
As the holidays approach, retailers everywhere are preparing for the mad rush of customers that shop from Thanksgiving all the way through the end of the year. In fact, most retailers make a huge portion of their yearly sales during the holiday season, so why not make the most of it with a POS system? This effective tool will help you make the most out of this holiday season, and you’ll feel a lot better when you’re able to review your sales and build a customer database. Here’s how to leverage your POS system this holiday season.
Identify Best-Sellers
What were last year’s best-selling items in your store? This year’s? This is something you can easily find out by leveraging your POS system. Simply take a look at your analytics reports and identify which items moved the most volume both last holiday season and this year up to this point. From there, you can decide how to best approach your marketing efforts to ensure you’re selling lots of those items during the holiday rush.
When you know what sells, it’s much easier to put those items out in the front of the store where customers will have easy access to them. Best-selling items should come with a discount to really drive home the sale to your customers; even if it’s something as simple as 5% off for a limited time. This is how you create buzz around best-selling items and drive customers through your doors to get their hands on them.
Use Your POS to Properly Schedule Staff
Your POS system can be helpful during the holiday rush for properly scheduling your staff as well. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing retailers during the holidays; finding that happy medium between too many employees on the clock and too few during the rush. Again, you’ll need to pull up last year’s numbers and take a close look at what your staffing needs will be.
If you notice slow times, you can probably assume that the times will be about the same for this year. While you can always call in more help if things get overwhelming, you can’t take back the time that employees spent on the clock during downtime. Only staff what you think you’ll need based on last year’s numbers. You can always call for extra help if need be, or staff temp workers to meet the increased demand.
Some POS systems even integrate with your staffing software, allowing for a seamless scheduling process that can help you figure out how much help you actually need during certain times of the year.
Utilize Mobility as An Asset
A lot of modern POS solutions offer mobile POS options, so you can have employees moving about the store with a mobile checkout option for customers to keep lines down and sales moving. Use these options to your advantage, as lines can build up quickly during the holiday rush, and before you know it, you’re fifty people deep in a line that’s being held up by one unhappy customer.
Modern POS systems’ mobility is one of their greatest assets. Instead of scheduling staff to strictly man the registers, you can have mobile checkout terminals walking around the store, which also double as customer-service points of contact as well. This dual-purposing of employees helps you get the most out of their performance and brings a certain level of convenience to your customers.
Keep Inventory Organized
If inventory is hectic during the year, it’s absolutely chaotic during the holidays. With items flying off the shelves quicker than you can stock them, layaways and financing, and returns for weeks after the holidays have passed, it’s a wonder that retailers can keep up at all! With a POS system, all of your inventory management will be completed in real-time by the automated POS itself; making the process simple and stress-free.
With a more organized inventory, you’ll know what you’re selling and whether or not you actually have certain products in stock. The last thing you want to deal with on Black Friday is a customer who saw that you had certain items in stock, only to find there are actually none on the shelves!
Get Those Emails!
With all the hustle and bustle of holiday buying, you should be encouraging employees to collect as many emails and names as possible for your customer database. The holidays are the perfect time of year to sign up new (and old) customers for rewards programs, email lists, or loyalty cards. Don’t forget to build up your database during the busiest time of the year!
Conclusion
With a POS system at your side, you’ll be able to tackle the holiday season with more confidence than ever before. Your inventory management will be automated, your payment processing will be smoother, and you can staff more effectively and collect customer information to build up your database. If you’re not set up with a POS system for this holiday season, now is a good time to get one; before the rush starts!