Retail Technologies for QuickSell Commerce, 2000 and Headquarters Point of Sale POS Solutions

Almost everyone who is considering investing in a POS system has in mind some specific goal or problem they are trying to solve. I know when I was first looking the number one concern I had was inventory control. I wanted to stop wasting time walking the store with sales reps to place orders and I wanted to make sure I purchased "just in time" to replace sold products.

While my goals were certainly met in regards to inventory control, the most important benefit I received from my POS wasn’t even on my original list. The money we have saved and revenue we have generated by knowing who our customers are and what they are buying has far outweighed all other benefits of automation.

To get this benefit, you have to collect the data. Sounds easy enough but many retailers resist collecting customer information at the point of sale because they think it will take too much time, or that customers will resist. Our experience has been to the contrary. First, give your customers motivation to give you the information. We instituted a frequent buyer loyalty program. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Just a discount coupon for reaching a certain spending level is fine. Maybe in store sales, only for "club" members. It really doesn’t matter. Just something that motivates the customer to give you the information. It will take less than you think. Then you must institute a policy that every customer that comes up to the register is asked for his or her account number. If the customer is already in your database, the sale is recorded with their account. If it’s a new customer, the clerk can enter the data right then. It takes a few seconds at most and what you will find is that within a couple months, almost all of your customers will be in the database. Then the fun starts.

Once you know who your customers are and what they are buying, you can stop wasting money on shotgun style advertising. Armed with your customer list, use the US mail and your local mailing services company to target your advertising where it counts. In our own experience we have reduced our advertising cost about 1/5^th of what we use to spend on radio, print and bulk mailing. With those methods we never felt we recovered the cost of the advertising with increased business. Our most recent targeted mailing had over a 20% response rate! That is no joke. The cost to put the mailing together was paid for 5 times over in increased sales.

It doesn’t take much effort or much money to get results from targeted marketing. Like the shoe folks say, Just do it!