The retail industry is undergoing a massive revolution. Retailers who are opening stores or have been in the business for decades are facing challenges with their retail operations e.g. Loss of inventory, accounts, etc.
Purchasing a point-of-sale system is a big decision for your retail business. While the right system streamlines processes and saves you time, the wrong system complicates simple tasks and becomes a source of frustration. You need a system that makes it easier to ring up sales, manage inventory, capture customer contact information, evaluate employee performance and generate sales reports. It should also share sales data with your other business systems, such as accounting and email marketing software, eliminating the need to manually input or transfer data between systems.
However, with so many options in the market today, from software providers such as CompuLynx, choosing the right POS system for your retail business may seem like its harder than ever.
That’s where CompuLynx comes in, we’re here to level the playing field. To help you make an educated judgment call by making sure you know what to consider before buying a POS system.
Here are some of the five things you should put into consideration:
- Customer Management
Allows sales and marketing teams to keep in touch with the customers and build a strong relationship. The POS software should be able to integrate with a CRM, allowing it to automatically pull customer data. The customer management tools keep track of the purchase history and attach transactions to customers.
The customer management module in software like NEXX Retail ERP is able to record important customer information and connect with email marketing to stay in touch with the customers. Many POS systems come with a customer management system that have a loyalty program built-in.
- Integration
Make it easy to connect the POS system with other business systems you use, such as your accounting or email marketing software. The benefit of this is that it allows the programs to share sales figures and customer contact information, saving you the hassle of manually downloading it from one program and uploading it to the other.
And when it comes to responding to customers, retailers integrate a POS system with a MailChimp account, and collect customer email addresses with a POS system at the point of transaction and have them sync directly with a MailChimp account. This way, the next time retailers go to send out a newsletter to loyal customers, they can skip the step of having to update the email list.
- Payment Method
The POS system should be compatible with the payment methods you want to use such as mobile money and card transactions. For instance, NEXX ERP retail point of sale (POS), allows customers to pay either using cash, M-Pesa, or credit card transactions for leading banks like Equity Bank, Absa Bank, and KCB Bank. This also minimizes the risk of fraud liability and is a must–have for any modern retail business.
- Usability
When choosing your POS system, make sure that it is easy and straightforward to use. Your employees should be able to easily understand what the POS system is and how to use it for all purposes. From the first day, your POS system should not feel complicated.
Therefore, before making a final decision to buy the ideal POS system, make sure you consider what the system is offering, its reviews, and whether it will fulfill your purpose. Once you are done, please leave it to the system and see how magically natural it becomes to manage your business.
- Reporting
For your business to be successful you need to understand it as well as possible. This means having access to the sales and transactions data from POS Systems like NEXX and ERP Retail POS that will empower you to make the right decisions. Big data may be something of a buzzword, but there is no doubt that it helps retailers get results. The more reporting options that your chosen POS can offer, the deeper you can drill down to get the specific information you need to have full awareness of your business. Using this, you can do more of what is going well, and less of what is not!
In conclusion, the right choice of a POS system from the very beginning will make it easier for you to plan the growth of your business. Alongside, it will also simplify the tasks of running it in its current form. With the help of the important tips mentioned above, you can get helped in choosing a POS system.
By Carolyne Rabut
Content Marketing – CompuLynx
