. Managing on-site inventory irrespective of the quantity is very important for the success of your store. Good inventory management capabilities help you take a look into your stocks and do the needful. This empowers you to eliminate inefficiencies, such as manual counting of stocks and digging through your warehouse for a specific product.
4. Point of Sale
POS is, as the name suggests, the point where sales are made. It is the place where your customer executes the payment for goods bought from your store. The modern POS software goes beyond just accepting and tracking sales. They also come with additional reporting features, such as which products are the best-selling or who your highest-performing sales personnel are.
A POS system can save a lot of time by simplifying your business operations, which in turn reduces any human error by automating tedious checkout processes, such as price calculation, item look-up, etc. You don’t have to dig through receipts also as you can easily look up any transaction processed.
5. eCommerce
eCommerce simply refers to any business transaction done online. If you’ve shopped online, you’ve interacted with an ecommerce software. eCommerce has become an unavoidable part of the shopping journey, which means that an online store is no longer just a “nice-to-have” for retailers, rather a “must-have” to stay competitive and achieve success.
We know that selecting the right POS system can be overwhelming. That’s why x2x eCommerce is here to help you shortlist POS systems that are a good fit for your business. Feel free to contact us at sales@x2xe-commerce.com or 888-929-3266 and get a FREE demo of 1 Hour!
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