Saturday was a typically busy day, the farmers market across the street always brings in a lot of lookers.  With our new shared goals of encouraging customers to sign up for our promotion list and to focus on units per transaction I found the team more social with customers. It was a much friendlier and energetic atmosphere which in turn made people linger longer and talk more about the displays.  I made a note to be more aware of my traffic patterns, next Saturday I was going to pull out the counter.

The associates liked the ability to check the POS to look for products and stock levels, and had some great ideas on how to improve the classification of the product. Having color as an attribute was clearly something that they wanted. We opened the portal and made those changes as they came up directly on the system.During the day I checked the phone app and saw that we our average units per transaction were just below 2, I had nothing to measure it to as we have never tracked it before.

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Today’s email which was the 5th of the series, and continued on yesterday’s theme of building customer awareness. It had a post on how to raise customer awareness of my brand by having “billboards” in their wallets and inbox.  

The POS solution has a gift card program, where in addition to the standard cards with my logo, you can also have customers buy and sell gift cards using mail, text and even facebook. I liked this and it made me think of how I had been neglecting my facebook business page.  I looked over the gift card company’s agreement and it seemed pretty simple, there were no monthly fees and i was able to order a 100 gift cards which I did.  The gift card company would contact me on how to activate the text and facebook ordering, and they were also able to put my cards in their online store for anyone to buy.  Seemed worthwhile as I only paid them if someone bought a card and a transaction fee when the redeemed. I was also able to use the send by facebook feature for promotions to attract new customers.

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Got email 2 in the 10 email series and today it suggested I add any customer data into the system, as well as turn on built in features to add customers to the mailing list. This would allow me to generate mailchimp campaigns on demand.

I had customer lists on constant contact, mailchimp, an excel spreadsheet and a note pad. I started by downloading the lists from constant contact and mailchimp after which I entered the names and email addresses from my note pad onto the excel sheet.  The chat support asked me to share the files with them, and after looking at it determined it was  more involved process to combine the data so they asked me to open a ticket and they would create a file for me that I could then import. Which I did.

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On Day 2, I received an email from retailcoud telling me that I had 10 days of white glove support and how to schedule an appointment to make sure of it. It also listed the free inventory tools that were available in their app store specifically mInventory and Inventory Manager.

Since I knew I still had to add items that were missing from my list and mInventory seemed like a good option, I downloaded it and installed it on my phone. There is only an Android version which was fine with me. I scanned a few items and was able to add them into the database, sometimes it prepopulated the information on the missing items with available descriptions and prices and other times no data was available and I had to enter it myself. This looked like it was working well, so we downloaded it on two other phones as well and began scanning the whole store. One cashier was also checking items directly on the POS and adding them there if they were not imported from the QB file.

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Once I opened and received my retailcloud welcome email, I went to the management portal as it recommended to update my default settings. I entered my store information and sales tax rate for the store. I imagine that this will all show up on the POS receipts.

Next, I exported the data from my current system and checked the UPC numbers and noticed that some of the numbers were much smaller than others, in looking further, I realized that the leading zeros were not being exported from QB. I got on retailcloud chat to see if there was a way to get them and they told me not to worry about it as they had a flag to append leading zeros in their solution.

“Already loving the retail made simple concept.”

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