The right retail POS can provide apparel retailers with more than a place to ring up customers. It can also help increase productivity, unify inventory across the storefronts and eCommerce sites, streamline loyalty programs, and provide essential business intelligence for improving sales.
Track Clothing Sales and Inventory
An apparel POS can unify sales information and inventory across multiple channels, providing visibility on in-stock and out-of-stock products no matter where it’s physically located. When the sales and inventory numbers go through the retail POS instead of another software solution, businesses automate data entry and free up employee time for other tasks. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that retail businesses improved labor productivity by 5 percent, helped by technology innovation such as retail inventory management. These systems also keep the eCommerce store up to date with in-store inventory numbers, so apparel retailers aren’t selling online shoppers products that aren’t actually in stock.
Customer Loyalty Benefits
A cloud or web-based POS may also store useful customer data that enables apparel retailers an easy way to target their customers based on preferences and demographic information. This benefit is two-fold, it can instigate an extra sale and it can also create brand loyalty through personalized emails from the retailer. Experian reports 75 percent of companies got a return on their investment after implementing a loyalty program. These programs create incentives to bring customers back to the stores, as well as providing the business with valuable consumer information. An added way of gathering customer information during checkout is via eReceipts, which provide the business with the customer’s email address a POS system can already have this functionality built in to automatically generate attractive eReceipts and send to the customer.
Business Intelligence
Keeping up with the latest fashion trends is a difficult task, but business intelligence provides retail stores with the tools they need to predict inventory needs, swap out inventory, and lower the possibility of inventory hitting the sales racks. These tools, incorporated with the retail inventory management software, provide critical analysis on sales numbers and overall inventory.
These elements provide a full-featured fashion POS that’s ready to tackle the challenges of this demanding retail market, whether the business is wholly offline or working in eCommerce and physical retail environment.
Sources:
- https://nrf.com/news/answering-the-big-questions
- http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prin1.nr0.htm
- http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/most-customer-loyalty-programs-remain-challenged
- http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/marketing/2015/02/9-stats-that-prove-the-value-of-loyalty-programs.html?page=all
