Retail Management Software

Buyers Guide to Retail Management Software

It’s an excellent time to be in retail, especially from a technology standpoint. A variety of point-of-sale (POS) systems have transformed into complete retail management systems. With the many features that are offered, it would make better sense to call today’s advanced POS system a “retail management system” instead.

When you’re looking for retail management software, what kinds of important features should you look for? What if you would like some additional options including cloud-based deployment or something for mobile devices like smartphones? There are a lot of decisions. This article below will be able to answer all of your questions so you will be able to make the decision that works best for your business.

Retail Management Software Offers More Than Just Point of Sale

It’s more important than ever to have retail software that does more than just receive payments from customers and act as a point of sale tool. Customers have a lot more buying options today than they did many years ago. In a retail market that’s increasingly competitive, you want tools that will not only help you anticipate but meet overall customer demand and be able to process transactions conveniently and easily.

Retail management software will help retailers answer a lot of very important challenges to their business including how relationships with suppliers can be managed to get better partnership and pricing terms, how products can be effectively managed to guarantee maximum profits, how administrative tasks can be improved and streamlined to lower the cost of overhead, how customer information can be tapped into and collected in order to build customer satisfaction, increase sales, and meet customer demands, and how the speed and convenience of purchase transactions be improved.

Common Features of Retail Management Systems

There are many important features that most retail management systems offer. While the scope and complexity of these features might vary between software programs, your retail management system should include five main features:

1. Point-of-sale/transaction automation - This feature processes payments and automates assigned prices to items at the checkout. This reduces human error from cashiers. It also accordingly adjusts inventory levels.
2. Inventory management - Inventory management tracks the levels of your inventory and makes adjustments in real-time to products as they are purchased. Retailers can be alerted when stock runs low, allowing for more detailed and efficient inventory organization. To locate trends, reports are offered on inventory movement.
3. Reporting and analytics - This is another important feature that analyzes and records business performance and sales data and turns it into easy-to-understand dashboards and reports. It also incorporates other expenses including inventory figures to provide a precise snapshot of opportunities or revenue leaks.
4. Retail customer service relationship management, or CRM - This feature set stores purchase history and customer information. It allows retailers to track preferred items that are marketable to customers, key dates including anniversaries and birthdays, and contact information.
5. Employee management - Employee management completes complex tasks like shift scheduling and provides the ability to clock an employee in or out. It keeps track of how many hours each employee works for payroll and assigns sales commissions.

These features should be more than enough to get a business going if you are a single-store retailer.

If you’re a retail store with more than one physical location or have an online store, you might want to purchase some extra features for your retail management system:

1. Merchandise management - This feature enables the organization and in-depth structure of inventory management that’s typically broken down into stock keeping units (aka SKUs). To pinpoint purchasing trends, it provides analytics and interacts between stores to create a master merchandise warehouse.
2. Warehouse management - Warehouse management automates the management, tracking, and location of inventory and includes capabilities such as invoice management, order receiving, and a locating/positioning system for products.
3. Business intelligence - Business intelligence is similar to analytics and retail reporting for a POS system but includes extra details to accommodate larger businesses (for example, analysis and multi-store data).

Benefits of Using Retail Management Software

A retail management system that’s properly implemented should help businesses be better able to manage inventory, efficiently direct employees, and drive more sales. We will outline some of these benefits below:

• One benefit is increased efficiency during checkout. This is the most important benefit retail management software has to offer – improving point-of-sale transactions for customers and employees. To help minimize completion times for transactions, RMS systems assimilate with barcode scanners, receipt printers, digital displays, cash drawers, and credit card processors.
• Another major benefit is improved merchandise management and inventory. It’s a delicate process to maintain proper inventory levels as so many seasoned retailers already know. If you don’t have any software support for controlling or tracking inventory, that can make the process even more frustrating. Including a merchandise and inventory management feature would provide incomparable transparency for managing levels of stock. If you have a bakery, for example, bakery software would manage inventory for all products and ingredients that are being used.
• The third benefit of a retail management system includes actionable customer management insights. This benefit would allow you to track and learn about your customers so your interactions can become more personalized. Customer databases that include loyalty program profiles, contact information, and purchase histories can assist you in sending out targeted emails as well as additional marketing promotions. Your CRM’s effectiveness is dependent upon developing a strong recurring customer base.
• One of the last benefits of a retail management system includes overall increased transparency and efficiency into business, which will decrease most of your time spent completing monotonous manual processes. You’ll have a lot more time to devote to improving business performance, optimizing inventory, training and monitoring employees, and improving relationships with your customers.

In-Store Retail Management Systems – Essential Hardware

We’ll break down some of the most essential hardware you will need for your retail management system:

1. Cash drawer - You need a place to store cash for transactions because a lot of people do still carry cash on them.
2. Receipt printer - You will need a receipt printer, despite the fact that digital printers are becoming more popular. Many customers are old-school and still want a physical copy of their purchases.
3. Credit card reader - This is another piece of hardware you need to have because EMV-compliant readers are being used more often since the standard went live.
4. Barcode scanner - This is a must. It adjusts stock by integrating with inventory management and automates the checkout process.
5. Register screen - This displays transaction items and product databases quickly and also includes additional functions such as viewing reports or clocking in.

You will need to have all of this hardware if you’re planning to upgrade from a POS to a system with more features, so be sure that your existing hardware will be compatible with your new retail management system.

If this is your first time buying a system, you’ll need to purchase all of this hardware.

Tips for New Retail Management Software Buyers

It can prove to be quite a challenge when you’re choosing a new retail management system. There are so many options and considerations to think about. We recently conducted a survey from some of our software buyers which uncovered many commonly-used tactics that helped them make a more informed decision on which system to buy.

You want to first research everything that’s currently available in the market. In terms of deployment models, prices, additional applications, and common features, you need to develop an understanding of what the market looks like. Be on the lookout for industry terms that you’ll want to understand when you start working with vendors. One good resource is to research software provider websites.

Next, you want to prioritize and define the needs of your business. What do you want your new system to accomplish? Make a list of some solutions that might work best for you, then compile some information together regarding what your current system is doing for you now. Ask managers to talk to employees about what they could do to make their jobs easier. Then create a document that can be shared with vendors to keep your conversation focused on specific requirements.

Finally, you want to evaluate some of your business solutions based on user reviews and demos. Researching retail software reviews is one of the best ways to evaluate and eliminate RMS systems. After you have shortlisted between three to five systems, you can give these systems a try to get a general overview of how different solutions work and be able to evaluate the functionality and usability of these systems.