Nowadays, customers are preferring shopping on multiple channels, yet experiencing a smooth and continuous shopping flow among stores and terminals. That leads to the emergence of the omnichannel experience as well as multi-store management.
By its simplest, omnichannel experience refers to a business approach including multiple channels interacting with customers in a joint and integrated way. The purpose of the omnichannel experience is to bring customers a seamless and smooth shopping experience across different stores. And managing multi-store is crucial to the omnichannel experience. Multi-store management sounds, obviously, uneasy, as it includes many processes and tasks. Today’s article will give you three tips to manage multi-store in POS (point-of-sale) properly.
Overview
Inventory management
In business, inventory management means stocking the RIGHT materials and products, with the RIGHT amount, in the RIGHT place, at the RIGHT time, and at the RIGHT cost. In order to create an omnichannel experience in POS, crucial features are:
Multi stores and multi warehouses
It is useful for merchants to be able to create warehouses and assign warehouses to each store (both online and offline) to manage a multi-store effectively. Moreover, it should be easy to change between stores at their fingertips. In each warehouse, the available items and their stocking amount can be adjusted. Furthermore, it becomes handy in the case that the desired items are already out of stock in the current store. In such cases, staff can easily check on the availability in the other stores and inform customers.
Real-time synchronization
Real-time synchronization is vital in multi-store management. With POS, when an order is placed, the product stock will be immediately deducted from the warehouse assigned to that store. Additionally, your products can be automatically updated from online stores to POS in real-time. Therefore, there’s no need to worry about misinformation. During the whole process, human involvement is lessened and subjective errors are minimized. Hence, selling an already-out-of-stock product can be avoided.
Utilize technology
It is fruitful for businesses to utilize online platforms to create an omnichannel retail experience. Thus, online channels can enhance in-store experiences. Currently, there are two trends emerging in the market:
PWA (Progressive Web Apps)
PWA consumer app facilitates a quick and easy POS experience. Whenever a customer is near the store, PWA will send notifications about promotions information to attract the passer. Once customers enter the store, they can scan barcodes to find more information about products and do self check-out to save time waiting in an endless queue.
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AI (Artificial Intelligence) facial recognition
AI facial recognition enables the store staff to be informed at the very moment that customers walk in. Moreover, with AI facial recognition, it is now just a piece of cake to identify existing customers and review their names, type, visit and purchase history, and their spending. Accordingly, sales assistants can figure out the most suitable way to support customers. And the business owners can manage the multi-store more effectively.
Enhance accountability and staff performance
As you have plenty of staff members in charge of many stores, you better get yourself a multi-store retail management software. It helps you to manage your staff performance and improve their accountability. The two keys to achieving that are:
Manager approval
The ability to create unlimited staff roles and give them restricted or permitted access to certain actions. For example, adding promo, applying taxes, customizing receipts, etc. Once a staff member has their role assigned, they receive a PIN code to access POS confidentially on any device to self-manage their own tasks.
Shift management
This feature is a must as business owners need to manage store operators with transparent shifts information. The information includes total cash adjustment in and out, total cash amount and take-out, etc. Furthermore, such information also helps business owners to have a better understanding of the net sales of each staff member. Accordingly, rewarding or coaching can be determined suitably and in time.
Recap
As we walked through the 3 decisive components of multi-store management in POS, we can tell that it requires lots of time and effort. Luckily, all of the functions mentioned above are all available in POS. If you are longing for a well-managed multi-store system, POS is a must-try as a multi-store retail management software.
ConnectPOS, one of the best cloud-based POS software for omnichannel retail businesses, takes pride in being able to deliver to you plenty of features that help you with multi-store management. And we are just one click away. Contact us for further details!