How EPOS Software Help To Identify Product Lines and Categories That Are Killing Your Profits

The best ways to increase profits in your retail business is to analyse the profitability of your product lines and categories using actual sales statistics with the help of epos software.

Make sure that each retailer has at least a couple of product lines and categories that are killing their profits. By simply switching or dropping a few items that are not pulling their fair share, you can easily increase your profits by 2% or more.

In case if you do 1 million in yearly sales and increase profit margins by 2% - that is an extra £20,000 in your pocket every year!

For example, suppose you open your EPOS software and pull up a report that compares your overall profit margins for each of your categories.

If you sell sporting goods, you may see your "gym equipment" category has a truly low profit margin compared with everything else. This raises up a question... should it be advisable for you to be really carrying this category? In case if you replaced it with something that had a higher profit margin, would you get a boost in profits?

You can do a similar type of thing with your product lines. Suppose you sell lawn mowers and you built up a great deal of product lines over the years. So you pull up a sales report to compare the overall profit for each line.

What will happen if you drop those profit lines? There's a good chance you'd have less headaches trying to order and manage stock from all of those resources and you'll most likely wind up selling another brand of lawn mower which has a higher profit margin.

This results in less work for you and more money in your account.

If you analyse your profit margins, I'm sure you'll be stunned at what you see. Some of the product lines that you thought were making you a lot of money could be killing your profits.

What I really love about this process is that it depends on actual numbers - not hypothesis or guessing. Also, it works for a wide range of retail businesses.

What's more, the good thing about using your EPOS software to see profit margins is that you will save time, reduce calculation and you can easily slice and dice up the data. I'm not saying you to drop all your categories with the lowest profit margins. In any case, I'm strongly urging you to analyse those items and decide what's best for your business.

You should never assume anything.

In case if you don't have the idea about your profit margins and you're operating blind, start getting that data now! Running a business without this data is a sure fire way to bankrupt.

Now remember that not every EPOS system will give you the exact reports that you need. So in case you're looking for another POS system, you need to write down all the features that are essential to you and create a "wish list".