3 Ominous Signs You Need To Dump Your POS System Today
Everything you do in business climaxes with the sale.
Whether you are a veteran company, a fledging start-up, or a brick-and-mortar store, the ultimate goal in commerce is to get someone to buy your product or service.
From market research to keyword research, from PPC ads to list building, from competitor analysis to auto responders, from free offers to sales pages, the culmination of all these efforts is one — sales.
Your POS system is the backbone of your business as it plays a crucial role in capturing sales and increasing ROI. However not every POS system will do. With the marketing landscape changing fast and reinventing itself every three years you’ve got to keep up otherwise you’ll lose sales.
In this post I’ll cover three signs that show that now may be the time to change your POS system.
Ready.
Here we go.
Warning Signal #1: You’re still using an electronic cash register
If your till just records transactions and prints receipts, you are losing sales.
A lot of them.
According to Capterra, 34% of sales still happen at a traditional register. Clearly, many retailers are not prioritizing their POS systems. Another research revealed that 46% of companies spend less than $1,500/year on their POS software.
Although traditional cash registers are cheap and easy to use they fall short in meeting the needs of today’s demanding customers. Modern POS systems like the Shopify POS do so much more than traditional registers.
Here are some benefits of current POS systems over outdated ones.
- More detailed reports and data– with plenty customer data at your disposal you’ll improve your marketing strategy and make more money.
- Omni-channel capabilities– an omni-channel ready system allows you to follow customers across devices and provide seamless personalized experiences across all channels.
- Improved accuracy so you cut down glaring human errors.
- Inventory management and control– up-to-the-minute inventory updates allow you to easily keep track of your stock and restock accordingly.
- Customer relationship management (CRM)– so you stay in touch with customers.
- Social selling capabilities– with social selling you can sell and provide customer support to your customers on social media.
Warning Signal #2: Your checkout queues are getting longer and longer
Long queues at your shop are great aren’t they? They show your shop’s busy and you’re making more money.
However, they can be a sign of a serious problem that’s costing you sales. Persistently long queues reveal one thing — a failure to promptly serve customers. These days customers are particularly restive.
In a recent research by Time Trade 70% of retailers reported that consumers will wait 5 minutes or less in a checkout line before they abandon a purchase and go elsewhere.
Source: Time Trade
The message is clear: if you make customers wait a minute longer than they’d like they’ll head for the exit.
To cut winding lines and sell to more visitors switch to a POS system that offers BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup In Store). BOPIS boosts sales. A recent study on consumer buying trends in the 2017 holiday shopping season showed that 40% of shoppers BOPIS and 90% of them bought additional items once in the store to pick up their goodies.
Another way of reducing queues is changing to mobile POS. A survey from mobile services company Stratix, showed that retailers who enabled mobile POS technology saw an average sales increase of 24% in 2017. The same research projects that retailers who deploy in-store mobile effectively this year will have an increase of 146% in sales for the year.
A mobile POS system speeds checkout and benefits your business in several ways:
- Provide paper-free receipting services by instantly sending receipts via email.
- Empowers sales assistants to ring sales anywhere on the shop floor.
- Capture customer information before they get to the check-out line so they sail through faster.
- Sales assistants can take orders while customers are in line so they don’t have to wait longer than they should.
- Enables sales staff to spend more time on the shop floor so they sell more.
In short mobile POS pleases customers and makes you more money.
Warning Signal #3: You balance your offline and online store inventories separately
If you’re scrambling between your brick and mortar store data and online store info in order to balance your inventory, it’s time for a change.
Not only is this cumbersome, it wastes precious time that could be better spent elsewhere.
An agile POS system allows you to bridge the gap between offline and online retail. You can manage all parts of your business from one dashboard. Data collection becomes a breeze — you can pull out all kinds of useful stats from one place.
One integrated POS system with powerful analytics can:
- Show the status of every item in your store in real time across all channels.
- Track the performance of all your sales channels in a flash.
- Indicate how many sales each employee makes in a given period.
- Identify your repeat customers and reward them so they buy more.
- Pinpoint your best sellers and worst sellers so you adjust accordingly.
- Generate detailed customer data so you sell better.
Build your business faster by providing customers with consistent experiences from channel to channel through one flexible POS system that syncs user experience across channels.
POS System: More Than A Bare Till
Today’s POS is more than a simple terminal for payments. It has evolved into a crucial tool for customer service that fuels business growth.
At the core a good POS system improves customer service. It provides prompt and personalized seamless customer experiences across channels. Poor customer service costs US brands an estimated loss of $41 billion annually. A good optimized POS helps you recoup some of those losses and increase profits.
