Running a retail business requires a variety of administrative, managing, and advertising skills. These skills are essential to ensure that your business runs smoothly, from making sure there is enough inventory to compiling monthly sales reports.

Having a reliable Retail Point of Sale (POS) can go a long way in ensuring that your business operations will run smoothly. Retail POS software will help you streamline processes and gain useful information to help you make strategic business decisions. Typically POS systems consist of a combination of hardware components and software applications. Often the hardware is as little as a portable card reader, and the software will only be a smartphone application.

A complete retail POS software includes both back and front-end management tools. Your business can gain a lot from retail POS software regardless of the size, so it’s critical to know which system and features will fit best for your company.

Hardware components of a Retail POS system

PIN pad, cash drawer, swiper, and customer receipt printer are the basic hardware components that come with most POS systems. Other devices can include, depending on your business needs such as barcode scanner for fast and automatic data entry, a customer-facing display, and a scale for weighing products. You might also want to invest in more efficient technologies, such as touchscreen monitors, tablets, and smartphones with the advancement of mobile and wireless technology.

The value of an online Retail POS Software

A point-of-sale system can be very beneficial for your small business in various ways:

• Save time by simplifying multiple operations via a single program
• Increases the productivity of employees, and reduces administrative expenses
• Prevents human errors with automated systems
• Provides comprehensive revenue and data analysis
• Improves the customers’ experience

What are the Key Online Retail POS Software Features?

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Building strong relationships with customers means that there is a bigger chance they will want to do business with you more than once. To monitor all customer details, retail POS software should have an advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) feature. A retail POS software with this feature helps you to monitor the purchasing behavior of your clients, create customer profiles, and recognizes the most important clients. Furthermore, you can create loyalty and loyalty programs with an app, personalize interaction with the customers, and use other marketing strategies to make a lasting impact on the people purchasing your product or services. Your retail POS software will provide you with the capacity to:

• • Attach customer sales/transactions
  • Keep track of the history of your clients’ transactions
  • Capture information about customers, such as age, name, birthday, email address and phone number
  • Use email marketing to stay connected with them and providing them with the latest news.
  • More advanced systems will feature an integrated customer loyalty program.

2. Inventory management

An automated tool enabling small business owners to collect data in real-time, monitor the best-selling products and easily refill stock. You can obtain, monitor, and sell products in real-time, using barcode recognition technology. That means you can eliminate the hassle of tracking sales and controlling your stock levels all by yourself.

When you are talking to customers, you want to provide them with the best you have got. For this to be possible, fast, and detailed information about your inventory is crucial. Imagine if a customer asks about the availability of a particular item, and in seconds you will have provided him/her with a response –  without searching through piles of stock in your storage room. Improved customer service is just one of the advantages of retail POS software with the capacity to handle inventories. You can optimize your time with your clients face-to-face by understanding what products you have in stock. Moreover, having quick access to data on quantity and pricing does not hurt either.

The inventory-managed retail POS software allows you to review and update comprehensive reports, receive low-stock warnings, and calculate profit margins to keep your company even more optimized. Thus, you can make crucial decisions with data reporting, such as how and when to adjust the price of an item. You won’t have to spend so much time worrying about running out of popular products. Meaning that your company can focus on providing the best experience for your customers.

High-end POS software allows you to:

• Trace levels of inventory across various locations
• Retail POS software allows seamless ordering, like instantly creating custom reorders of your best-selling items.
• Digital scanning and counting of goods
• Purchases and orders are consolidated in a single order.
• Manage your inventory by creating variations in products (size, colour)
• Classify particular products that have a distinctive serial number

3. Sales Reporting

Most online retail POS software allows you to view your sales. The difference, however, lies in how those numbers are conveyed, and how easy it is to access data and the number of details you get. Ideally, a leading online retail POS software like CloudOne is able to:

• Generate detailed sales reports (based on employee, hour, product, total sales cost, net profit, percentage profit, total retail amount, gross margin);
• Include convenient snapshots and charts of the sales success of your business.

4. Employee Reporting and Management

Your employee performance can make or break the success your business will have. The number of sales will rise when having the ability to established sales targets as well as knowing who your best-sellers are and who requires additional training. Your online retail POS software should provide you with the capacity to:

• Include personnel into your system
• Track the hours of employees weekly and their overtime
• Create and modify work schedules based on the activity forecasted
• Analyze which employees are performing best
• E-mail working schedules to your staff

What is a Cloud-Based Retail POS Software?

A cloud-based POS system is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) web-based solution that stores your data in the cloud rather than on a computer. Unlike traditional server-based retail POS systems, you can access data, process payments, and receive automatic internet updates. On top of that, the migration to a cloud-based POS system has other valuable benefits such as:

• Your data can be accessed anywhere, anytime using nothing but the internet.
• Automatic upgrades and data backups help avoid expensive downtime in your business.
• You will save a lot of money because there will be a decrease in software upgrades, maintenance and licensing fees.
• Inventory monitoring and real-time sales reporting will get rid of guesswork.
• Revolutionary analytics allows you to make better business decisions.

As already mentioned above, cloud-based retail POS software allows you to take your business anywhere anytime. Plus, even if your internet connection is interrupted, you can continue to take payments from your customers — your system will track sales and sync your data as soon as you are back online. That makes a cloud-based retail POS software also ideal for small business owners traveling to industry events, art and craft fairs, doing catering, and so much more. 

It’s time for retailers to embrace a cloud-hosted retail POS software that provides all the high-end features. Are you ready for transformation?

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