The Quick And Easy Guide To Retail Management Systems

The adage that the customer is king still rings true. This is still the motto of every retailer today.

Retailers need to ensure that their customer is more than just satisfied with the shopping experience; otherwise, they will face customer retention and acquisition challenges. This is why retailers are now going beyond just selling and working towards understanding lifestyles and schedules.

What Is a Retail Management System?

Retail management is the process of amplifying sales and customer satisfaction through a better understanding of consumers, products, and services.

Retail management systems analyze the retail process from the manufacture of the product to its distribution among retailers and eventually to the stage of customer feedback. This entire process includes several steps to obtain the necessary information. The ideal retail management system ensures that a customer is satisfied with the shopping experience. It enables the customer to locate the product quickly, offering convenience, saving time for retailers. The result must be the ultimate satisfaction of the customer with the overall shopping experience.

An advanced Retail management system must include:

Stock security: Keeping track of the products and their sales has become mandatory. This is necessary to prevent shoplifting. By simply assigning a unique SKU to each product, you can make it easy to identify and track the item.

Retail Management Systems Essentials

The role of a retail management system is to make it easier to run your retail store operations smoothly. Here are the essential features that can help enhance customer experience and profit margin.

A complete retail management system includes a Point Of Sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Order Management, Purchasing and Receiving, Inventory Management, Reporting, and Dashboard modules.

Let's discuss the features of such a system:

Dashboards

Dashboards provide a graphical summary of vital information to give you a quick overview of your retail store. You can use it to analyze your retail store business thoroughly and optimize inventory, staffing, and operations - real-time.

Loyalty Programs Management

Everyone wants to be rewarded for their loyalty. This is one of the reasons customers are attracted to loyalty programs that incentivize their shopping. A sufficiently capable retail management systems should help you administer rewards to customers. It needs to do this while keeping track of points earned and redemption for each customer.

Upsell and cross-sell

Helping customers by encouraging or recommending similar or complementary products after looking at their purchases can uncover several opportunities. 

There are two ways of doing this: cross-sell and upsell. Upselling is when you encourage a customer to buy an identical product from a better brand. Cross-selling is when you add a complimentary product that goes well with what the customer has purchased. The ideal retail management system keeps track and groups similar products. This helps the sales team make recommendations to customers during transactions. It boosts your revenue but enhances customer satisfaction.

Payment Flexibility

Retail management systems give the customer convenient payment through several modes. The customer can choose to pay using cash, card, gift vouchers, or mobile payment apps.

Enables Promotions

Multi-item promotions are all the rage. They allow retailers to set prices for a group of customers based on the information gathered from their shopping history.

Retail store automation

In the age of Amazon and Flipkart, retail stores need to deliver stellar customer experiences to remain competitive. This is why it is essential to enhance all store processes and automate manual operations effectively. The retail software you choose must provide the store sales team with powerful tools to run operations seamlessly.

How does a retail management software help

Since the advent of the pandemic, the retail industry has been undergoing considerable changes. There is a considerable shift in consumer behavior. Customers are becoming impatient:

• Studies report that 87% of shoppers leave the store if an item is unavailable and there is no assistant.
• Research shows that 30% of customers will wait for no more than two minutes to check if what they want is in stock.
• About 78% of buyers won't use a retailer again after late or incomplete deliveries.

The writing on the wall is clear. To keep pace with the competition and attract loyal customers, brick-and-mortar stores must undergo a technological shift.

A retail management software that can scale from a single shop to a retail chain can help here.

Retail management software benefits

Automation: The most significant benefit of a retail management system is that you can automate store tasks such as inventory auditing, pricing regulation, billing, reporting, payroll, and returns processing.

Real-time visibility: Comprehensive systems allow you to control warehouses and shop floors simultaneously. It enables you to identify items out of stock, send instant if so, avoiding downtime.

Enhanced customer service: A superior retail management system allows employees to engage with customers, automating the mundane tasks away.

Components of a Retail management software

A retail management software usually comprises several modules that enable retailers to manage and automate in-store and out-of-store processes. These systems provide functionality for the retail sector or industry-specific features. Flexible systems allow you to customize different modules based on your needs.

Payment Processing module

This module connects stores with banks and payment systems and its functions include:

• Card processing
• Online payments
• Secure storage of payments
• Invoice creation
• Reports creation
• Bank reconciliation

Inventory Management module

Your stocks are at the core of your retail store business. That is why the inventory management system is so important. After all, how can you sell something if you don't have it with you? The inventory management module controls warehouse stocks and automates some of the logistics and supply chain processes, such as automated:

• Synchronization of stock
• Digital invoicing
• Report generation for real-time insights
• Procurement planning
• Stock optimization
• Expiry tracking

Point of Sale (POS) Software

A fundamental component of a retail management solution is a POS usually includes the following components:

• A Mobile POS solution that allows moving around and performing transactions on the go
• A Desktop POS system installed on computers in stores.
• A self-service kiosk that enables customers to order and pay without cashier assistance

Retail Management Software with a built-in point of sale systems 

Comprehensive platforms can help retailers with an integrated set of tools to manage retail store business activities.

A single retail management solution can include the following capabilities as part of the POS systems for retail:

• Inventory management
• Invoicing and billing
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Marketing management
• Stock verification
• Reporting and analytics

By implementing retail management solution, businesses can automate numerous processes. It enables the business to get a single source of truth that relevant information about transactions, products and customers.

Retail enterprise resource planning (ERP) Systems

The ERP module helps control all stages of the retail operations helping you:

• Collect customer data to improve campaigns and strategies
• Control human resources and communication
• Deal with money flows and transactions
• Support the balance between orders and stock
• Integrates logistics, supply chain and inventory management processes
• Categorize products by various criteria and control their lifecycle

The future of retail management software is cloud-based

While on-premise retail management software systems are all well and good, we understand the paranoia that that most businesses feel with the current spate of data breaches and what not. The reality is that there are far more threats from keeping your retail system on-premise. Disasters happen, and a system can be breached far easier when physically accessible on your infrastructure. You also have to deal with the overhead of hiring IT specialists to maintain the system, handle updates and fix issues.

The future is cloud-based retail management software. With a cloud-based platform, you don't need to install it. This frees up resources and the cost of maintaining both the hardware and the software.

Omnichannel retail management systems

Device proliferation increases how people make different purchases across channels because omnichannel retail has become the top priority. Gone are the days of a stand-alone point of sale systems in a store, sitting in a corner.

By nature, omnichannel retail management systems synchronize traceability across all touchpoints, from the eCommerce portal to the brick and mortar store to the mobile application. While these are exciting ideas, they are a bit off for most small businesses.

Accelerate your retail business with the right partner

Selecting the best retail management system is critical and challenging. It impacts your business performance. Opt for a system that caters specifically to the retail market, which needs minimal customization while being cloud-native.

At Ginesys, we optimize your retail business with in-depth know-how of how things work. Our software empowers you to achieve growth and profitability with ease. Be it simple retail point of sale systems to sophisticated retail management systems, span the entire gamut of functionality you may need. Get in touch with us to learn more.