Importance of Retail EPOS System?

When it comes to retail, guaranteeing all of your customers are given the most extreme attention is important. That is the reason improving the payment process and providing them effective service is important. To achieve such goals, retailers implement a reliable retail EPOS system to help them track stock, process payments, give customer benefits and many more.

At Epos Direct, we've helped many retailers throughout the years track sales and improve their processes, so we've collected some insight for you here. Below you'll find some of the most significant parts of implementing a system with reliable retail POS features.

Pricing Benefits

With regards to pricing the products in your retail store, a retail EPOS system can help drastically lessen errors. This is because the system keeps pricing consistent by syncing with your stock control or ERP system so that scanning a barcode gives you exact pricing data, avoiding customer error. Obviously, discounts, sales and other customer incentive programs are also modified into your EPOS software, with extra options to override, depending upon staff permissions set by Head Office.

Tracking Employees

The right EPOS system can also help you keep an eye on your staff. You can monitor their performance and what they're doing, just as reduce wasted time by making staff responsible for their own registers and payment terminals. You'll also have the option to track best performing staff and see where others need improvement.

Stock Management

Having a reliable epos system, you'll have the option to track your stock. Each time a customer buys a product, that product's stock level will be automatically updated, guaranteeing you know accurately how much stock you have at a given time and when it's time to order more. You can also check your stock's performance to determine best selling products and streamline your retail floor.

Client Support

Retail EPOS systems make it easy to serve your customers. By making the purchasing process faster and more efficient, you'll reduce wait periods. Also, EPOS systems can help you customize to your customers' specific needs, bringing up data about past purchases and other data to help you better serve them. It also makes it simple to run customer incentive programs and offer special discounts for loyal customers.

Increased Efficiency

EPOS systems can drastically build efficiency by cutting down the number of staff expected needed to track payments or stock shelves manually; the POS system does these things. These automated solutions reduce the requirement for relying on human resources, enabling you to save money on operation costs and focus your resources somewhere else.

What Are The Key Features To Look In An Epos System?

A retail or hospitality business is to sell products or provide service where you need to have an epos system. But before investing in POS system, let’s understand the key features to have in a POS system. Since you understand what a POS system, here are 7 key features that you should look for while buying it.

1. Billing and Order Processing

Epos system should have the basic functionality of billing and order processing. It should be able to bill the orders by scanning products and capturing various types of payment modes.

It has the ability to generate order receipt, reprint and email to end customer along with adding the discount, customer details, remarks if any and sales representative's name to an order.

2. Sales Monitoring and reporting

The POS system must be able to generate a robust report on sales result. It should have the option to report hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly takings and outgoings so the merchants can easily understand the growth of their business.

Sales trends such as seasonal demand in products, forecast based on sales trends, insights on unnecessary products and data regarding stock management are some features of advanced POS reporting module.

3. Inventory and Stock Management

A POS system's stock management module should give complete visibility and accountability at store level.

The system should provide a view on stock, SKU transaction history about 'in', 'out' and 'inside' movements of any SKU, and inbound and outbound stock.

It should also have the feature to make stock adjustments for example increase/decrease stock while seeing stock and capture the purpose behind stock adjustments.

4. Cross Channel Returns Management

Accepting cross-channel returns and facilitating refunds and replacements from any store location are a few of the requirements of a POS returns management module.

The system should facilitate creating refunds for one sales order at various time intervals. It should capture details like the purpose behind return, salesman's name, and remarks.

5. Customer Relationship and Experience

A POS system can help you with retain your customers by storing customer data and buying history. This can be used to give a customized insight to your customer.

Customer data is highly helpful for advertising as this data can give experiences on which customer would be interested in your sale. For example, sending a sale flyer for "30% off on larger sized shirts" to the customer who wears a medium sized shirt would be a waste of time.

6. Employee Management

It is surprising if we say that a POS system can be used to manage staff. But, a staff management feature of a POS system can help you with managing with your staffing levels, employee hours, and sales performance which causes you to track staff productivity.

You can track your staff performance by connecting it with every transaction. This will help you with bifurcate the good and bad performers so you can make appropriate decisions to improve their productivity.

7. Loyalty Programs and Gift Cards

Rather than using traditional punch cards, you would now be able to track your customer loyalty incentives using the POS System.

As the sales of gift cards are increasing each year, your POS system should have the ability to manage with those as well.

The modern POS System goes past processing sales. As you have learned in the previous sections, a feature rich POS can help increase efficiency and provide insights to help you with improving your productivity. These are a few reasons to change to a modern POS system.

How To Choose The Best EPOS System For Your Business?

We help you in choosing the right epos system for your business to manage stock, orders and payments as seamlessly as possible. We talk through some of the features you need staff interaction and more.

In 2021, your business is fast and reliable as the epos software that powers it. This doesn't simply apply to pure play business, however.

Bricks and mortar businesses need great software, particularly in the hospitality sector. When your financial turnover relies upon customer turnover, you should be certain you can manage stock, orders and payments as seamlessly as possible.

It's here that your EPOS system truly starts to matter.

Steps To Choose Your EPOS System

Your EPOS system will fuel your operations for quite a long time so it's important to get the right one.

These four questions will help any retail or hospitality business find the best EPOS system for them.

What Are The Important Features And Why?

When you start browsing around, you'll quickly see that EPOS systems differentiate themselves by features and few out of every feature will be essential for your industry.

For example, a fashion retailer won't require pay-at-table feature. Also, at a bar or pub, customers probably won't be paying with vouchers.

Here Are Some Features You Should Consider:

•         Stock control
•        Discount and gift coupon support
•        Reporting and analytics
•        E-Commerce integration

Tip: A feature only serves a purpose if it helps your team work more efficiently, or improve customer support.

How Your Staff Interact With Customers?

Ease of use should be your first priority while choosing the best EPOS system for you. All things considered, you don't need too steep a learning curve for staff, nor do you need an EPOS system that takes time from serving customers.

Take a back step and map out your staff and customer journeys do your F.O.H teams need mobile payments through tablet, or will a fixed till do? You need to find some kind of right balance here: giving your staff the tools they need, while just spending what you need to.

What Data Drives Your Business?

Chances are, you've identified your best sellers and profit drivers. But, with the right EPOS software, you can learn more about your business.

Cloud-based systems give real time access to sales data. Others can help you with back-office tasks like customer management.

You'll never have to think about what items to place in your shelf racks, cafe counter or chalk board again your EPOS system will advise you, and help you with supercharge sales.

Where Would You Like To Be In The Future?

Today, you may truly need to hit down the ground running with an EPOS system that simply works.

But, what happens when you start to grow?

Scaling is tough for all businesses, large or small, so it's smart to choose an EPOS solution that allows growth. For example, you may need the option to add more customers to the system or grow to new premises.

At Epos Direct, we can help serving your go-to EPOS partner, advising the best solutions for all retail and hospitality challenges, today and in future.

If Still Not Sure To Choose The Best EPOS System For Your Business? Talk To Epos Direct

It might sound like choosing the best EPOS system for your business will be a tough decision to make. However, it doesn't need to be.

Call the friendly team at Epos Direct today and draw on our 20 years of EPOS experience to help you make the right choice for your retail or hospitality business.

How To Promote Your Business For Christmas?

Every year, Christmas seems to move around faster and faster. As the end of year being so close, it’s time to prepare yourself for pre-Christmas trading period. To help you prepare for the busiest season, we explore some Christmas season marketing tips that you can easily implement to boost your income and delight your customers over the coming month.

What is the Importance of Christmas Marketing?

Britons are set to splash a lot of money up to Christmas. Shoppers will spend about £20 billion on Christmas shopping, but the competition for these pounds will be fierce.

So how to make the most of the Christmas shopping season? The answer can be strategic marketing and here's how to execute it this year.

Offer Christmas Promotions

Plan your promotions and sales early, and take complete advantage of social media to spread the news.

Facebook is a great way for marketing tool that can help you reach your customer base and beyond. Use Instagram to offer shoppers an image rich overview of your business, products, and promotions. Or then again you run a loyalty program, create special event discounts and market them through an email campaign with limited period offers that encourage spending.

Encourage New Shoppers to Your Business

Since the business is overflowed with shoppers looking for gift ideas around the Christmas season, this is a great opportunity to try to bring in new customers into your store.

Consider about some incentives that would not only entice new customers to shop with you, but also look after for your current customers too. Offering perks like free samples, discounts, vouchers, and competitors are a great way to connect and draw in those Christmas customers.

Offer Gift Cards

Never under estimate the power of gift cards. Gift cards and certificates will continue to top the gift holiday consumer plan on giving, and their popularity continues keeps on rising.

If you sell gift cards, ensure you have them shown at your counter, and put up an ample signage advertising their availability for customers who are browsing. If you don't sell gift vouchers, and just offer your customers paper or emails, ensure that you either have it all well signed for the customer or have your staff trained in offering them to the customer.

Plan Ahead And Learn From Last Time

As most of the yearly sales are rising on this bustling period it's important to recollect you can never be too prepared.

Managing your stock levels successfully is key to your holiday season success. Reviewing detailed reports the earlier year's sales and stock levels is important tool in understanding how you traded and how you can improve. Perhaps you sold out early, so order more during the current year, possibly you had an excess of stock a year ago so tone it down this season. Keep in mind the intensity of reporting through your epos system.

Make Sure Your Systems Have Proper Antivirus Protection

You make sure your work PCs has proper antivirus protection. You have to maintain a strong firewall between your network and the rest of the world. You teach your staff about the need of strong passwords. However, if you don't ensure your epos system, you can leave your business and your customer’s vulnerable t cyber attacks.

Why Is This Important?

Your POS system is a important part of your business. If you have a retail store, you may have hundreds of credit and debit cards that go through your system consistently. In various ways, a POS system is simply one more PC system with similar sorts of vulnerabilities. The greater concern is that if a POS system is attacked by malware, it can mean the loss of sensitive financial data. Therefore, you have to take extra care to ensure your system is secured. Each business needs a system security plan (SSP), and your POS system is essential for it.

Use Reputable, Well-Built EPOS Software

Epos software carries a number of functions. Basically, it is designed to make secure financial transactions for your business. It will also do things like track purchases to help improve the stock process. In case if you are investing resources into epos software, be sure that it has been developed keeping security in mind. Great software will make it simple for you to restrict access to the system based on employee roles. A salesman needn't bother with the same kind of access as somebody from your IT department. This product should also make it easy to white list applications, preventing malware from running on the system too without any problem. Malware protection on your system should regularly update as cyber threats change each day.

Secure Your Customers, Your Business and Your Reputation

Having a secure POS system secures your customers' data, but it also guarantees your business' reputation. Even though the fact that a cyber attack isn't your fault, it still reflects poorly on your organization. Customers may drift to your competitors simply because they no longer feel they can trust you with their data. A large data breach can also cost your business time and money and your insurance rates will go up in response to the damage. You may also catch up in legal claims if a large group of customers is affected by your lack of preparation.

Many business owners think that their POS system is good enough as they are. However, cyber attacks on POS systems are on the rise. So investing resources into network safety for your POS isn't optional if you need to secure your business, your customers and your bottom line.

How to Improve Cash Management in Your Business

Effective cash management is important for any business. Poor cash management can lead host of issues within your business, for example, inability to pay your bills.

In view of this, we have listed 5 different ways you can improve your cash management, regardless of the size of your business. It is also important that none of these strategies are especially expensive to execute, merely requiring you to re-think a couple of elements of your business:

Adopt an Epos System

Having an effective epos system can automatically track all incoming payments and changes to stock as it processes a payment for your service or product.

Profits can also be maximized with epos software with quick and accurate reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. These reports can interface directly into cloud reporting software, which allows for a wider range of detailed reports to help keep you on top of your business.

All transactions are recorded so at the closing time of the day, you can guarantee that any and everything has been accounted accurately.

Know Your Breakeven Point

You can't keep on making profits unless you know your breakeven point. An important reason to calculate this number is so you can understand complete ongoing expenses and if the point is too high, you can assess what you need cut. Calculate this number along with taxes, costs and income with the goal that you can be proactive when addressing your costs if they start to rise.

Have Money in Reserve

Keeping up some money in reserve is important for a business. If for instance, you have a terrible month and you are hit with a surprising cost, you can use that money to take care of the bills without going into the debt. It is a smart idea to place your profits into cash reserves first before you grow the business, if there is some emergency hitting you unexpectedly.

Use Incentives to Increase Sales

Everybody loves a good deal, so tempting your customers with incentives is potentially a decent way of increasing your sales while not costing a lot to implement.

For example, coupon codes are a good idea. You can email a customer a coupon to entice them to return to you as a recurrent customer. The coupon doesn't cost you anything to send and may bring back repeat business in the future for a fraction of the price of gaining another one. You could also analyse into sponsoring a competition and give away a product or service; the products don't need to cost a lot, while it could bring about a good amount of coverage.

Collect Receivables As Soon As Possible

Many businesses end up under financial pressure due to delivering goods and services without accepting payment. This may bring about you paying interest on loans taken out to cover your short comings, as there is no pressure on your customers to pay right away. You should keep purchases like these, and give your customers incentives to pay for goods and products straight away.

Why After Sales Support Is Important For EPOS Systems?

After sale support is so important for an EPOS system. The team here at Epos Direct is aware of this and would not supply system without the necessary support. So to keep up our reputation high, we would only recommend what we believe is the best hard wearing equipment.

Spend a little more at the beginning, and save more in the long haul.

Do not be misled by cheap costs, remember that you get what you pay for. Cheap priced units are for the most part dispatched in boxes, and then the customers are generally expected to set up and program them themselves. This isn't a simple task. On top of this, there are charged monthly support payments and licencing fees.

The basic support required for a smooth running business

•   Make sure EPOS systems are completely modified as per your requirements
•   Have on-site installation by a certified engineer
•   Have live training
•   Guarantee you can always call back an engineer for any further training
•   Guarantee you have warranty for 1 year on site parts and Labour

We offer the complete above mentioned and 24/7, call support including evenings and weekends.

Also check for remote support availability via broadband. No annual licencing fees are necessary for the software support with any good quality systems.

On site demonstrations can be arranged all across UK, thus enabling you to post questions and see the hardware in action, prior to making a decision. You can't have this feature just ordering online, it could be a costly mistake.