5 Features you need from a Retail POS System

When opening a store and looking for a new retail POS system, or even when you're upgrading an existing one, you’ll find hundreds of options online, all with a multitude of features.

With so much information out there, you can often be left with more questions than you had to begin. That's why it's so important to understand exactly what a retail POS system can do, and what you need from one to drive your business forward.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small market stall or a national chain of vape shops, your retail POS System should be a central management tool for every part of your supply chain.

A retail POS system should not only help you run your business efficiently in the immediate term, but it should also future-proof your business and be able to scale with you.

While a good retail POS System has hundreds of features, we want to highlight those that are vital for running your retail business, and staying ahead of the competition. Here are 5 essential features to look out for.

5 Features you need from a Retail POS System

1) Sales Reporting & Analytics - Data Visibility

Getting full visibility over sales reporting will provide you with a real-time snapshot of transactional data. This allows you to track individual product performance, as well as Year-On-Year or Month-On-Month sales data so you can better analyse business performance.

Your retail POS System should have an inbuilt back office that allows you to easily conduct a full business analysis.

Why you need this Feature:

When making key business decisions, you need to rely on concrete data rather than guesswork.

Having full visibility over your historical and real-time sales data will enable you to make informed decisions that will drive your business forward.

Sales reports allow you to identify both your most profitable products and those that are sitting on your shelves gathering dust. You can use this data forecast stock with greater accuracy, and identify high-margin items for promotions.

Detailed sales data by item also allows you to quickly validate actual stock against expected inventory levels, allowing you to pinpoint potential areas of waste and/or theft.

2) Customer Management

Customer Management allows you to capture valuable information on your customers and their purchase history. You’re able to track your highest spending customers and build meaningful relationships with them.

Why you need this Feature:

By building up key customer information, you can track and analyse behaviour, including when your customers are spending and how much they spend per visit. You can recording more personal information, like name, email, and number, to start communicating with your key customers.

You can also use customer data to build smarter marketing campaigns, and send customers special offers or information about events when you integrate with an email marketing program like MailChimp. This will drive customer loyalty and keep your biggest fans coming back.

3) Integrated Inventory Management

The Inventory Management System built into your retail POS will streamline and automate what once were laborious and time-consuming processes, saving you hours of time. You’ll get full visibility over your inventory, and will be able to automate the population of purchase orders when stock is low, so you never miss a sale.

Why you need this Feature:

You need inventory management built into your retail POS System simply to save you hours of time each week. Having more time will allow you to focus your customers and other areas of your business.

With a good inventory management system, you can also create automatic minimum and maximum stock alerts on products. This will ensure that not only fast selling items never run out of stock, but also that any cashflow tied up within stock is kept to an absolute minimum.

Read our full guide to POS System Inventory Management.

4) A User-Friendly Interface

A retail POS System needs to be both easy to use for your staff, and easy for you to work in the back office, when you're adding and editing products, and keeping an eye on real-time data.

Why you need this Feature:

Having a user-friendly interface on your retail POS system will speed up service and reduce time spent in the office, leading to greater efficiency and a healthier bottom line. Your staff will have more time to serve more customers if products are easily found on the front till, and when payments can be processed quickly.

5) Apps & Integrations

From online shop integrations like Shopify and BigCommerce, to accounting integrations like Xero and Sage, a Retail POS system needs to be able to do more for your business than simply process sales. You can also add a loyalty integration like LoyalZoo where you can set up an integrated loyalty scheme to reward returning customers.

Why you need this Feature:

Having access to hundreds of apps and integrations will streamline processes and help your business become more profitable. You’ll no longer have to manually input sales figures into your accounting software, and both your online and physical inventory will synchronise so you know exactly what you have in stock.

In Conclusion:

With so many options on the market, selecting a retail POS system is a confusing and arduous task. At Epos Now, we support retailers by making their decision easy. With our easy to use Complete Retail POS System, we’ll centralise your entire retail operation to help your business work harder and smarter for you, so you can really focus on what matters.

To find out more about how an Epos Now Retail POS System can help you, get in touch:

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