Top 6 Reasons to Use a Point of Sale System in a Retail Store

Introducing a POS System can help reduce the unwanted operational costs of your business. According to a study by Intuit Market Research, a retailer with a revenue of $300,000 can reduce the cost by almost 10% with the help of a POS system. A POS system reduces the need for human resources, which acts as a major cost-cutting mechanism. This can be seen in various operational processes. One of the main aspects where a POS system can reduce costs is being able to understand the status of inventory. Unwanted delays, ordering the same consignment multiple times, loss of stock due to expiry, costs related to unplanned haphazard purchases adds to unwanted costs. The other aspect is unplanned campaigns carried out without sufficient insights or a guarantee in favorable return on investment which can be replaced by well-directed campaigns, using data such as customer visit frequency and product history from the POS system that could save a huge deal of effort and cost. Choosing the best POS system for retail will minimize unwanted costs drastically at the same time improve your businesses’ ROI.

Having a smooth inventory system is the backbone of a successful business. A POS system has built-in inventory management software that helps the business keep track of its inventory and to manage it efficiently. A POS system also helps in the process of adding new items to the system that are catalogued for later use with frequent updating of the same items. It also assists in making intelligent ordering decisions effectively, based on the minimum quantity of products in the inventory as well as by stored customer statistics. Automating these tasks with a POS system helps your business grow with efficient real-time inventory management.

A POS system lets you create loyalty programs for your valued customers through loyalty reward systems. This enables the POS to capture customer information and monitor buyer patterns. The captured information can be used to create targeted incentives as well as personalized marketing campaigns easily, which ensures better sales. While eliminating the risk of failure of marketing campaigns, the intervention of a POS system helps achieve better overall customer satisfaction. This will create more loyal customers as they are provided with benefits and efficient service. This is a huge advantage for the business to keep its existing customers satisfied.

Creating and maintaining reports manually is a stressful and time-consuming task. A POS system solves this problem by capturing information constantly and using them to generate reports automatically with the overview of critical factors like frequency of sales, the ratio in product category movement, and status of inventory and its movement frequency over a period of time. As mentioned above, a report such as an inventory expiry report will give you all inventory that is nearing expiry and using a customer profiling report, you could plan for promotions to quickly move the stock. A Purchase Order report will give you an indication of what goods are still in transit, preventing multiple re-orders resulting in overstocking. Most importantly, the sales report will give the owner an indication of the business is making sufficient profits to stay afloat. The POS system presents these reports in an easy to understand grids, charts and tables. Reports make it easier to identify areas that need improvement, key success factors and assists in orienting business decisions. This will help maintain your retail store increase its profit, meet targets, develop new strategies, and gives a competitive advantage over other competitors

Human errors are inevitable but not ideal, given their impact on business operations, some of which may be long term. By introducing a POS system to your retail store, these errors can be minimized to a great extent. With the built-in functionality of a POS, manual tasks from updating inventory to billing items at the cashier become more accurate. The touch-screen, the user-friendly feature of most POS systems, allows the employees to access all necessary information at their fingertips. Enabling levels of permissions and tracking cash allows the business owner to be more hands-on with the day-to-day operations.

In a retail store where most tasks are heavily dependent on human intervention, the staff is obliged to do a lot of manual updating constantly. But with a POS system, the time saved by automating tasks can be utilized to focus on other important areas of the business which cannot be handed over to technology, such as building better relationships with suppliers, customers and even within the team. this not only creates more a conducive work environment but also builds morale and loyalty.