Growing Your Retail Store With the Right Technology
A retail store can survive only if it's selling more than it's spending. This might seem like an obvious concept when appearing in an article about retail stores, but in practice, it's often more difficult to master. To be fair, there are many factors outside of an owner's control. However, there is much in which they have a direct say, including choosing inventory, controlling margins, and managing staff. Minimizing costs and effort while maximizing sales is the absolute key to success, and balancing this formula properly is the difference between a business that thrives and one that fails. It is essential that a retail store is able to oversee all of these areas from a single system. These days, that means software.
Point of sale and inventory management software has been around since the early days of personal computers. But as technology has developed, many retail software packages have been slow to evolve with the market and are outdated. They remain complicated and difficult to use, designed by computer engineers with little or no expertise in creating friendly and intuitive user interfaces. Even if a system has a thousand bells and whistles, can you really expect to benefit from them if it's inscrutable and frustrating to use? When you consider all the various positions of a typical retail store, salespeople, inventory controllers, clerks, managers, accountants and more, the potential for confusion at every point in your business is too important to ignore.
A good software solution for managing your juvenile products store should deliver benefits that drive your business, rather than hinder it with processes that are labor-intensive or difficult to master and that lack easy integration between the front counter and the back office.
A good software solution should provide tangible benefits that:
- Save time for both staff and customers;
- Deliver added convenience for customers that will drive repeat business;
- Create a unified system that yields invaluable data to make educated and informed decisions about purchasing, pricing, and staffing; and
- Increase sales.
What follows is an overview of the features and functionality a good POS and inventory-management software solution should have to provide these benefits.
Saving Time
Even from setup and configuration, the right POS software can save you time. Importing options will let you create your product database in just minutes from a data file that your suppliers will likely be able to supply upon request. Batch modification tools keep your database up to date, allowing you to mark up prices based on product categories, or even set rules that automatically apply these markups without you having to think about it. A set of user privileges can often be configured to allow only certain staff access to particular features, so your front counter staff is unable to modify purchase orders, for example. Being able to move through the sales process quickly, from quote to order to invoice, keeps your customer engaged and your salespeople focused on selling.
Finally, one of the best ways to save time is simply being able to access all of the information relevant to your business quickly and easily; a good navigation system that puts your entire business at your fingertips can save you hours a week just in everyday use.
Customer Convenience
Excellent POS software saves your customers time, too, giving them a level of convenience that will encourage them to return. If they are inquiring about the availability of a particular product, a quick and informed reply from your staff can only make a powerful impression. The ability to leave deposits, back order stock, put items on layaway, redeem gift cards, and pay by a variety of methods are all ways you can provide top-notch customer service.
By keeping customer records, you can stay in touch with customers for direct marketing based on particular criteria. If you have multiple locations, don't underestimate the value of being able to provide "big box" features such as cross-store gift cards and returns to maintain personalized customer service regardless of where the customer is shopping. Offering these conveniences will help you get customers, but having a system with the power to do it quickly and easily will help you retain them.
A Unified System
Implementing a system that integrates point of sale, inventory management, customer management, accounts receivable, purchasing, reporting, and web sales minimizes effort and maximizes benefit. By centralizing each of these components, you reduce the time it takes to put information in and get information out. For example, rather than running a series of reports, exporting the data from one system and comparing it to the sales from another while trying to make educated decisions about inventory in yet another system, a comprehensive software solution should bring all these elements together, streamlining your workflows, simplifying stock management, and eliminating duplicate data entry.
More Sales
Of course, all these benefits should result in increased sales. By allowing retailers to focus on selling products rather than the administration of a complicated and fractured set of systems, the right solution brings together all the tools needed for everyone in an organization. Product cross selling can introduce high-margin add-ons to your customers that they might have otherwise missed. And by integrating a web store, a storeowner can reach an entirely new market without adding floor space and staff that will increase overhead.
In Conclusion
Retail is fiercely competitive. Technology gives retailers new tools that can give them the advantage they need to succeed. By using these tools, and implementing a software solution that brings together all the elements needed to run a shop into one simplified, comprehensive system, store owners are able to make informed purchasing decisions, streamline product and customer information, offer their product catalog online with minimum effort, and save valuable time for themselves and their staff. With the right solution, a relatively low one-time investment of hardware and software can bring a retail operation into the 21st century and provide a competitive edge.
The key is to make a thorough assessment of the solutions available on the market before committing to one POS system versus another. Develop your criteria for the best POS system for your business and stick to it. Take the time to engage in a demo and ask to speak to the software vendor's customers who have retail operations similar to your own.