There is no standard customer anymore. Everyone who searches through your shelves is doing their own combination of online and offline shopping, with their own styles and tastes, and even their own preferred method of payment. The question is, how far do you have to go as an entrepreneur to accommodate these preferences?
Fortunately, the same digital revolution that opened up all these customer demands also created a way to grant them. New point of sale technology is built around the boundless possibilities of Cloud computing and the digital delivery of flexible customer experience options.
Digital is Visible
Digitizing your business begins at the point of sale. What was once the final transaction of the customer experience can now be one of its starting points. More and more businesses are using digital displays such as Ipads to double as sales registers and customer-facing touch-screen tools. They’re still connected to your cash drawer and linked to your receipt printers, but now they can do more. You can load your entire inventory on to the devices and guide your customers through all the variation, styles, colors, and seasonal variations available to them anywhere in your shop. It can save you space on the in-store floor and also offers the full shopping experience to your online customers.
In-store these digital displays also give you a final conversation point to value-add to your customer experience. They may have an item or two ready to be bagged, but a flashy visual by the register can catch the eye and lead to last-minute addition.
As impressive as these visual selling techniques can be, they’re only the beginning of what new point of sale technology can do.
Digital is Flexible
Much of the flexibility a digital POS system opens up is associated with payment. That includes providing you with the ability to handle any sort of electronic transaction with end-to-end encryption and the latest authentication technology, but it doesn’t stop there. As they’re tied directly to your inventory, purchase orders, and stock levels—digital POS solutions give you the flexibility to price and package your products to best suit a sale.
You can bundle items together with the swipe of a barcode—and can create your own professional-grade barcodes as well—to entice customers while still tracking your inventory. You can offer spur-of-the-moment discounts, negotiate refunds, and exchanges without hassle, and generally turn a static cash register into another tool for pleasing your customers.
It’s your business, after all, and a digital POS setup gives you the power to run it your way. Even more, you can use this digital technology to gain a better insight into how your business functions in the first place.
Digital is Analytical
Digital POS products use the Cloud to gather and organize information from every aspect of your business and your customer’s behavior into a comprehensive study of how it all fits together. You can use this functionality to trace the origin of every dollar and account for each sale, discount, or surge in popularity that occurs along the way. It’s a data science endorsement of your sales strategies that comes built into your POs system.
You can use it to gauge the effectiveness of individual staff, to experiment with online and in-store sales initiatives, and to see just how valuable all these many new digital demands really are.
A digital POS system lets you meet the new demands of the modern shopper, while also assessing whether these options are right for your business. It’s a step toward answering the answer posed earlier about how far entrepreneurs should and can afford to go in appeasing the new digital customer.
New Point of Sale Technology Solutions
Once you convert information into digital form you can bend it to your whim. Capture your stock with a digital camera and you can create an entire mix-n-match boutique online; digitize your inventory and you can seamlessly integrate it with every sale; move from cash to encrypted transactions and you can take customer payments from anywhere in the internet-connected world.
That’s the benefit of new point of sale technology. You get the flexibility to appease any kind of customer demand and create the perfect shopping experience for your enterprise. If you’ve yet to make the leap to an integrated digital POS system you’re making working life harder for yourself. Thankfully, there’s an easy solution.
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