Footballers aren’t usually associated with tips for retail sales, but as the great NFL coach and executive Vince Lombardi once said: “It can take months to find a customer and seconds to lose one.” As a retailer, the losing part is something you want to avoid at all costs.
Having smooth processes at your point of sale (POS) is important for positively capping off your customer’s shopping experience and ensuring they remember the experience the next time they need something you offer. In this article, we’re going to examine how the POS feature of Cin7 Core can benefit your business.
Advantages of the Cin7 Core POS feature
1. Scan products by their barcodes.
A barcode holds all the information about the product it’s attached to, and a barcode scanner, a separate hand-held device, uses a light source to transmit barcode information to your computer.
For a brick-and-mortar store, scanning barcodes at the POS makes checkout speedy and accurate. Other advantages of this system are that training cashiers is easy, and the information that’s fed back into your inventory management system updates stock levels instantly.
2. Work online and offline.
Cin7 Core can be accessed from anywhere on multiple devices and stores information securely.
As a cloud-based system, an active Internet connection is necessary to get the sales data from the POS scanner to the central software that processes it. But if your network goes down for any reason, Cin7 Core’s POS will still be able to scan items and ring up sales. In these situations, our scanner will hold on to all the sales information until the online connection is back, when all the data will be sent to the central system.
3. Track customers’ purchases.
Alongside making a record of sales, the POS feature of Cin7 Core takes note of customers, linking them to their purchases. When this information is categorized by customer, you end up with individual accounts that show everything a particular shopper has ever bought from you. New sales can easily be associated with a repeat customer, while new customers can be set up in a new account. The big upside of all this data is that your best shoppers will be highlighted and you’ll know the kind of products they favor.
Another upside is that this method of keeping sales’ records can be used to facilitate layaway or on-account plans. For layaway – called layby on Cin7 Core – the customer pays for their items in installments over time and gets the goods when they’ve paid in full; on-account allows the customer to take the goods and pay for them after. In both instances, the sales are recorded in customers’ accounts and sales reports show the balances owed.
For larger companies, the sales information collected by the POS can be applied to individual sales reps. Each of these employees can be given accounts, and the sales they’re responsible for can be registered against their individual names. Organizing sales data this way doesn’t just track performance, it’s a way of backtracking when there are disputes.
4. Park sales.
Parking a sale means that the POS system is keeping note of items a shopper has indicated they want to buy while they go off and do something else, like maybe check out other items. A record of their chosen items will be held in the system and can be brought up when the customer comes back to pay.
For those of you with brick-and-mortar stores, Cin7 Core’s POS can save these parked sales until the shopper returns, allowing you to take care of new customers in the meantime. Again, the parked sales can be pulled up when the shopper returns to pay. When saving parked sales, our software includes details like discounts and any other relevant information. In case there’s additional information you need to be reminded of when ringing up a sale, there’s a space for you to add your own notes as well.
5. Email receipts.
While Cin7 Core’s POS can print up a receipt in the usual way, it can also directly email one to the customer. The customer can choose one over the other, or get both. Digital receipts can also be generated when items are returned or exchanged.
6. Review metrics
With our dashboard, which you can pull up on multiple devices — electronic notepad, cellphone, or computer — you get an overview of your stores’ key metrics. Plus, these metrics can be organized by:
- Revenue,
- Sale count,
- Product-return count,
- Gross profit,
- Cost of goods sold, and
- Discounts.
All this information can be organized by categories or by time factors like week, month, or day. Because Cin7 Core’s POS updates sales information in real time, you can be sure all the data are accurate.
7. Control the sales data
It’s all very well having a POS system that can gather and store everything about your sales, but you may not want all your employees to have access to all of the information. You may, for instance, want to prevent your floor staff from seeing sales reports. Fortunately, Cin7 Core’s POS lets you decide who sees what. Some of the ways you can allocate access to information are:
- Administrators could be allowed to see all reports for every store location. (With Cin7 Core POS, you can add an unlimited number of stores at no extra cost.)
- Store managers could only access reports for the actual outlets for which they’re responsible.
- Cashiers could be restricted from having access to any kind of report.
Our POS system lets you decide on an individual basis which of your employees can offer discounts, change pricing, or set up on-account or layaway sales.
8. Manage returns.
Returns happen, and it’s in your best interest to accept them. Essentially, they signal trustworthiness to a shopper and encourage them to return to your store for something else.
However, returns can get messy, especially if the company is large and has a lot of customers. Cin7 Core POS eases the pain of returns by updating the inventory level as soon as they happen and revising the data. The software can arrange for a cash refund, store credit, or a direct exchange of products. It can also work with different channels, so something purchased online can be brought into a physical store for a refund.
9. Accept multiple payment methods.
When it comes to making payments, the range of options available spans from those offered by online platforms like Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and Google Pay to traditional credit cards to cash. Fortunately, Cin7 Core’s POS can process all of these different payment methods.
Our system also lets you create loyalty programs, which are great for encouraging users to make repeat purchases. It’s up to you how you configure a loyalty program, but as an example, for every $10 a customer spends, you could offer a $1 loyalty point that can be accumulated and applied to future purchases. Gift cards can also be generated by our POS system.
Try Cin7 Core POS now
Cin7 Core POS is, in short, the one-stop solution for your retail checkouts. The app is available for Android or iOS mobile and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Microsoft’s Play Store respectively.
If you’d like to know more, get a free consultation with one of our experts by clicking here.