Well, 2020 seems to not be favorable for everyone, especially for retailers. As 2021 is already around the corner and we’re going to say goodbye to days of auld lang syne real soon, it’s the prime time to look forward to a more fruitful year. To ensure that, in today’s article, we’ll discuss the reasons why you, as business owners and operators, should adopt a POS solution for supplements & nutrition retail.
Overview
Robust e-commerce functionalities
According to research, online sales accounted for US$10 billion in supplement sales in 2019. Additionally, it is outpacing brick-and-mortar sales. Bob Sanders, executive vice president at Information Resources Inc., estimated a 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for online sales brick-and-mortar from 2019 to 2024. Meanwhile, the CAGR in the same period for physical stores was expected to be only 4%. Besides, the IRI data indicated that the dollar share going to brick-and-mortar supplement retailers had fallen from 69% in 2016 to 53% in 2019.
Evidently, the emergence of e-commerce retailers like Amazon in the supplements & nutrition industry is threatening offline merchants. That’s when a POS solution for supplements & nutrition retail comes in.
Integration with e-commerce platforms
Options like e-commerce, which, by the way, also offers consumers education, and in the palms of their hands. The integration of POS and e-commerce platforms helps merchants in more than one way:
- Build a well-functioning commercial website.
- Create an omnichannel shopping experience while ensuring buyers can get the product they want.
- Make sure staff members have all the proper tools and assistance they need to complete their tasks efficiently.
- Integrate with e-commerce inventory in real-time to manage inventory efficiently.
- Expand e-commerce offerings.
Thus, the compatibility with multiple e-commerce platforms is an attractive feature of a great POS solution for supplements & nutrition retail. Some popular e-commerce companies worth paying attention to are Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
Consumer app
Robert Craven, CEO of MegaFood has identified the force making retailers start to think about applying technologies in their businesses. One manifestation of this force is what Craven calls the “ubiquitous shopper”. They are the consumers who want to buy anything through any devices available. “I can tell my watch to order something for me now”, said Craven. So, to compete in such an environment, adopting some tools of technology is a must.
A consumer app (or shopping experience app) is a favorite among businesses as a tool that they utilize to enhance customer shopping experiences. Eventually, it helps strengthen the relationship with customers and boost sales performance.
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Every kind of mobile consumer app will do. However, a PWA (progressive web app) consumer app, supported by POS software, can optimize the user experience. Being the hybrid of a regular website and its mobile app, PWA has inherited the good traits of both a website and a native app. It loads faster, requires updates less frequently, is less expensive than a native app while being able to reach a large number of users just like a website.
Proper multi-store management
Although we just have talked about how online sales are outperforming offline sales, data has shown that brick-and-mortar is still the leading channel for supplement sales. In 2019, brick-and-mortar sales accounted for $18 billion of the total $36 billion supplement market. So, physical channel sales are also growing and playing the main role in the supplements & nutrition industry.
The key here is to pay attention to all retail channels, including physical stores, online marketplaces, social media, etc. As buyers will shop across all outlets, retailers must ensure an omnichannel shopping experience. To achieve that, an extra helping hand from a POS system coming with a robust multi-store management feature would be nice.
Such a system is a decent POS solution for supplements & nutrition retail as it helps:
- Create new stores and registers. Business owners can easily create new stores as they grow and add more registers during the peak seasons to sell more and faster. Additionally, they can also choose to disable a store or register if they no longer need it.
- Operate multiple stores in real-time. With real-time synchronization, all data are updated and synchronized on a real-time basis. Thus, there’s no need to worry about overselling or misinformation.
- Manage multi-store and multi-warehouse. This feature is extra useful when you have multiple stores and multiple warehouses. And each warehouse is supplying for more than one store or vice versa. It allows merchants to create warehouses and assign warehouses to each store (both online and offline). Moreover, it is easy to change between stores at their fingertips.
- Allow click-and-collect. With this handy feature in POS, customers can totally browse and order online, and then pick-up their purchases in-store. Not only does it help buyers save time, but it’s also even more meaningful during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Provide advanced reports. It’s not easy to manage multiple stores, because you can’t be at all places to manage at one time. Accurate and comprehensive reports in POS that can be accessed from anywhere will become your supportive ‘side-kick’.
Insightful marketing reports
Along with selling supplements & nutrition products on as many retail channels as possible, merchants also need to utilize as many marketing channels as possible. However, managing all those is, obviously, not a simple task. That’s why a POS comes to your rescue. Merchants benefits from marketing reports in POS in many ways:
- Keep track of referrers. A referrer is the way that a customer gets to your store. By knowing that, you can strategically distribute your sources to different marketing channels accordingly. Some referrer sources include direct, search, email, and social.
- Get an overview of conversion. A conversion occurs when a visitor of your website completes a desired goal like making a purchase or filling out a survey. This kind of report gives insights into a particular customer’s behaviors. In details, a conversion summary shows:
- Total orders the customer makes from your store.
- Total times the customer visits your store.
- The number of days between the first visit and the most recent visit.
- An overview of the customer’s other activities.
Efficient inventory management
Inventory management has never been an easy task. Particularly when the demand is rocketing, managing inventory can be a mess. What merchants need is a POS solution for supplements & nutrition retail. A handy inventory management system in POS can really help:
- Automatically update inventory in real-time. With the real-time synchronization functionality, when a retailer sells an item at their offline store, the stock level of that item is immediately deducted from the outlet and the warehouse assigned to that store. Additionally, the stock availability on the online platform also changes accordingly, in real-time.
- Keep track of stock levels and stock flow. Not only can merchants check on the stock level anytime, but they can also set up stock alerts when an item is low or out of stock to place purchase orders in time.
- Allow multiple warehouses in one order. It’s normal for supplements & nutrition retailers to source their inventory from multiple warehouses. Thus, enabling products supplied by many warehouses in 1 single order is vital to merchants.
- Make better inventory plans with comprehensive reports. By reviewing sales reports, it’s convenient to know which item is selling the most and the least. With that being so, retailers can make data-driven decisions on what and when to stock.
Powerful payment integration
As we have discussed in the previous article, there have been more and more payment methods emerging and becoming a favorite among consumers. That’s why supplements & nutrition retail in particular is trying to be capable of providing as many payment options as they can. Thus, payment integration deems one of the must-have features to look for in an outstanding POS system. Such an essential feature helps:
- Reduce check-out time by providing a frictionless experience.
- Minimize human errors and make it easy to deal with extra features like return, exchange, and money-back guarantee.
- Ensures the transparency and security of transactions thanks to the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).
- Support contactless payments to minimize human interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are countless payment gateways that POS solution providers are partnering with. Some worth mentioning are Paypal, Moneris, Authorize.Net, iZettle.
A POS solution for a New Year’s resolution
As we’re reaching the end of today’s article, we hope that you have found yourself the answer to the question of why a POS solution matters to supplements & nutrition retail. To wrap it up, here are the key features making a POS system important to merchants like you:
- Robust e-commerce functionalities
- Integration with e-commerce platforms
- Consumer app
- Proper multi-store management
- Insightful marketing reports
- Efficient inventory management
- Powerful payment integration
They’re all the reasons why you, as retailers, should include adopting a POS solution in your New Year’s resolution. And if you’re now wondering which one to choose, then how about looking at our suggestion?ConnectPOS is the one that takes the cake. This POS software prides itself on being a leading POS for omnichannel retail with a plethora of features and up-to-date technologies. Book your 14-day completely free trial below to immediately experience a world-class product! Should you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact now!