Running One Business, Not Five Disconnected Systems
Picture a typical day at your store: Customers are browsing the floor while employees in the back are packing items for online orders. A customer messages your shop’s social media page asking if a product is in stock. Someone’s sorting through hundreds of price changes needed across your different channels, while another employee updates your online inventory from a spreadsheet. Just as you finish unpacking today’s shipments, you realize it includes plenty of items to restock a key product line, but not the one thing you need for an upcoming promotion.
Between physical retail, the online store, social media messages, the website price updates, and the incoming inventory, it might seem like you’re running five different businesses. The reality is… you’re not. You’re running one business with five disconnected systems.
In most retailers, valuable sales information is scattered across different systems: your online store, your point-of-sale system, inventory spreadsheets, marketing tools, and accounting systems. Keeping all of them current requires a tremendous amount of duplicate work, which could lead to mistakes, lost sales, and product waste. This is why many retailers are turning to multichannel retail management software, built to unify every sales channel rather than keep things separated. Call it a retail management system, retail software, or a retail point-of-sale system — the goal for retail businesses is the same: one accurate source of truth.
Retail Has Changed Faster Than Many Businesses Have
Most retailers agree that the landscape has changed significantly over the last few years, faster than most businesses have been able to adapt. When you look at the “simple days of retail,” customers visited the store, employees rang up sales, and inventory was updated at the register. By the end of the day, you’d get a report on how various departments performed.
Today’s retail environment looks very different. Customers start their shopping journey at different points (social media, a search on your website, etc.) and interact with you through a variety of channels: it could be a call to the store or browsing your selection online before visiting – they may even opt to have their items delivered right to their door. They shop when and however they want, and expect a consistent experience every time. Some of these processes are easy to manage within a single channel; others require connecting several systems at once — and that’s exactly where most retailers struggle.
A Harvard Business Review study found that 73% of customers use multiple channels during their shopping journey. To them, every online and offline channel is just one process for finding and buying what they want. They expect every channel to know their purchase history and have the stock they’re looking for, and the only way to meet that expectation is by running every sales channel off the same information. Shop owners and small business owners are catching on that a modern retail POS does more than ring up sales; it connects sales channels, customer profiles, and sales history in real time, on the sales floor and off it.
The Hidden Cost of Disconnected Systems
Disconnected technology doesn’t always create dramatic failures. The occasional big failure might get reported in the press, but more often it’s a bunch of small inefficiencies quietly adding up over time:
- An online sale doesn’t update inventory in the store.
- An employee updates a price in one system and forgets to update it in another.
- Customer purchase history exists in multiple places.
- Marketing promotes products that are already running low.
- Managers export data from several systems just to build one report.
These gaps in inventory data, purchase orders, or vendor management chip away at customer satisfaction and customer retention all the same.
Inventory Is Everywhere Now
The typical view of inventory management is stock sitting on a store’s shelves. Today, inventory exists in far more places. Products may be:
- Available in-store
- Reserved for online orders
- In transit from suppliers
- Waiting to be received
- Transferring between locations
- Committed to special orders
- Listed across ecommerce platforms
Manually managing all of these locations is becoming increasingly difficult. According to IHL Group research, a lack of inventory visibility costs retailers an estimated $1.77 trillion a year worldwide, and while that exact figure won’t hit every retailer the same way, the problems behind it, disappointed customers, cash tied up in overstock, and missed sales from products that only appear to be out of stock, are the same for every multichannel seller. Multichannel retail management software helps keep every channel and location updated with the same stock information, so you can avoid all three.
The right inventory management tools and warehouse management systems track every one of those locations, giving retail stores real inventory accuracy and inventory tracking instead of a guess pulled from a spreadsheet. POS systems built for multichannel selling let you manage sales and manage inventory from the same dashboard, whether you’re running one shop or multiple locations.
One Customer, One Experience
Customers don’t see your internal systems. They simply expect consistency. If a customer purchased from your website last week, it’s expected that purchase can be referenced in-store. If they’ve earned rewards online, they expect to redeem them at the register. If they find a product on your website and then can’t find it on your shelves, the customer may leave with a poor impression, one that can shape how they see your business going forward.
Building a good relationship with a customer involves many interactions; closing a single transaction isn’t enough. One of the biggest advantages of multichannel retail management software is that every part of the business, including customer relationship management, runs on one system, so employees spend less time searching for information and more time serving customers. Loyalty programs and customer loyalty perks only work if every channel pulls from the same system, and customer interactions and customer feedback both suffer when they don’t. Completing a sale is good, but building trust is what actually matters.
Better Visibility Leads to Better Decisions
Every retailer makes dozens of decisions a day. Should you reorder that product now or wait a week? Is a promotion driving profitable sales or just cutting into margins? Which categories deserve more floor space? Are seasonal products arriving too early, or too late? Better data leads to better decisions, more so than gut feeling alone. However, your unique retail experience is still invaluable when it’s mixed with facts and data.
A major advantage of multichannel retail management software is having your whole shop in one database; no more juggling systems or exporting data just to build a report. Historic sales, stock movements, customer buying behavior, and purchasing activity from every part of your operation merge together and become far more visible. Better sales data and real time visibility into supplier performance and stock levels help retail operations run with more operational efficiency and less guesswork.
Every Department Benefits from Connected Systems
There’s a misconception that retail management software is only for the owner or manager. In practice, every employee benefits when your systems are connected. For example, receiving teams are able to process incoming shipments more efficiently and marketing can identify which products to promote (because they know what’s actually stocked across every channel). Customer service can also handle returns more efficiently with full purchase history on hand. An immediate benefit to store managers is spending less time producing reports and more time managing your store. From workforce management on the sales floor to employee management in the back office, daily operations and store operations both run smoother when everyone’s looking at the same numbers.
Your Data Should Work as Hard as You Do
Retailers collect a huge amount of data just running the business day to day: sales transactions, customer purchases, inventory movement, vendor performance, seasonal trends, and the results of promotions. How do you turn that data into actionable insight?
You start by asking relevant questions: Which products consistently sell together? Which vendors have the most reliable delivery times? Which promotions bring back repeat customers instead of just one-time bargain hunters? Which categories are growing year over year? Which products are eating up shelf space for little return?
The right reports help you improve buying, planning, staffing, and customer service. That same data set touches payment processing and payment processors too, and the right point-of-sale software turns it into reporting tools you can actually use instead of a spreadsheet. The more you know, the better positioned you are to make the right call.
Growth Shouldn't Mean More Complexity
Many people in retail assume complexity grows right alongside the business. Another location means another inventory to manage. Another sales channel means another internal reporting system. Another website means another customer database that doesn’t talk to your physical location.
A connected multichannel retail management software platform grows with you instead. Whether you’re adding new product lines, opening a new store, or starting to sell online, your systems should scale with your business, not create more complexity. When inventory, sales, purchasing, reporting, and customer information are all connected, growing the business (online or off) gets a lot easier. That’s true whether you’re one of many small businesses running a single cash register or global brands managing multi location retailers — an all in one solution beats stitching together specialized solutions and hoping they stay in sync. Complex inventory doesn’t have to mean a complicated retail POS system.
Preparing for the Future of Retail
As the retail environment continues to evolve, customers expect accurate inventory online, flexible fulfillment options, and the same experience whether they’re shopping online, in-store, or on their phone. Artificial intelligence is starting to help customers find and compare products and make purchases, and while these emerging technologies will keep changing how customers shop, one thing stays the same: retailers need reliable, connected information.
Omnichannel retailers stuck with limited offline functionality often feel this the most, especially when an already-stretched IT team is left maintaining multiple systems instead of one.A retailer running connected systems spends more time growing, improving, and serving customers. Technology that connects every part of the business is what gives retailers the visibility they need to deliver a better retail experience.
Bringing It All Together
The challenge of multichannel retailing isn’t keeping up with every trend and theory, it’s making sure every part of the operation works together. Connecting your information on inventory, customer details, reports, purchasing, and sales means spending less time on errors and more time developing your business.
Multichannel retail management software is an operational advantage. Whether you’re monitoring the business, making informed purchasing decisions, delivering a consistent customer experience, or getting ready to seize a new opportunity, visibility into your own operation is one of the most valuable assets a retailer has today.
How Rapid POS Can Help
At Rapid POS, we specialize in multichannel retail management software for independent retailers. Our system brings together real-time inventory and purchasing management, CRM features, online ecommerce integration, reporting, and more.
Managing multiple sales channels doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you’re moving online, opening a new store, or just trying to get a handle on where your business stands today, Rapid POS can help simplify how you manage it. Whether you need retail POS software, an ecommerce platform, or simply want all the features of modern retail management in one place, gift shops, liquor stores, and retail businesses of every kind can get there with the right system.
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