Fixed Point of Sale for Retail Stores
Mobile Point of Sale & Line Busting App
Dashboard and Analytics Mobile App
Free Inventory Management App
Full Service Inventory Management App
E-Commerce Solution Platform
Order Management Solution
House Accounts and Invoicing
Workforce Empowerment App
Hospitality Point of Sale App
Table Mangement for Restaurants via Mobile or Tablet
Kitchen Display System
Seamless Sales Across All Channels
Elevating Sports & Entertainment Transactions Effortlessly
Streamlining Retail Transactions for Seamless Shopping
Optimizing Transactions for Vibrant Festival Experiences
Transforming Hospitality & Suite Service Management
Smart Inventory Management with RFID
Building Relationships, Rewarding Loyal Customers
Insights-Driven Decisions for Business Growth
No one is unaffected by the impact of the COVID-19 slowdown/shutdown. We are all in this together to make it through financially, physically and emotionally. Small businesses are hit particularly hard. With small businesses accounting for employing over 48% of all workers, the shutdown has the bigger impact on this group.
The following are ways for small businesses to help weather the crisis as well as ways that consumers can pitch in and help
Offer online sales through your website, Facebook Store and Instagram Store. If you have one or more social media profiles, start posting. Take photos of products, videos of the store or update posts and get your information out there and let your customers know you are still active and how they can purchase from you.
Offering gift cards allow your customers to support your business by providing much needed cash now and continued support for the future.
If you have the ability to use a video conferencing software, do so. You can connect and sell to customers via webcam and ship directly to their home.
Buy now to use later or better yet, buy a gift card to give as a gift to a person who is working extra hard during this time, such as a health care worker, grocery store clerk or is in emergency services
Call your favorite stores to see if they are taking phone orders or purchase online to support your favorite business. This will help them and you get cool new stuff.
Many restaurants are now offering deliveries or pick ups. Call your favorite restaurant to see what your options are or order from them online
People are still working, so tipping extra will not only help them financially but also boost their morale. They are working extra hard and this will show your appreciation to them.
Do you have a social media account? Reblog, retweet, or send out props to your favorite stores to give them a boost. Liking, commenting and reblogging will help get them noticed.
Consider this as a donation at this time. It will help the business during a time of little to no income. You can help them out by not rushing to cancel and keep it open so it will be ready as soon as you’re able to go back.
Donate what you can to local food banks and pantries to help your neighborhood. Give as much as you can to help those that have little to nothing.
Call your favorite store to see if there is anything you can do to help. There are some small businesses that have crowdsourcing where you can directly donate to help them and their employees. It never hurts to ask how you can help.
During this trying time, let’s take the time to help out our neighbors and local businesses. A little extra care now will help with recovery once we are back to our everyday lives.
To understand your customers, customer feedback is important. Companies that listen to their customers have the tools to succeed – You’ve heard this many times and you have probably even given it consideration for your business. But what’s missing is a solid explanation. You’ve heard that customer feedback is crucial to your business grow, but the how’s and why’s are what I’ll try to help clarify for you.
Here are seven reasons why a customer feedback rating is important to the success of your business
You know your product, every variation, size, color, style, feature and you have educated your team hundreds of times. Unfortunately, your passion may not allow you to see the imperfections. It is important to know what appeals to your customers, as well as what was subpar and why. Listen to your customers and provide the products that they desire.
Listening to your customer feedback makes your customers feel involved and valued. When customers feel listened to, they positively connect with your brand and direct their good experience back to you, which makes them a part of your business family and ensures return visits.
Word of mouth advertising is very successful, and referrals are the most effective, free way of advertising. These most often come from friends and family and are often the most convincing recommendations. Always remember to strive for positive feedback, if you want to gain customers through recommendations.
You can always sell something once, but the true test is getting the customer to return over and over. Feedback is helpful in providing some of the finer details that encourage the recurring business. Is maybe free shipping, same day alterations, polite/educated support team, user friendly website which is the key to solidifying the customer relationship.
Especially nowadays, with competition down the street and on line, its essential to tackle a problem or misunderstanding immediately. With the bandwidth of social media, a bad comment can do far reaching harm to your business.
Seek out a rating system can has the capability to alert you to negative feedback immediately – before your customer has left the store. Allowing the customer to share the unhappy experience and providing you with the opportunity to rectify the issue immediately.
As a consumer, one of the first things you do when looking up a business or product is to read online reviews. Make sure that you have reviews available to draw in the new business, and further more, make sure that the reviews are positive. Asking your customers for their feedback in store will allow you to react before it appears online.
Actively soliciting feedback from your customers and reacting to their opinions creates a relationship that makes the buying process more personal. The customer perceives the business as being run by friendly people that care about their experience, instead of just a company that sells product.
As you see, eliciting feedback from your customers is important and can be very beneficial to your business, as it helps you get to know your customers better, increases their engagement and loyalty and brings in new customers. As it turns out, customer feedback is quite important!
As part of the retailcloud sales team, at least 2-3 times a week I speak with a business owner who tells me that their biggest issue is staying on top of the cash flow; in fact a not to uncommon statement is that we just had a great month but I don’t know where the money went.
Managing your Cash Flow and effectively converting inventory into cash are the most important things that small business operators do. With that in mind I thought I would put together a very high level post on some basic practices on cash flow management. If you want some complexity we have other posts on managing cash flow, GMROI and sales to stock and cash to sales ratios that can take you to the next level but this for the basics.
Let’s begin by taking that money and putting it into some piles
Paying Sales Tax – this is often overlooked, but start first by running your sales tax settlement reports and put that aside for the tax man – there is no getting around that. While you are doing that, make sure that the amount you are reserving is in line with what your sales are – often items are not properly set up in your system and you may have neglected to collect the correct taxes.
Paying your Employees – Look at your time clock reports and forecast what you need to pay your employees, remember to carefully set aside withholding amounts and any other employer contributions. These are monies that you don’t want flowing into your operating accounts.
Keep your doors Open – Know what your fixed costs are (Rent, Utilities, Business Operation Fees) and prorate them so you are setting aside enough to cover these fixed expenses. Having accurate projections will allow you to forecast what your minimum sales are on a daily basis to cover overhead.
Replacing your Inventory – Finally set aside enough to replace your inventory, if you are buying on account you will need to pay your vendors and if you are paying on delivery you need to keep your items stocked at optimum levels. While doing this, consider what you stock on hand is and determine if you are better off investing in complementary products. Have a look at our posts on Increasing per Unit Sales.
See what’s left over – This is for you if there is not enough to go around, you only have a few choices
These are 4 simple checkpoints – having these good practices will help you build a strong and profitable business. The majority of business failures occur due to poor cash management.
Brick and mortar or physical stores are still the way to get start a small business for a lot of communities across the country. A lot of these business have ambitious plans to build their store and expand it beyond their first location. However seldom think about how to get beyond brick and mortar. Today’s digital world require you to go beyond your instore strategies. This post outlines some quick ways you can adopt beyond brick and mortar
This is the quick way you can expand your channel. The easiest way is to start an online store and have start selling there . Modern retail software allows you to start online store with a few clicks without any server cost of huge maintenance. You can either use your existing site or provision a new website to do this.
Pro Tip : Use a smaller web address even if you have a long business name . This is way to remember
Online store these days are not just for online shipments. You can have Buy online and pickup instore strategies without any additional cost. These are sometimes very useful for busy shoppers where they can get orders picked up same day. BOPIS also offers Pay online or Pay in store capabilities.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchats have become an essential part of people’s life. They also offer ways you can sell products. When you take a nice picture of your products, get your likes and if you can have your customers buy directly from that picture it would be awesome. This is what these social platform enables with commerce.
According to hootsuite here are some statistics about Instagram . If your business targets any of these demographics you know that it is right time to get into the Instagram commerce
How can you sell beyond your store, online store social media ?. The answer is market places. Everyone knows that amazon is the biggest online seller of eCommerce products. Did you know that you can also sell through amazon marketplace. Moreover did you know that you can have the products displayed across all the channels and have a single inventory view.
retailcloud online provides capability to give your instore into another dimension with and set of channels with a single Inventory view. You can sell products in store, online, facebook , instagram and marketplaces through retailcloud online.
Since Android made a foray into Tablet space in 2011 we have had opportunity to release hundreds or versions for retailcloud TabPOS. One of the challenge have always been to match TabPOS to our Enterprise Windows Point of sale system and allow customers to use it for their heavy processing situations. Some of the reasons why we held back on features were due to lack of hardware support and backing from provider when it mattered most for our customers.
Elo introduced next gen iSeries platform in 2015 and we extended our existing partnership with Elo to iSeries and Paypoint platforms. Their world class hardware & support has helped us navigate through these challenges and we have chosen it as our recommended hardware for serious business. Some of the outstanding features why we decided to choose Elo’s platform are
We have come a long way since then and in last 2 years we have accelerated our pace . retaicloud’s android TabPOS currently features some of the best solutions for any Android Point of solution out there
Beyond our Tablet Point of Sale we have extended our Android apps to business solutions such as
Today retailcloud’s & Elo solutions are used in Sport Arenas, Grocery Shop, Convenience stores, Liquor Stores, Salons, Apparel.
We are showcasing retailcloud and Elo solutions at @NRFBigshow #NRF2018 . Visit us at booth #3662 . Mention this blog to get a special offer on retailcloud and Elo bundle
Learn more about @retailcloud here
Learn more about @elo here
The sleekly designed Poynt Smart Terminal with it’s built in EMV reader and Interactive Customer Display makes it easy for small retailers to step up from their calculator registers into something that provides them with flexibility and integrations into todays must have retail solutions.
Poynt users of all sizes will have a couple of decisions to make in deciding if Register or Skycraft POS best meets their needs. This post will help navigate the waters and simplify the decision.
Both apps have the ability to create user pages to easily layout items making them easy to find, and both also support line item and order level discounts, coupons and fees, as well as the ability to set tax levels based on the item. Register has a limit of 500 SKUs per catalog so if you have more than that you will need to move up to Skycraft POS which has unlimited SKU’s.
With Skycraft POS in addition to the features mentioned above you also get category management features that allow you to run margin and performance reports by up to 3 classifications and 5 attributes. Leaving lots of room for growth. The inventory management module is also quite comprehensive allowing you to easily identify categories that are impacting your net margins.
There is also a built in CRM list builder app to easily get and launch marketing campaigns, a loyalty program to offer club pricing, discounts on merchandise to your most valuable customers as well as Time & Attendence with time sheet management. These together with Sales Tax Settlement reporting and Barcode Label printing are the most popular features on Skycraft Point of Sale App.
Other benefits of the Skycraft application is that you can add Advance Orders for online ordering with delivery or pick up in Store, you can also connect your Poynt to Windows and Android POS devices on retailcloud and there are phone apps for cycle counting and other inventory functions. You can also connect to retailcloud online and launch an ecommerce store within minutes.
Regardless of which application you select you cant go wrong with your new Poynt Smart Terminal.
If you are not considering using the Poynt to get one view of your transactions, inventory and customers, there are some other apps (most of these features are already included or available in Skycraft POS) you may want to also consider
Let me know if you have any questions or feedbacks on the apps recommended here. You can reach me on twitter @retailmadesimpl or post your comments below
Is mobile an effective sales channel for retail?
Given that Forrester states consumers have spent $60 billion from mobile phones in 2016 alone and have influenced over $1 trillion dollars in brick and mortar sales, that question may have to be marked “Answered and Resolved!”
No doubt you have seen the various posts on the demise of bricks and mortar retail over the past few months; however, there are some conflicting stats. Accenture surveyed nearly 10,000 consumers and found that while social media is the most preferred method of purchasing for millennials and post millennials, for 77% of them, bricks and mortar were preferred.
This being a generation that has spent their entire life depending on smartphones, its inevitable that devices play a key role in finding product, comparing prices, looking for reviews and promotions; so let’s look at the top things they are doing on their devices
Where brick and mortar retail excels is in its ability to provide superior brand engagement to consumers – there is a personal authentic experience that cannot be replicated in online sales; however, giving consumers transparency to the inventory and experience from their mobile devices is a key component of this process.
Gen Z consumers are typically looking to start the shopping experience before they even walk into the store, they want a high level of engagement on the store floor but a frictionless easy checkout process. Ideally, surveys show most of them would prefer checkout directly from the devices (Amazon & Walmart are already making inroads in this capability).
While online will continue to grow, I believe that traditional brick and mortars refusal to provide their consumers a mobile interaction channel is really what will ultimately be more of a detriment than the online boom. What their customers want is the ability to provide a high engagement experience that incorporates the online and offline experience in one seamless process. Mobile will continue to be the key in enabling that process
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