Increase Sales and Reduce Costs with Your Retail POS System

The two questions that every retail operator asks is, “How can I increase sales, and how can I reduce costs?” Business-savvy folks know that a quality point-of-sale (POS) system can help with both.

Here are some strategies to increase sales and reduce costs with your retail POS system.

Increase Sales with Employee Monitoring

Start with monitoring your employee’s performance with your POS system. See what they are selling, and not selling. Find out where you need more training with your employees. Perhaps, a refresher on upselling is needed.

Also, you can use incentives to get more sales through contests that motivate your staff with rewards. For example, the person with the highest average sales in a week gets a prize, or the person who can sell ‘x’ item along with ‘y’ item the most times in a month receives a bonus.

Tracking the data, creating reports, and developing contests can all be done through a POS system.

Increase Sales with Customer Loyalty Programs

Customers that come back often mean more consistent cash flow. Create a customer loyalty program to help increase revenue. For example, keep track of how many of ‘x’ a customer buys and on the 10th purchase of ‘x,’ they get a free ‘x.’ Collect customer data, like emails, to let shoppers know what’s on sale, and give them special incentives. In this way, customers are incentivized to come back more often than they would normally.

Decrease Indirect Costs

Indirect costs can be tough to recognize. In retail stores, variance is an important metric to track, and something that can easily be accomplished with your POS system. Variance is the difference between the inventory reflected on your reports and the actual amount on the floor (accounting for missing or stolen items). The closer these stats are tracked, the easier it is to reduce costs.

Another example is employee errors. If employees are ringing up incorrect amounts at the register, or as an owner you find yourself giving things away to customers as an admission for a costly employee mistake, then your business is incurring an implicit cost. It could be time lost in trying to fix these errors, or an increased chance that the customer will not be back. A POS system with a barcode scanner could easily solve wrong ring-ups.

Decrease Direct Costs

Reduce costs by decreasing your inventory. Use your POS system to look at what is selling, and what is not so you can improve your margins. In addition, many hours can be saved every week by automating many of the processes that may be managed manually. In this way, a POS system can make tracking inventory more efficient, and save labor costs on re-ordering. Plus, keeping track of what you have makes it a deterrent for employee stealing.

In summary, here’s what happens in your retail store when you use a quality POS system like Bepoz’s: an increase in sales through employee monitoring and customer loyalty programs, and a decrease in indirect and direct costs through monitoring inventory orders and variance metrics.