There’s plenty of growth in the footwear market, which brings in $35 billion in revenue and has a steady growth rate. While prospects are good for footwear retail stores, it’s also a market with lots of competition. Using a footwear POS that simplifies the sales process and makes employee jobs easier will help drive revenue and keep the retail store’s use of technology ahead of the competition’s.
Real Time Shoe Inventory Tracking
Footwear sales involve a lot of running back and forth so customers can try on sizes and eventually be completely happy with their shoe selection. When a footwear store doesn’t have inventory visibility, the sales associate may come back empty-handed at a critical point for the customer’s purchase decision and lose the sale.
Real-time inventory tracking, across all locations, provides complete inventory visibility so the sales associate knows exactly which sizes and styles are in stock at any given moment. If a pair of shoes sells while associates are talking with their customers, it gets updated automatically with retail inventory management software. Additionally, providing sales associates with mobile inventory lookup capabilities, while serving customers, enables them to make alternate suggestions on-the-fly without running to the stock-room.
Convenient Payments
Over 66 percent of customers pay in-person with a credit or debit card, according to Cheat Sheet. A frustrating payment experience results in a poor customer experience, so it’s all the more important to make this step seamless. One way to do this with Retail Cloud POS is by enabling payment directly from the fitting chair rather than having the customer go up to the counter. Small touches like this make the payment process enjoyable instead of annoying. Additionally, using a system with marketing style eReceipts helps you build opt-in e-mail marketing lists and continue the dialogue with your customer immediately after the sale, including the use of banner advertising within receipts that can promote events or your online presence.
eCommerce Integration
Retail footwear chains that are expanding into eCommerce need a way to sync their in-store inventories with their online sites, so consumers and the back-office have full product visibility. Customers don’t want to encounter a dreaded out-of-stock message, or show up to the store just to find out the last pair of the shoes they wanted went to a website customer. An integration solution prevents these frustrating experiences.
Business Intelligence Tools
The footwear industry sees plenty of hot, short-lived trends when the next big shoe comes into the store. With business intelligence tools powered by retail management software, predicting the shoes customers are likely to buy becomes a much easier task. A user-friendly Retail Cloud POS designed for footwear retailers can empower owners and managers to make surgical choices on the right styles (including size, color and width combination) to buy and to reorder.
A retail POS forms the backbone of the footwear retail store. With the right feature set, it enables sales associates to work smarter and improve their productivity. In the back-office, it delivers deep insights into customer purchasing patterns and trends in order to support predictive purchase analysis.
