5 Ways a POS System Can Add Value to Your Small Business
A point-of-sale (POS) system is an invaluable tool for all brick-and-mortar storefronts today. As a genuinely innovative technology, these systems streamline multiple operations and responsibilities in a business’s overall workflow.
While you’ll notice its primary purpose in facilitating transactions, it has other usages like tracking inventory, keeping tabs on loyalty programs, and supporting management and back-of-house operations. That’s a lot of potential and responsibility placed on one system!
Read on to take a deeper look into the main features of this technology and discover five ways a POS system can add value to your small business.
Early Beginnings
POS systems entered the business world as trackers of sales data. Over time, their capabilities would develop to cover broader internal operations. Now, POS systems are everywhere and allow businesses to track their revenue without doing all the work manually.
More To Know
Typically, these systems require equipment purchases and may require an occasional upgrade as transactions continue to evolve. There is usually a learning curve when understanding a POS system. It helps to train yourself and your staff so that you can make the most out of the experience.
Inventory Management
Inventory management allows businesses to keep monthly or planned orders in check. When it comes to disposable goods, inventory management prevents the situation of ordering too much and wasting goods—this is especially important for food and beverages.
For example, inventory management allows restaurants and bars to ensure servers, bartenders, and cooks have proper training and can use the standard amount of ingredients within each dish or drink. When there are inconsistencies in amounts the following month, it may be essential to address this with your staff to ensure everyone uses the same standard processes.
Robust POS systems will let you set notifications on low product inventory or popular product categories. For e-commerce businesses, inventory management allows you to advertise for products in stock properly and notify potential customers that there is only a limited amount remaining of a specific product. This incentivizes consumers to stay on your online store and finalize their purchases.
Inventory management is critical for POS systems; most inventory management systems can easily integrate with your existing systems through spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets.
Accurate and Instant Transfer of Data
When accounting for products by hand, there will always be room for human error. Human error is the first issue, which also leads to delays in transferring that data. Recording inventory, products, or estimations of goods by hand will take time.
Most businesses handle stock replenishment and inventory management on days that are not as busy. For small businesses with constant movement or seemingly endless tasks, finding downtime to address crucial inventory upkeep becomes difficult. A POS system will be able to carry out stock notifications instantly, allowing your team members or staff to replenish goods proactively. Furthermore, a POS system will have preventative measures in place to reduce instances of human error.
A POS system that syncs with your website will also instantly notify you if someone purchased a product online before someone in your physical store attempts to do the same. This prevents potential problems that may arise for businesses that sell both in-person and online. Finally, if you have multiple store locations, POS systems make it easy to streamline inventories quickly and efficiently.
Improved Customer Service
The increase in resources and time POS systems provides will effectively allow you and your staff to focus on client retention and overall customer service. POS systems will be able to notify staff members first on whether they have the goods necessary to fulfill the customer’s sale.
This prevents situations where customers may be unhappy due to your staff failing to meet expectations at the end of the shopping process. The ability to accurately answer customer questions can increase customer satisfaction scores and empower your staff to represent the business with confidence.
POS systems also allow for multiple payment methods, including the following: credit, debit, mobile phone payment processors, and third-party payment processing apps. Allowing your customers to pay with their favorite methods will be a significant step in improving customer service.
Convenience
To further expand on convenience, POS systems also expedite the transaction process. Instead of fiddling around with cash, your customers will be able to use their preferred payment method to pay for goods. This increases their confidence in making a financial transaction with you and helps to limit instances of inaccurate cash drawers.
You can mount POS technology anywhere; however, using PAX terminal stands to situate payment machines can help increase accessibility and convenience, ultimately resulting in a positive shopping experience.
Optimizing Off Data
POS systems can track customer engagement data too. Through customer engagement data, small businesses can provide additional goods and services to customers based on historical data and feedback. This method of selling products or goods can also take place online.
POS systems will typically contain a dashboard or overview that displays data over a time period of your choice. This will allow you to make informed decisions on what is currently selling and what is not.
Do you sell products online and through a brick-and-mortar store? No problem.
As mentioned before, several POS systems can account for sales in multiple locations and online. The system allows you to separate or categorize data based on designated parameters. You can view data regarding which products you mainly sell online, the average order value of customers in the store, and more.
Trackability or Estimated Time of Arrival
This feature applies to small businesses that will ship products out to customers—a robust POS system will let you track packages and give your customers an estimated arrival time. Plenty of distribution companies integrate with POS systems for this very purpose.
As the business owner, this will also give you options to deal with customers quickly in case the product goes missing or a delay occurs in the shipping process.
There are many more ways a POS system adds value to your business. Savvy startup owners are always looking to improve their business further and keep their employees satisfied while delivering the best customer experience. At the end of the day, this technology enables small businesses to operate at the same capacity as larger, expansive retailers. An intelligent POS solution has the capability to reveal new opportunities and add more flexibility in modernizing a business.
