Inventrak Blog

The following are four retail technology strategies that I believe will give retailers the biggest benefit and maximum return on their technology investments. Your small retail operation can be just like the Big Box stores when it comes to being efficient and productive.

Point of Sale (POS), Bar Code/UPC Code Scanning 

A POS System is mandatory. A good POS system can track all your sales. It replaces your cash register and allows a multitude of features that will save you time. Bar Code and UPC Code scanning allows you to check products at the point of sale much faster and more accurately than can be done on the keyboard.  

Real Time Inventory Tracking

Inventory is your biggest asset. It generates almost all of your business’ income but also ties up a substantial amount of your cash. Inventory management is the heart and soul of retailing. Real-time inventory tracking tools enables you to know where your products are and how many are there in real-time. With such a tool, an out-of-stock situation will rarely happen at your store.  Moreover, you don’t need to overstock your inventory as you can make reordering decisions based on real-time sales reports across all stores. This tool not only reduces your inventory level but also ultimately increases your customer satisfaction.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)  

CRM includes individual customer purchase tracking, customer group management, and loyalty/reward programs. Customer purchase tracking helps you to identify your best customers as well as understand their purchase habits, so that you can design certain programs to increase their spending and satisfaction. For those who do not visit your stores often or do not purchase much, you can use a programs such as a reward program to transform these customers into loyal ones. 

Retail Marketing Technology

Retail Marketing Technology involves e- marketing, m-marketing and in-store marketing.You need to use all possible marketing tools to get your customers involved. For example, your POS pops up a reminder to tell your cashier what to promote at the point of purchase. Another example is to download a list of customers who are most likely to buy the item which you want to promote and use e-marketing tools to inform them of this promotion.

During the checkout process, consumers often leave the store with a long paper receipt. It is inconvenient for consumers to store and manage reams of paper from different merchants. Moreover, retailers spend millions of dollars annually on ink and paper receipts, which means this process destroys countless trees every year.

Going Green: Electronic Receipt

Apple and a few other retailers have started to shorten the paper trail by encouraging consumers to have their receipt emailed to them. To take advantage of this green initiative, the cashier offers the customer the option of an electronic receipt. If the customer opts to “go green”, the cashier validates an email address on the payment terminal and the receipt is instantly transmitted to the customer.

This retail technology reduces the use of paper and saves our natural resources. This innovative and go green technology is a win-win innovation for retailers and consumers.

Though you may not be familiar with Software as a Service (SaaS), you probably have heard the popular buzz word – “on demand”.  Yes, SaaS technology enables “on demand” possibilities for every business. It has actually grown increasingly popular for all sizes of businesses. 

How does SaaS benefit retail businesses compared to current retail technology?

On demand access to your database.  You can manage inventory and pricing even if you are abroad; you can use your smart phone to access all sales, inventory and customer information whenever you want.  

Recently, at Best Buy, the Palm Pre was supposed to sell for $199 but a lot of consumers bought them for $99. Best Buy Marketing Manager John said, “Without releasing confidential numbers, all I can confirm is that the price was honored until removed from the system. Not sure how we reconcile further?” They had been dealing with the pricing problem for a few days. 

If they had real time pricing management capability, much of their loss could have been avoided. 

On demand scalability. The SaaS model allows merchants to scale up and down based on the needs of the retail business. It is like a customized Google page, where you can add whatever applications you want; on your SaaS system, you can add whatever modules you want. Moreover, no worry about IT problems when you expand your business, SaaS database is scalable. 

Lower IT cost. This is one of the main reasons that some retailers begin to go to SaaS. SaaS technology reduces total cost of ownership by eliminating the initial capital expenditure to buy and establish infrastructure in-house. It also reduces operational cost by reducing infrastructure maintenance.