The holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s also the busiest time of the year for many retail businesses and their suppliers. For a holiday season to run smoothly, preparation is vital. One of the most important elements when it comes to being prepared is your point of sales system, as it can be the key to real-time inventory data, customer accounts, employee productivity and sales.
By preparing your POS system for the holidays, you are setting up your business for one of the most successful holiday sale seasons. Here are some helpful hints to help you get started in preparing your point of sales system for the holiday period.
1. Set up your sales and surcharges as early as possible
With an integrated POS system, sales and holiday surcharges can be inputted as soon as they are confirmed. This makes it extremely easy to be prepared for the upcoming holiday season.
When you set up sales prices in advance, your system will automatically discount prices that are on sale during the designated period, and it will alert your store managers as to when you need to order more stock.
By automating your surcharge for selected days, you are helping streamline the sales process for your employees, so there are fewer mistakes made and a greater amount of customer satisfaction.
2. Check your Historical Data
With your POS reports function, you are able to review year-on-year data to forecast customer behaviour and sale trends. The historical data can form the baseline for what to expect in profit margins this holiday season. Other benefits to reviewing the year on year trends in advance include:
- Identifying top-selling and low selling products during this time to optimise stocktake.
- Establishing days of the year where you see an increase in online and in-person customers to determine opening hours.
- Optimising holiday rosters for employees per year on year trends.
3. Update Stock Levels
During the holiday season, the last thing you want is to have low stock or run out of your best-selling items. With the pandemic and constant shipping delays, getting stock to your store on time can be harder than usual. Nowadays, Point of Sales systems are not just cash registers but comprehensive responsive inventory management systems that provide real-time stock updates. It helps business owners identify what is in stock and what they need to order. With an Acumen POS system, you can get updates when top-selling products are running low in stock and automate purchases to assist with inventory management.
4. Be Secure
Your Point of Sales System should have an element of security to it. The last thing you want to happen is for an employee to be mis-scanning a high-value product. With an Acumen POS system, you can delegate different levels of control to different types of employees, making it more secure than your typical point of sale system and assisting you in keeping things in control during the holiday period.
Before Boxing Day, it would also be a good idea to review and refresh company procedures, including price disputes, refunds, and inventory issues, so you and your employees are completely prepared for the holiday season.
5. Personalise your Holiday Specials
Customers love businesses that engage with them on a deeper level. Omnichannel engagement is a significant drawcard for repeat holiday buyers and continued customer retention. With an integrated POS system, you can automate emails, marketing offers, receipts and invoices that are entirely personalised to the customer, their company and their interests. By adding this level of personalisation to your internal documents, your customers feel appreciated and are more likely to engage with your business during the busiest times of the year.
6. Make sure everything is online
Following the pandemic, online shopping is very common, and industry experts expect eCommerce to overtake traditional retail during this year’s holiday period. If you don’t already have an online store, make sure to provide your customers with an online inventory guide and direct them to call you if they wish to enquire. If you have an online store, an integrated POS system can sync all sales made online to sales made in-store and allocate inventory accordingly so that every customer and employee has real-time access to what products are available. Recently Acumen Computer Systems helped Ted’s Cameras set up a custom POS system so they could streamline their inventory management and better fulfil their customer’s orders.
7. Set up integrated EFTPOS
If you are a growing business, a simple retail system may not be the best option over the holiday period. An integrated EFTPOS system is designed to mesh with your business processes to provide a streamlined experience of customer sales, inventory management and accounting processes. Most importantly though, it encourages contactless payment, making it safer and more hygienic for everyone involved in the sale.
Plan and prepare for your holiday season with Acumen
If you are planning for a big holiday season, get in touch with our team today about installing and setting up an integrated POS system. Acumen Computer Systems provides custom solutions for a range of businesses, including Ted’s Camera and De Grandi Sports, and we pride ourselves on being 100% local and Australian-based. Call us on 1800 228 636.
