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Convergence of the retail kind: The human touch

It's an all too common occurrence in the news: well-established companies downsizing or shuttering stores that can't compete with the expedience and pricing of the rising class of etailers. Though media and entertainment companies were first on the scene with a click-and-collect model, the digital movement has caused a fever pitch across the apparel, consignment, household goods, grocery, and pet care industries leaving a trail of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers in its wake. However, opportunity exists to reshape this reality. While closures are a consequence of digital giants and start-ups alike, they're also exacerbating the problem. When brick-and-mortar stores close their doors, they relinquish their very advantage of the retail experience and the environments they cultivate. Harkening back to dime stores in small-town America and village squares in Italy, merchants thrive on face-to-face interactions with their customers. It instills a sense of community and reciprocity that builds lifelong loyalty. Beyond the importance of human connection, the tangible aspects of shopping often lead to an almost visceral sense of gratification and reward for customers.

Spotlight

Signet

Signet Jewelers Limited is the world's largest retailer of diamond jewelry and the largest specialty jewelry retailer in the US, UK and Canada. Signet operates over 3,500 stores primarily under the name brands of Kay Jewelers, Zales, Jared The Galleria Of Jewelry, H.Samuel, Ernest Jones, Peoples and Piercing Pagoda. Signet also operates JamesAllen.com. The company’s annual sales of approximately $6.3 billion derive from the retailing of jewelry, watches and associated services.

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POS Solutions, POS Retail

Implementing Marketplace Optimization Tools for B2B Success

Article | January 12, 2024

Marketplace optimization serves as a gold mine for businesses, helping them attain key marketing goals. Read the article to discover leading marketplace optimization tools for increased sales and ROI. Contents 1. Marketplace Optimization: The Tale of Visibility 2. Core Benefits of Marketplace Optimization 3. Boosting POS Strategies with Location Intelligence 4. Top 10 Best-selling Optimization Tools for Market Dominance 4.1 Stackline 4.2 Perpetua 4.3 Teikametrics 4.4 Quartile 4.5 Wiser Solutions 4.6 Intentwise 4.7 CommerceIQ 4.8 Feedvisor 4.9 A2X 4.10 eDesk 5. Final Thoughts 1. Marketplace Optimization: The Tale of Visibility Marketplace optimization (MPO) enables businesses to enhance their selling capabilities and rank higher on search engines, leveraging diverse signals like search keywords, product listings, seller metrics, etc. The MPO process essentially includes multiple best practices, such as optimizing product descriptions, fine-tuning advertisements, and employing locational intelligence, which together focus on ensuring superior execution of businesses’ selling operations. The global online marketplace optimization tools market size is projected to touch USD 2159.22 million by the end of 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 19.32% during the forecast period. [Source: Business Research Insights] Significantly, as catalysts for greater brand visibility and POS strategies, today’s leading marketplace optimization tools help B2B businesses elevate their e-commerce platforms, delivering the best results and increased customer satisfaction. With such notable benefits and prominence, the MPO process has become a shining protagonist in B2B's tale of visibility. 2. Core Benefits of Marketplace Optimization Along with increased website traffic, conformity to prominent sales acceleration trends, and enhanced customer engagement, marketplace optimization tools usher in many advantages for B2B businesses. The prominent merits of these include: Better Performances With actionable insights into businesses, marketplace optimization ensures better e-commerce performances, allowing companies to make end-to-end forecasts and informed marketing decisions. Enhanced Brand Visibility The MPO processes help businesses improve quality scores for search keywords and fine-tune their product listings. It also heightens their brand presence across different filters and categories, enabling them to reach wider audiences. Targeted Marketing By incorporating processes like locational intelligence, marketplace optimization further makes for precision in lead targeting and efficient resource allocation, ensuring increased conversion rates and brand loyalty. Improved POS Tactics Businesses can augment their pricing and inventory management processes with marketplace optimization, ensuring optimized POS strategies. This optimization enables companies to set attractive prices and maintain the right products in stock, rendering the checkout processes effortless for buyers. Customized Ad Campaigns With an effective MPO strategy, companies can also gain beneficial insights into the behavior of target audience segments. Such information, in turn, helps businesses create laser-focused campaigns with high-performing keywords, optimized content, and attractive product listings. Greater Profitability Marketplace optimization promises higher sales and lead conversion rates. It further promotes cross-selling and upselling through personalized advertisements, ushering in significant returns and meeting businesses’ marketplace objectives. 3. Boosting POS Strategies with Location Intelligence In today’s marketing world, location intelligence has emerged as an integral part of MPO processes, empowering businesses to boost their productivity and potentially earn peak financial gains. By leveraging geospatial data or location intelligence, companies can effortlessly assess crucial factors like customer demographics, economic factors, product demand, and competitor actions, which enable them to strategically optimize their e-commerce strategies for enhanced sales. Furthermore, the process enables companies to understand purchase behavior and customize their products and pricing according to regions, ensuring a practical POS approach and driving higher sales. From enhanced delivery logistics and product offerings to personalized marketing endeavors and customer experiences, location intelligence effectively promises multiple benefits to businesses and remains an essential tool for optimizing digital marketplaces. 4. Top 10 Best-selling Optimization Tools for Marketplace Dominance With prominent marketplace technology and tools, businesses successfully attain unparalleled customer confidence and expand their reach, enhancing the way online commerce works. Here’s a list of the top 10 best-selling optimization tools for inimitable marketplace success: 4.1 Stackline Launched in 2014, Stackline is a comprehensive e-commerce optimization tool for retailers and brands in the digital marketplace. It offers businesses crucial MPO signals, such as revenue metrics, commerce insights, and interaction data, enabling them to make informed decisions and POS strategies related to product pricing and stock availability. The AI-powered optimization tool Stackline further boasts multiple promising features that include: Market Insights: Stackline enhances businesses' marketing intelligence by providing comprehensive insights into buyers' behaviors, preferences, and trends. It enables companies to understand markets and engage their audiences for better returns. A Multi-retailer CRM: Through a notable multi-retailer CRM, the marketplace optimization tool empowers businesses to undertake customized marketing efforts, as customer data can be centralized and managed in the system for various MPO processes, including assessment of rating and reviews, targeted surveys, collection of customer feedback, and so on. Optimization of Ads: With Stackline, e-commerce companies can create powerful advertisements and campaigns, simplifying their advertising efforts and optimizing advertisement expenditure. Performance Monitoring: Stackline further lets businesses get a complete view of their e-commerce business data, including sales performance. It allows users to monitor and analyze crucial parameters, driving peak financial gains and enabling informed decisions. Handling Product Listings: The marketplace optimization tool also offers solutions for product listing management across multiple digital platforms, ensuring reliability, preciseness, and enhanced POS tactics. 4.2 Perpetua Perpetua is an advanced optimization tool for marketplace that serves the top e-commerce platforms globally. The tool primarily focuses on optimizing businesses’ advertising efforts, empowering them to attain their strategic goals by highlighting crucial metrics and assessing trends through next-generation machine learning and advanced algorithms. With easy task automation and crucial marketplace insights, Perpetua helps businesses ensure true e-commerce success. The chief features of the tool include: Advertisement Intelligence: With Perpetua, businesses can gain complete advertising intelligence, as the tool provides users with crucial marketplace data and insights. This data empowers them to show suitable ads to the right people on major e-commerce platforms, further enhancing sales and revenues. Simplification and Automation of Advertising Workflows: Optimizing processes like video and display advertising across leading marketplaces, Perpetua also helps businesses automate tasks and streamline their workflows. Such automation allows companies to implement more efficient advertisement strategies and customize their ads for better results and investment efficiency. Marketplace Insights: By rendering comprehensive insights into market performance, sales trends, competitors, market developments, and customers’ behavior at the POS, Perpetua effectively strengthens retailers’ decision-making processes, helping them devise better advertising techniques and driving higher ROI. Bidding Algorithms for Precise Targeting: Through intelligent bidding algorithms, Perpetua enables businesses to analyze crucial factors such as market trends and customer demographics, and helps them reach their target audiences with extraordinary precision. It offers companies tailored suggestions based on these analyses, ensuring the practical usage of advertising budget and better impact of ad campaigns. Comprehensive Sales Analytics: Showcasing the effectiveness of businesses’ advertisement expenditure, Perpetua’s all-inclusive sales analysis feature lets retailers leverage crucial insights into their sales performance, helping them improve their advertisement approach. 4.3 Teikametrics Facilitating innovative advertising, Teikametrics is a revolutionary e-commerce optimization tool that incorporates AI technology to help companies thrive on major e-commerce platforms. It renders solutions for advertisement optimization, marketplace insights, and inventory management for small businesses and established enterprises. Notably, with its impressive Flywheel 2.0 technology, the powerful optimization tool automates advertisement bidding processes and ensures enhanced brand visibility. Teikametrics shines with its unique selling proposition, promising a robust optimization tool with the following key attributes: AI-driven Optimization: Teikametrics leverages artificial intelligence to analyze market trends and customer behavior and subsequently augments businesses' advertisement campaigns, empowering them to make the most of these campaigns. Flywheel 2.0 Technology: The tool’s advanced Flywheel 2.0 technology helps companies make intelligent bids on ad placements, ensuring greater brand awareness and enhanced business sales. Significantly, by automating crucial advertising tasks, it streamlines the ad campaign processes and helps businesses drive higher ROI. Effective Inventory Management and POS Techniques: With Teikametrics, businesses can clearly understand stock requirements and high-performing products. Correspondingly, the forward-looking tool ensures the availability of product stocks in the right amounts at the POS locations, enabling customers to buy what they like and enhancing businesses' POS techniques. Powerful Market Insights: Teikametrics provides businesses with crucial information and insights related to competitors’ actions, market trends, and customer preferences, allowing for informed decision-making and strategy building. 4.4 Quartile Being a robust optimizer of retail media, Quartile utilizes patented AI technology to help e-commerce enterprises fine-tune their digital advertising efforts across prominent platforms. The tool carefully filters through large data sets, automating crucial advertisement tasks to amplify the companies’ returns on investment. Emphasizing the correct ad placement and cross-platform advertisement optimization, the advanced tool further allows enviable precision targeting to businesses. Correspondingly, the key highlights of the innovative marketplace optimization tool include: Automatic, Purpose-Driven Ad Optimization: Leveraging advanced AI technology, Quartile helps users define their optimization goals and streamlines their efforts automatically without requiring manual updates. With the forward-looking tool, businesses can also digitize their ad bidding strategies, streamline ad placements, and search relevant keywords, elevating the efficiency of their ad spend. Privately-owned Machine Learning Innovations: The promising optimization tool for marketplace boasts six proprietary machine learning technologies that companies can leverage to promptly elevate their e-commerce publicity initiatives. Integration of Digital and Retail Media Campaign: Quartile allows businesses to effortlessly combine their digital and retail media campaign optimization within a single platform. This eliminates the need for firms to traverse different platforms separately. It also enables them to augment their brand presence and simplify operations with advanced campaign management tools and analytics from a single interface. Holistic Performance and Attribution Reports: With Quartile, companies can get a comprehensive performance overview comprising relevant insights into sales drivers and attribution reports and make informed decisions or adjust their strategies based on such information. 4.5 Wiser Solutions Wiser Solutions, a leader in commerce execution SaaS products, has an impressive commerce execution suite that facilitates intelligent decision-making and renders a comprehensive view of businesses’ performance. Combining data from offline and online stores, the tool gives companies essential insights, helping them draw augmented sales and profits. Facilitating optimized commerce execution, Wiser Solutions comprises the following notable features: Relevant Pricing Data: By providing actionable pricing data, Wiser Solutions helps businesses enhance their pricing and POS strategies, allowing retailers to promptly evaluate competitor prices, market trends, and other relevant factors, make real-time decisions, and revise product prices to maximize profitability. Comprehensive View of Retail with Multiple Data Sources: Combining data from different sources, such as e-commerce platforms and offline stores, the pioneering tool renders a complete view of the retail environment to businesses, entailing required stock levels, market trends, and customer behavior. In-store Operations Monitoring: Wiser Solutions helps companies effectively carry out core in-store tasks such as pricing products, placing promotional material, and arranging product displays. This helps them render exceptional shopping experiences to customers and ensure consistent brand presence across channels. Smart Decision-making: Wiser’s impressive array of tools comprises advanced analytics that let users leverage real-time insights into competitor strategies, market trends, etc. and make well-informed decisions based on them. The tool, driven by proprietary algorithms, helps businesses drive sales and widen their market shares. Better Product Assortments: With Wiser Solutions, companies can offer customers the most attractive mix of products and ensure that these products don’t run out of stock. Therefore, the tool helps businesses optimize product assortment, driving sales and providing better POS decisions. 4.6 Intentwise Intentwise is an exhaustive marketplace optimization tool that enables retailers to enhance and streamline their advertising endeavors on leading online e-commerce platforms. Focused on elevating pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, it boasts striking components like analytics cloud, ad optimizer, and so on, increasing return on advertising spend (ROAS) and facilitating successful campaign management. Committed to its endeavor of augmenting advertisement ROI, Intentwise offers various benefits to users: Robust Ad Optimization Engine: Harnessing AI and machine learning algorithms, Intentwise empowers businesses to evaluate their advertisement performance data in real time and further renders actionable suggestions related to keyword optimization, budget allocation, and keyword bidding, which could be implemented either manually or automatically. It also provides competitor insights and AI-powered audits for ad campaigns. Overview Dashboard: With Intentwise, companies get a detailed view of crucial ad metrics, such as conversion rates, total expenditure, impressions and clicks. The comprehensive data allows for better decision-making, time and effort savings, enhanced advertising strategies, and attainment of marketing goals. Flexible Reporting Tools: Intentwise further enables businesses to effortlessly tailor their reports according to their preferences and needs. This customization helps companies undertake detailed analysis, better understand their performance metrics, and make vital decisions. Optimized Ad Spend: To ensure maximum ad spend efficiency, businesses leveraging Intentwise can notably fine-tune their campaign management and bidding strategies based on crucial factors of the retail environment, like market conditions and competitor behavior. Superlative Data Visualization: Users can view and evaluate data with a single click, which showcases a clear distinction between brand and non-brand keywords. Furthermore, the tool converts foreign currency into the user’s local currency, rendering the data comparison easier. The enhanced data visualization importantly improves performance and ensures greater precision in decision-making. 4.7 CommerceIQ Empowering brands to effortlessly succeed in the digital marketplace, CommerceIQ is a comprehensive marketplace optimization tool that enhances all aspects of a brand's retail, such as marketing, sales, and supply chain administration. The tool essentially promises high profitability and business growth through task automation, data analytics, and more. Characterized by relentless, ongoing innovation, CommerceIQ is an all-encompassing tool that benefits retailers through: Progressive Data Evaluation: Using advanced algorithms, CommerceIQ allows businesses to analyze large sets of data related to competitors' actions and consumer behavior, which helps companies make strategically intelligent decisions. AI-Powered Ad Solutions: With CommerceIQ's AI-powered ad solutions, businesses can optimize their advertisement expenditure by real-time bid adjustments, using strong keywords, and allotting advertising funds to top-performing campaigns for improved brand visibility and revenue generation. Task Automation: From product pricing adjustments to advertisement bid management, CommerceIQ automates significant advertising tasks, enabling businesses to carry them out quickly and more efficiently. Enhanced Inventory and Supply Chain Management: By predicting inventory requirements and helping businesses maintain the proper stock levels, Commerce IQ ensures that the demands of customers are invariably met at companies' POS locations. Automated Tools for Effective Sales Management: CommerceIQ's innovative features further elevate businesses' sales operations, protecting brands' reputations from third-party sellers and preventing out-of-stock situations and income loss. 4.8 Feedvisor Feedvisor is an AI-first marketplace optimization tool that strengthens businesses through its comprehensive suite of services. The tool renders actionable insights to brands and sellers, empowering them to optimize their pricing techniques, advertisement campaigns, brand management, and content. Reflecting the significance of data-driven intelligence, Feedvisor helps businesses drive true success through its striking features like: Patented Technology for Dynamic Pricing: The comprehensive tool helps businesses fine-tune their product prices, delivering real-time market data, demand forecasting, and competitive analysis for data-backed decisions. AI-driven Optimized Ads: Feedvisor further elevates sponsored ads and DSP campaigns by helping sellers align these campaigns with product prices and promotions. Correspondingly, the tool allows businesses to leverage the most effective keywords for their ads and modifies bids according to conversion rate trends and traffic. Unmatched Market Intelligence: With Feedvisor, businesses get unparalleled marketing intelligence, as the tool offers comprehensive dashboards and data-backed insights to companies, which allow them to understand market trends, competition, and SKU-level performance. A Splendid Suite of Services: Rendering agency-like business and marketing services to clients, the advanced marketplace optimization tool strengthens businesses through various solutions, including inventory management, counterfeit removal, content listing optimization, reputation management, etc. 4.9 A2X Simplifying ecommerce accounting for businesses, A2X was established in 2014 with impressive integration capabilities and the ultimate aim of helping companies reconcile their revenues correctly. Combining effortlessly with various accounting software, A2X helps businesses gain accurate financial information for well-informed decision-making. The principal features of the A2X marketplace optimization tool include: Automated Accounting Tasks: Ensuring the accurate recording of financial information, A2X streamlines accounting processes by automating tasks such as importing and categorizing transactions. Such automation effectively curtails errors associated with manual data entries, rendering an accurate financial picture to business enterprises. Complete Accessibility: The advanced optimization tool further focuses on rendering high accessibility, ensuring that correct and up-to-date financial information remains accessible to all stakeholders, including bookkeepers, accounting firms, and businesses. Elevated Transparency: The forward-looking A2X tool enhances transparency by delivering accurate financials to stakeholders. This allows businesses to clearly understand their operational effectiveness and make insightful decisions. Scalability: From start-ups to big businesses, A2X addresses the unique needs of companies of varying sizes. The tool's high scalability allows businesses to effortlessly leverage it, as it can grow alongside them to meet changing demands and requirements. 4.10 eDesk With an emphasis on augmenting customer experiences, xSellco’s eDesk offers a vast array of e-commerce tools to brands and retailers, which enable them to increase their response rates and work more efficiently. Facilitating effective communication and intelligent decision-making, the comprehensive tool further offers smart response recommendations to businesses through AI automation. From enhanced customer satisfaction to seamless integrations, the chief elements of eDesk include: Smart Inbox: By consolidating customer queries from different sources, such as social media, marketplaces, and web stores, eDesk ensures unified customer support. It empowers businesses to manage all of their sales and customer messages in a single place for more effective communication. Impressive Integrations: Effortlessly connecting with over 200 platforms like web stores, marketplaces, and social networks, eDesk possesses striking integration capabilities, which allow businesses to gain comprehensive order information. Need-based Message Sorting: Automatically prioritizing messages based on business needs, eDesk ensures prompt response to urgent messages, streamlining workflows and augmenting the overall customer experience. Integrated Analytics: With eDesk, businesses can leverage comprehensive insights on support metrics and customer dealings from various data sources to understand customer demands and trends and enhance customer support services. 5. Final Thoughts Marketplace optimization promises greater visibility and e-commerce excellence to retailers and brands worldwide. Importantly, employing diverse best practices and signals, online marketplace tools empower businesses through ad optimization, workflow streamlining, enhanced selling capabilities, and so on. With processes like location intelligence, digital marketers further endeavor to improve the efficiency of their POS strategies. Yet, one can expect a greater emphasis on the use of such processes along with AI and machine learning in the time to come. Future trends in MPOs will especially witness businesses ensuring enhanced immersive experiences for customers through AR and VR. Furthermore, ethical commerce, sustainability, influencer marketing, predictive analytics, and multi-channel integration would continue to hold great prominence, helping businesses make the most beneficial decisions and thereby unlock true business success.

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POS Solutions

What Is Point of Sale Software? A Checklist for Choosing the Best POS for Your Business

Article | February 15, 2024

Point-of-sale (POS) software is constantly evolving. Clunky cash registers alone can’t keep up. Brick-and-mortar retailers are adopting leaner systems that operate on mobile devices in favor of complicated setups that cost thousands of dollars. But it’s not just retail stores that are interested in POS systems—online store owners who sell at craft fairs, trade shows, and farmers markets are also in need of inexpensive and easy-to-use point-of-sale solutions. So, what exactly is point of sale software, how do you know if you need it, and how do you choose the right tool for your business? What is point-of-sale (POS) software? Point of sale software is what brick-and-mortar retailers use to conduct sales in person. It's sometimes a cash register, computer, or even a tablet where cashiers input products, tally the cost, and conduct the financial transaction. Most POS software will also communicate with inventory levels to keep everything in balance. A lot of big-box stores have wildly complex and expensive POS solutions, some of which were custom built for their needs. Independent retailers are moving away from these traditional POS systems and toward cloud-based point-of-sale solutions. Types of POS software There are two main types of POS software: on-premise and cloud-based. On-premise POS software requires you to be on location to use it. Terminals are the most common on-premise POS. Cloud-based POS software offers more flexibility, as you can use any connected, compatible device to access the dashboard. Cloud-based POS software is becoming more mainstream—the market was valued at around $1.29 billion for 2019, with an expected growth rate of more than 21.38% through 2026. A cloud-based POS allows you to conduct sales and check in on your business even when you’re not at the store. You access it directly from the internet, and it’s often compatible with most POS hardware (cash drawers, printers, etc.) and other tools in your tech stack. This is great if you’re a small business that sells in a store and online along with the occasional in-person event. When you use a cloud-based POS and link it to your Shopify store, your inventory automatically adjusts, helping you mitigate costly problems like stockouts. Cloud-based POS systems are also typically less expensive and more convenient than a tethered on-premise solution. There are other types of POS software that fall into one or both of the above categories: Mobile POS (mPOS): A mobile point-of-sale can move around inside or outside a store. Store owners can take transactions from a central point of purchase, like a traditional checkout counter or cash register, or wherever they need it to be. To take transactions on the go, retailers often use hardware like a tablet or smartphone to process transactions. Best for: Pop-up shops; increasing in-store conversion rate Tablets: A tablet POS can be both mobile and docked to a station. These POS systems run on Android tablets or iPads, acting as either the main POS or supplementing your central POS station. This is also a mPOS. Best for: Selling products with lots of details, features, and/or use cases; collecting lots of customer data at the point of purchase; self-serve options; pop-up shops and event sales Desktop: POS systems that run on a desktop computer are typically on-premise solutions docked to a checkout station. They’re bulky but often more powerful and reliable, depending on the hardware you choose. The main POS station in a permanent brick-and-mortar store; businesses that want to add mPOS in addition to their desktop setup Self-serve kiosks: Self-serve kiosks are common in food-based businesses, especially for quick-service restaurants and fast casual dining. This type of POS can drive a 15%–30% increase in average check size. They also work in retail environments. Best for: Food-based businesses; reducing lines and wait times; digitally savvy customers POS apps: Depending on the POS, there are a few point of sale apps to choose from. POS apps work with your hardware and other compatible devices to enable you to access your data and manage business operations. Best for: Businesses that want flexibility and customizability without needing lots of technical resources or budget Open-source POS: Open-source software allows companies to use their source code to build custom solutions with their platform. You can build your open-source POS system internally or with external collaborators. Best for: Enterprises with lots of technical resources; highly unique POS needs Multichannel POS: A multichannel POS can integrate with various commerce channels, an increasingly important capability. These channels include your own website, third-party online marketplaces, your store, pop-up shops, event sales, wholesale, social media, and more. Best for: Ecommerce merchants who do or plan to sell in-person; multichannel online brands Retail POS: A retail POS has features tailored to a brick-and-mortar business selling products. These features could include inventory management, forecasting, and multichannel selling. Best for: Pop-up shops; permanent brick-and-mortar stores in a traditional retail environment Restaurant POS: Restaurant POS systems are designed with food-based businesses in mind. Specific features might include menu planning and costing, ingredient-level tracking, dish customizations, and self-serve ordering. Best for: Food-based businesses (fast food, casual, quick-serve, sit-down, etc.) Components of a POS system There are other pieces of hardware that can complement your POS setup: Barcode scanner: In addition to scanning barcodes, you can also use some scanners to add discount codes. There are 1D barcode scanners that use the traditional bar code, and 2D barcode scanners that can read QR codes. Cash drawer: Unless you only process cashless payments, you’ll need somewhere to put the cash customers use to pay for your products. The cash drawer is a safe, secure place to organize bills. Credit and debit card reader: This piece of hardware can read debit and credit cards. There are several ways to read a card, including swipe, tap, and EMV chip. You need this for payment processing so you can receive the funds from the customer’s bank. Receipt printer: These aren’t always essential, especially if you use Shopify POS, because you can send email receipts, but a printer can connect to your POS and spit out receipts on the spot. Label printer: There are some instances where you’ll need to print a label—ship-from-store, for example. With a label printer as part of your POS setup, you can do that on the spot. Scale: If you sell products by weight, you’ll need a scale to be able to determine how much to charge customers. Some scales connect directly to your POS for a seamless checkout. What does a POS system do? Modern POS systems offer far more functionality than simply administering transactions. They can complete other business functions, as well as inform important business decisions, including: Managing inventory across all locations, both online and offline Providing sales metrics and reporting Managing customer data effectively Improving in-store sales Adapting to business needs with customizations Managing inventory across all locations, both online and offline Whether you have inventory at your storefront, pop-up shop, or warehouse, keeping accurate counts across the board is a tricky (and sometimes tedious) task. Inventory is one of your largest expenses as a retailer, and you need a simple way to manage it. That means having the right products in the right place at the right time—and a POS that helps you achieve that goal. A modern POS system should help retailers manage inventory anywhere you keep your products. Not only does this level of inventory management make tracking easier, but fulfilling orders is quicker when you know how much of a product is at a given location at any time. With a POS, you can easily monitor stock counts across all your stores, while keeping customers happy by avoiding stockouts and automatically ceasing sales of products when inventory runs out. Accurate stock counts streamline ordering from vendors so you always have inventory in stock wherever your products are selling best. Complete visibility of your inventory across all locations also makes it easier to move stock from one place to another (e.g., from warehouse to storefront) when you run low on a product. And it’s simpler to create purchase orders and accurately create your demand forecasts. Providing sales metrics and reporting A POS is useful for far more than processing transactions. You also can use crucial information from your point-of-sale solution to make data-informed decisions about your entire business. Modern POS systems make it painless to see analytics across every channel in your retail business, both individually and as part of your business as a whole. The ability to break down and filter sales data this way can often shed light on what’s working—and what isn’t. So, when you’re assessing a POS system, ensure you can easily track the following: Data for both in-store and online sales Sales broken down over time (number of sales by day, week, month, etc.) Sales per employee Sales per channel (across all stores and for each location) Staff activities broken down by employee Product reports (to see what’s selling and what’s still sitting on shelves) Number of orders (broken down by various stages of fulfillment) Easy, intuitive access to this kind of data can help you make better decisions and understand the overall health of your business. Managing customer data effectively A POS should also help you easily collect, track, and manage customer information. Access to these details can help you better understand your ideal customers and identify your most loyal shoppers. When evaluating your shortlist of POS contenders, make sure that your top choice helps you manage the following: Customer profiles. Collect contact details to build in-depth profiles of your customers to help you learn more about them and their shopping habits. Customer order histories. Quick access to a customer’s order history can help you effectively cross-sell and upsell by offering on-the-spot, tailored product recommendations based on past purchases. Customer loyalty programs. A POS should give you access to your loyalty program across all sales channels, whether someone buys online, in-store, or elsewhere. Improving in-store sales The traditional shopping experience has changed, and retailers have to meet the ever-evolving demands of customers in order to compete. But a POS system can help you keep up with a shifting industry. The right POS features can help you appeal to the empowered shopper and make more sales. For example, use your POS to stay in touch with customers and keep your products top of mind after they leave your store. Sales associates can email customers a list of items they were interested in but didn’t purchase while in-store, so, when they’re ready, the customer can buy those items via a feature like Shopify POS Email cart. Providing a variety of shipping options is another way you can serve your customers’ evolving needs. You can use a POS feature to ship a purchase to whatever address is most convenient for a shopper, whether it’s their home, their office, or another location—which can give you a competitive edge. A POS that offers flexible shipping alternatives can minimize the need for returns and exchanges and keep sales strong. That’s why the following pickup, purchase, and delivery options are quickly becoming table stakes: Buy online, pick up in-store. In-store pickup allows customers to buy online and collect their order from the retailer’s physical store or a third-party location. Thousands of stores are decreasing returns and selling more by letting customers check the size, color, and shape of their purchases before walking out—all while offering highly valued flexibility. Home delivery. After customers buy products in-store—especially heavy or large products, like furniture—they don’t necessarily want to lug it home with them. As an added convenience, offer home delivery. Or, if an item isn't available in-store, but is at another location, customers can buy in store and have the item shipped to their home. In-store returns/exchanges for items purchased online. Creating a hassle-free returns experience for customers can actually build loyalty. For example, if a customer wants to return a product they purchased online, they may want to make a return immediately rather than sending the product back via snail mail. Make it simple for them to visit your store to make the return.

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POS Solutions, POS Retail, Ecommerce Merchandising

8 POS Software Trends for 2022: New Forecasts and What's Next 2

Article | June 10, 2024

When the pandemic first started, most retail stores had to close, and some even suffered financial losses. Know more how retailers up scaled their businesses. Online shopping is quickly becoming the new norm in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most retailers had to migrate their businesses to the cloud in order to meet the current demands of highly tech-savvy consumers, and the use of POS software has become more important than ever. A cloud-hosted POS solution is no longer an option for small and large businesses, but rather a requirement. POS systems have provided retailers with a more efficient way to track inventory and manage sales, replacing the old cash register and traditional methods of selling. As ecommerce grows, POS solutions play an important role in increasing convenience for online customers and providing a customer-centric experience. To keep up with the latest POS system developments, there is a list of the most important POS software trends to watch for. By understanding current POS software adoption reports and key insights, you can maximize the potential of your existing POS solution or, better yet, have better ideas on financing trends by POS that can bring value to your retail business. Consumers had to reorient their purchasing toward needs like food, medicine, and other home items as the viral pandemic threatened everyone's health and safety. The US Census Bureau recently released a report that found that throughout the pandemic, retail stores providing food and beverages saw the biggest monthly growth in retail sales. To better understand how POS systems are assisting retailers in overcoming the challenges posed by the rapidly changing retail landscape, here’s a list of the most recent and importantPOS software trends: Cashless Transactions via Mobile POS Systems Adoption of Cloud-Hosted POS Systems Multichannel Commerce Customer Layout Programs Personalized Shopping Experience AI Integration in POS Systems Use of POS Data Analytics Simple POS Hardware Investing in modern POS systems and maximizing their rich feature sets can help your retail business go a long way, from attracting new customers to retaining a loyal customer base that can drive sales and support your long-term growth.

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POS Retail

5 POINT OF SALE TREND YOU CANNOT MISS IN 2022

Article | January 12, 2022

Point of sale (POS) software is a critical corporate tool that has been well-known as an upgraded alternative to the traditional cash register. This system provides your business with management capabilities like loyalty programs and an improved shopping experience. According to a report carried out by Grand View Research, the worldwide POS terminals market is projected to attain nearly $126 billion by 2027. Here is a point of sale trend list that you will benefit from. You should adopt this point of sale trend. More and more firms are using POS software that allows for quicker checkout time. People tend to have more than a location they wish to drop by. When they visit your store and buy something, they desire to spend as little time as they can, particularly when doing a checkout.

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POS Solutions, POS Retail

Choosing the Right POS Software: Top 10 Tools Unveiled

Article | January 12, 2024

Marketplace optimization serves as a gold mine for businesses, helping them attain key marketing goals. Read the article to discover leading marketplace optimization tools for increased sales and ROI. Contents 1. Marketplace Optimization: The Tale of Visibility 2. Core Benefits of Marketplace Optimization 3. Boosting POS Strategies with Location Intelligence 4. Top 10 Best-selling Optimization Tools for Market Dominance 4.1 Stackline 4.2 Perpetua 4.3 Teikametrics 4.4 Quartile 4.5 Wiser Solutions 4.6 Intentwise 4.7 CommerceIQ 4.8 Feedvisor 4.9 A2X 4.10 eDesk 5. Final Thoughts 1. Marketplace Optimization: The Tale of Visibility Marketplace optimization (MPO) enables businesses to enhance their selling capabilities and rank higher on search engines, leveraging diverse signals like search keywords, product listings, seller metrics, etc. The MPO process essentially includes multiple best practices, such as optimizing product descriptions, fine-tuning advertisements, and employing locational intelligence, which together focus on ensuring superior execution of businesses’ selling operations. The global online marketplace optimization tools market size is projected to touch USD 2159.22 million by the end of 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 19.32% during the forecast period. [Source: Business Research Insights] Significantly, as catalysts for greater brand visibility and POS strategies, today’s leading marketplace optimization tools help B2B businesses elevate their e-commerce platforms, delivering the best results and increased customer satisfaction. With such notable benefits and prominence, the MPO process has become a shining protagonist in B2B's tale of visibility. 2. Core Benefits of Marketplace Optimization Along with increased website traffic, conformity to prominent sales acceleration trends, and enhanced customer engagement, marketplace optimization tools usher in many advantages for B2B businesses. The prominent merits of these include: Better Performances With actionable insights into businesses, marketplace optimization ensures better e-commerce performances, allowing companies to make end-to-end forecasts and informed marketing decisions. Enhanced Brand Visibility The MPO processes help businesses improve quality scores for search keywords and fine-tune their product listings. It also heightens their brand presence across different filters and categories, enabling them to reach wider audiences. Targeted Marketing By incorporating processes like locational intelligence, marketplace optimization further makes for precision in lead targeting and efficient resource allocation, ensuring increased conversion rates and brand loyalty. Improved POS Tactics Businesses can augment their pricing and inventory management processes with marketplace optimization, ensuring optimized POS strategies. This optimization enables companies to set attractive prices and maintain the right products in stock, rendering the checkout processes effortless for buyers. Customized Ad Campaigns With an effective MPO strategy, companies can also gain beneficial insights into the behavior of target audience segments. Such information, in turn, helps businesses create laser-focused campaigns with high-performing keywords, optimized content, and attractive product listings. Greater Profitability Marketplace optimization promises higher sales and lead conversion rates. It further promotes cross-selling and upselling through personalized advertisements, ushering in significant returns and meeting businesses’ marketplace objectives. 3. Boosting POS Strategies with Location Intelligence In today’s marketing world, location intelligence has emerged as an integral part of MPO processes, empowering businesses to boost their productivity and potentially earn peak financial gains. By leveraging geospatial data or location intelligence, companies can effortlessly assess crucial factors like customer demographics, economic factors, product demand, and competitor actions, which enable them to strategically optimize their e-commerce strategies for enhanced sales. Furthermore, the process enables companies to understand purchase behavior and customize their products and pricing according to regions, ensuring a practical POS approach and driving higher sales. From enhanced delivery logistics and product offerings to personalized marketing endeavors and customer experiences, location intelligence effectively promises multiple benefits to businesses and remains an essential tool for optimizing digital marketplaces. 4. Top 10 Best-selling Optimization Tools for Marketplace Dominance With prominent marketplace technology and tools, businesses successfully attain unparalleled customer confidence and expand their reach, enhancing the way online commerce works. Here’s a list of the top 10 best-selling optimization tools for inimitable marketplace success: 4.1 Stackline Launched in 2014, Stackline is a comprehensive e-commerce optimization tool for retailers and brands in the digital marketplace. It offers businesses crucial MPO signals, such as revenue metrics, commerce insights, and interaction data, enabling them to make informed decisions and POS strategies related to product pricing and stock availability. The AI-powered optimization tool Stackline further boasts multiple promising features that include: Market Insights: Stackline enhances businesses' marketing intelligence by providing comprehensive insights into buyers' behaviors, preferences, and trends. It enables companies to understand markets and engage their audiences for better returns. A Multi-retailer CRM: Through a notable multi-retailer CRM, the marketplace optimization tool empowers businesses to undertake customized marketing efforts, as customer data can be centralized and managed in the system for various MPO processes, including assessment of rating and reviews, targeted surveys, collection of customer feedback, and so on. Optimization of Ads: With Stackline, e-commerce companies can create powerful advertisements and campaigns, simplifying their advertising efforts and optimizing advertisement expenditure. Performance Monitoring: Stackline further lets businesses get a complete view of their e-commerce business data, including sales performance. It allows users to monitor and analyze crucial parameters, driving peak financial gains and enabling informed decisions. Handling Product Listings: The marketplace optimization tool also offers solutions for product listing management across multiple digital platforms, ensuring reliability, preciseness, and enhanced POS tactics. 4.2 Perpetua Perpetua is an advanced optimization tool for marketplace that serves the top e-commerce platforms globally. The tool primarily focuses on optimizing businesses’ advertising efforts, empowering them to attain their strategic goals by highlighting crucial metrics and assessing trends through next-generation machine learning and advanced algorithms. With easy task automation and crucial marketplace insights, Perpetua helps businesses ensure true e-commerce success. The chief features of the tool include: Advertisement Intelligence: With Perpetua, businesses can gain complete advertising intelligence, as the tool provides users with crucial marketplace data and insights. This data empowers them to show suitable ads to the right people on major e-commerce platforms, further enhancing sales and revenues. Simplification and Automation of Advertising Workflows: Optimizing processes like video and display advertising across leading marketplaces, Perpetua also helps businesses automate tasks and streamline their workflows. Such automation allows companies to implement more efficient advertisement strategies and customize their ads for better results and investment efficiency. Marketplace Insights: By rendering comprehensive insights into market performance, sales trends, competitors, market developments, and customers’ behavior at the POS, Perpetua effectively strengthens retailers’ decision-making processes, helping them devise better advertising techniques and driving higher ROI. Bidding Algorithms for Precise Targeting: Through intelligent bidding algorithms, Perpetua enables businesses to analyze crucial factors such as market trends and customer demographics, and helps them reach their target audiences with extraordinary precision. It offers companies tailored suggestions based on these analyses, ensuring the practical usage of advertising budget and better impact of ad campaigns. Comprehensive Sales Analytics: Showcasing the effectiveness of businesses’ advertisement expenditure, Perpetua’s all-inclusive sales analysis feature lets retailers leverage crucial insights into their sales performance, helping them improve their advertisement approach. 4.3 Teikametrics Facilitating innovative advertising, Teikametrics is a revolutionary e-commerce optimization tool that incorporates AI technology to help companies thrive on major e-commerce platforms. It renders solutions for advertisement optimization, marketplace insights, and inventory management for small businesses and established enterprises. Notably, with its impressive Flywheel 2.0 technology, the powerful optimization tool automates advertisement bidding processes and ensures enhanced brand visibility. Teikametrics shines with its unique selling proposition, promising a robust optimization tool with the following key attributes: AI-driven Optimization: Teikametrics leverages artificial intelligence to analyze market trends and customer behavior and subsequently augments businesses' advertisement campaigns, empowering them to make the most of these campaigns. Flywheel 2.0 Technology: The tool’s advanced Flywheel 2.0 technology helps companies make intelligent bids on ad placements, ensuring greater brand awareness and enhanced business sales. Significantly, by automating crucial advertising tasks, it streamlines the ad campaign processes and helps businesses drive higher ROI. Effective Inventory Management and POS Techniques: With Teikametrics, businesses can clearly understand stock requirements and high-performing products. Correspondingly, the forward-looking tool ensures the availability of product stocks in the right amounts at the POS locations, enabling customers to buy what they like and enhancing businesses' POS techniques. Powerful Market Insights: Teikametrics provides businesses with crucial information and insights related to competitors’ actions, market trends, and customer preferences, allowing for informed decision-making and strategy building. 4.4 Quartile Being a robust optimizer of retail media, Quartile utilizes patented AI technology to help e-commerce enterprises fine-tune their digital advertising efforts across prominent platforms. The tool carefully filters through large data sets, automating crucial advertisement tasks to amplify the companies’ returns on investment. Emphasizing the correct ad placement and cross-platform advertisement optimization, the advanced tool further allows enviable precision targeting to businesses. Correspondingly, the key highlights of the innovative marketplace optimization tool include: Automatic, Purpose-Driven Ad Optimization: Leveraging advanced AI technology, Quartile helps users define their optimization goals and streamlines their efforts automatically without requiring manual updates. With the forward-looking tool, businesses can also digitize their ad bidding strategies, streamline ad placements, and search relevant keywords, elevating the efficiency of their ad spend. Privately-owned Machine Learning Innovations: The promising optimization tool for marketplace boasts six proprietary machine learning technologies that companies can leverage to promptly elevate their e-commerce publicity initiatives. Integration of Digital and Retail Media Campaign: Quartile allows businesses to effortlessly combine their digital and retail media campaign optimization within a single platform. This eliminates the need for firms to traverse different platforms separately. It also enables them to augment their brand presence and simplify operations with advanced campaign management tools and analytics from a single interface. Holistic Performance and Attribution Reports: With Quartile, companies can get a comprehensive performance overview comprising relevant insights into sales drivers and attribution reports and make informed decisions or adjust their strategies based on such information. 4.5 Wiser Solutions Wiser Solutions, a leader in commerce execution SaaS products, has an impressive commerce execution suite that facilitates intelligent decision-making and renders a comprehensive view of businesses’ performance. Combining data from offline and online stores, the tool gives companies essential insights, helping them draw augmented sales and profits. Facilitating optimized commerce execution, Wiser Solutions comprises the following notable features: Relevant Pricing Data: By providing actionable pricing data, Wiser Solutions helps businesses enhance their pricing and POS strategies, allowing retailers to promptly evaluate competitor prices, market trends, and other relevant factors, make real-time decisions, and revise product prices to maximize profitability. Comprehensive View of Retail with Multiple Data Sources: Combining data from different sources, such as e-commerce platforms and offline stores, the pioneering tool renders a complete view of the retail environment to businesses, entailing required stock levels, market trends, and customer behavior. In-store Operations Monitoring: Wiser Solutions helps companies effectively carry out core in-store tasks such as pricing products, placing promotional material, and arranging product displays. This helps them render exceptional shopping experiences to customers and ensure consistent brand presence across channels. Smart Decision-making: Wiser’s impressive array of tools comprises advanced analytics that let users leverage real-time insights into competitor strategies, market trends, etc. and make well-informed decisions based on them. The tool, driven by proprietary algorithms, helps businesses drive sales and widen their market shares. Better Product Assortments: With Wiser Solutions, companies can offer customers the most attractive mix of products and ensure that these products don’t run out of stock. Therefore, the tool helps businesses optimize product assortment, driving sales and providing better POS decisions. 4.6 Intentwise Intentwise is an exhaustive marketplace optimization tool that enables retailers to enhance and streamline their advertising endeavors on leading online e-commerce platforms. Focused on elevating pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, it boasts striking components like analytics cloud, ad optimizer, and so on, increasing return on advertising spend (ROAS) and facilitating successful campaign management. Committed to its endeavor of augmenting advertisement ROI, Intentwise offers various benefits to users: Robust Ad Optimization Engine: Harnessing AI and machine learning algorithms, Intentwise empowers businesses to evaluate their advertisement performance data in real time and further renders actionable suggestions related to keyword optimization, budget allocation, and keyword bidding, which could be implemented either manually or automatically. It also provides competitor insights and AI-powered audits for ad campaigns. Overview Dashboard: With Intentwise, companies get a detailed view of crucial ad metrics, such as conversion rates, total expenditure, impressions and clicks. The comprehensive data allows for better decision-making, time and effort savings, enhanced advertising strategies, and attainment of marketing goals. Flexible Reporting Tools: Intentwise further enables businesses to effortlessly tailor their reports according to their preferences and needs. This customization helps companies undertake detailed analysis, better understand their performance metrics, and make vital decisions. Optimized Ad Spend: To ensure maximum ad spend efficiency, businesses leveraging Intentwise can notably fine-tune their campaign management and bidding strategies based on crucial factors of the retail environment, like market conditions and competitor behavior. Superlative Data Visualization: Users can view and evaluate data with a single click, which showcases a clear distinction between brand and non-brand keywords. Furthermore, the tool converts foreign currency into the user’s local currency, rendering the data comparison easier. The enhanced data visualization importantly improves performance and ensures greater precision in decision-making. 4.7 CommerceIQ Empowering brands to effortlessly succeed in the digital marketplace, CommerceIQ is a comprehensive marketplace optimization tool that enhances all aspects of a brand's retail, such as marketing, sales, and supply chain administration. The tool essentially promises high profitability and business growth through task automation, data analytics, and more. Characterized by relentless, ongoing innovation, CommerceIQ is an all-encompassing tool that benefits retailers through: Progressive Data Evaluation: Using advanced algorithms, CommerceIQ allows businesses to analyze large sets of data related to competitors' actions and consumer behavior, which helps companies make strategically intelligent decisions. AI-Powered Ad Solutions: With CommerceIQ's AI-powered ad solutions, businesses can optimize their advertisement expenditure by real-time bid adjustments, using strong keywords, and allotting advertising funds to top-performing campaigns for improved brand visibility and revenue generation. Task Automation: From product pricing adjustments to advertisement bid management, CommerceIQ automates significant advertising tasks, enabling businesses to carry them out quickly and more efficiently. Enhanced Inventory and Supply Chain Management: By predicting inventory requirements and helping businesses maintain the proper stock levels, Commerce IQ ensures that the demands of customers are invariably met at companies' POS locations. Automated Tools for Effective Sales Management: CommerceIQ's innovative features further elevate businesses' sales operations, protecting brands' reputations from third-party sellers and preventing out-of-stock situations and income loss. 4.8 Feedvisor Feedvisor is an AI-first marketplace optimization tool that strengthens businesses through its comprehensive suite of services. The tool renders actionable insights to brands and sellers, empowering them to optimize their pricing techniques, advertisement campaigns, brand management, and content. Reflecting the significance of data-driven intelligence, Feedvisor helps businesses drive true success through its striking features like: Patented Technology for Dynamic Pricing: The comprehensive tool helps businesses fine-tune their product prices, delivering real-time market data, demand forecasting, and competitive analysis for data-backed decisions. AI-driven Optimized Ads: Feedvisor further elevates sponsored ads and DSP campaigns by helping sellers align these campaigns with product prices and promotions. Correspondingly, the tool allows businesses to leverage the most effective keywords for their ads and modifies bids according to conversion rate trends and traffic. Unmatched Market Intelligence: With Feedvisor, businesses get unparalleled marketing intelligence, as the tool offers comprehensive dashboards and data-backed insights to companies, which allow them to understand market trends, competition, and SKU-level performance. A Splendid Suite of Services: Rendering agency-like business and marketing services to clients, the advanced marketplace optimization tool strengthens businesses through various solutions, including inventory management, counterfeit removal, content listing optimization, reputation management, etc. 4.9 A2X Simplifying ecommerce accounting for businesses, A2X was established in 2014 with impressive integration capabilities and the ultimate aim of helping companies reconcile their revenues correctly. Combining effortlessly with various accounting software, A2X helps businesses gain accurate financial information for well-informed decision-making. The principal features of the A2X marketplace optimization tool include: Automated Accounting Tasks: Ensuring the accurate recording of financial information, A2X streamlines accounting processes by automating tasks such as importing and categorizing transactions. Such automation effectively curtails errors associated with manual data entries, rendering an accurate financial picture to business enterprises. Complete Accessibility: The advanced optimization tool further focuses on rendering high accessibility, ensuring that correct and up-to-date financial information remains accessible to all stakeholders, including bookkeepers, accounting firms, and businesses. Elevated Transparency: The forward-looking A2X tool enhances transparency by delivering accurate financials to stakeholders. This allows businesses to clearly understand their operational effectiveness and make insightful decisions. Scalability: From start-ups to big businesses, A2X addresses the unique needs of companies of varying sizes. The tool's high scalability allows businesses to effortlessly leverage it, as it can grow alongside them to meet changing demands and requirements. 4.10 eDesk With an emphasis on augmenting customer experiences, xSellco’s eDesk offers a vast array of e-commerce tools to brands and retailers, which enable them to increase their response rates and work more efficiently. Facilitating effective communication and intelligent decision-making, the comprehensive tool further offers smart response recommendations to businesses through AI automation. From enhanced customer satisfaction to seamless integrations, the chief elements of eDesk include: Smart Inbox: By consolidating customer queries from different sources, such as social media, marketplaces, and web stores, eDesk ensures unified customer support. It empowers businesses to manage all of their sales and customer messages in a single place for more effective communication. Impressive Integrations: Effortlessly connecting with over 200 platforms like web stores, marketplaces, and social networks, eDesk possesses striking integration capabilities, which allow businesses to gain comprehensive order information. Need-based Message Sorting: Automatically prioritizing messages based on business needs, eDesk ensures prompt response to urgent messages, streamlining workflows and augmenting the overall customer experience. Integrated Analytics: With eDesk, businesses can leverage comprehensive insights on support metrics and customer dealings from various data sources to understand customer demands and trends and enhance customer support services. 5. Final Thoughts Marketplace optimization promises greater visibility and e-commerce excellence to retailers and brands worldwide. Importantly, employing diverse best practices and signals, online marketplace tools empower businesses through ad optimization, workflow streamlining, enhanced selling capabilities, and so on. With processes like location intelligence, digital marketers further endeavor to improve the efficiency of their POS strategies. Yet, one can expect a greater emphasis on the use of such processes along with AI and machine learning in the time to come. Future trends in MPOs will especially witness businesses ensuring enhanced immersive experiences for customers through AR and VR. Furthermore, ethical commerce, sustainability, influencer marketing, predictive analytics, and multi-channel integration would continue to hold great prominence, helping businesses make the most beneficial decisions and thereby unlock true business success.

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POS Solutions

Streamlining Product Catalogs: Best PIM Software Unveiled

Article | February 15, 2024

Point-of-sale (POS) software is constantly evolving. Clunky cash registers alone can’t keep up. Brick-and-mortar retailers are adopting leaner systems that operate on mobile devices in favor of complicated setups that cost thousands of dollars. But it’s not just retail stores that are interested in POS systems—online store owners who sell at craft fairs, trade shows, and farmers markets are also in need of inexpensive and easy-to-use point-of-sale solutions. So, what exactly is point of sale software, how do you know if you need it, and how do you choose the right tool for your business? What is point-of-sale (POS) software? Point of sale software is what brick-and-mortar retailers use to conduct sales in person. It's sometimes a cash register, computer, or even a tablet where cashiers input products, tally the cost, and conduct the financial transaction. Most POS software will also communicate with inventory levels to keep everything in balance. A lot of big-box stores have wildly complex and expensive POS solutions, some of which were custom built for their needs. Independent retailers are moving away from these traditional POS systems and toward cloud-based point-of-sale solutions. Types of POS software There are two main types of POS software: on-premise and cloud-based. On-premise POS software requires you to be on location to use it. Terminals are the most common on-premise POS. Cloud-based POS software offers more flexibility, as you can use any connected, compatible device to access the dashboard. Cloud-based POS software is becoming more mainstream—the market was valued at around $1.29 billion for 2019, with an expected growth rate of more than 21.38% through 2026. A cloud-based POS allows you to conduct sales and check in on your business even when you’re not at the store. You access it directly from the internet, and it’s often compatible with most POS hardware (cash drawers, printers, etc.) and other tools in your tech stack. This is great if you’re a small business that sells in a store and online along with the occasional in-person event. When you use a cloud-based POS and link it to your Shopify store, your inventory automatically adjusts, helping you mitigate costly problems like stockouts. Cloud-based POS systems are also typically less expensive and more convenient than a tethered on-premise solution. There are other types of POS software that fall into one or both of the above categories: Mobile POS (mPOS): A mobile point-of-sale can move around inside or outside a store. Store owners can take transactions from a central point of purchase, like a traditional checkout counter or cash register, or wherever they need it to be. To take transactions on the go, retailers often use hardware like a tablet or smartphone to process transactions. Best for: Pop-up shops; increasing in-store conversion rate Tablets: A tablet POS can be both mobile and docked to a station. These POS systems run on Android tablets or iPads, acting as either the main POS or supplementing your central POS station. This is also a mPOS. Best for: Selling products with lots of details, features, and/or use cases; collecting lots of customer data at the point of purchase; self-serve options; pop-up shops and event sales Desktop: POS systems that run on a desktop computer are typically on-premise solutions docked to a checkout station. They’re bulky but often more powerful and reliable, depending on the hardware you choose. The main POS station in a permanent brick-and-mortar store; businesses that want to add mPOS in addition to their desktop setup Self-serve kiosks: Self-serve kiosks are common in food-based businesses, especially for quick-service restaurants and fast casual dining. This type of POS can drive a 15%–30% increase in average check size. They also work in retail environments. Best for: Food-based businesses; reducing lines and wait times; digitally savvy customers POS apps: Depending on the POS, there are a few point of sale apps to choose from. POS apps work with your hardware and other compatible devices to enable you to access your data and manage business operations. Best for: Businesses that want flexibility and customizability without needing lots of technical resources or budget Open-source POS: Open-source software allows companies to use their source code to build custom solutions with their platform. You can build your open-source POS system internally or with external collaborators. Best for: Enterprises with lots of technical resources; highly unique POS needs Multichannel POS: A multichannel POS can integrate with various commerce channels, an increasingly important capability. These channels include your own website, third-party online marketplaces, your store, pop-up shops, event sales, wholesale, social media, and more. Best for: Ecommerce merchants who do or plan to sell in-person; multichannel online brands Retail POS: A retail POS has features tailored to a brick-and-mortar business selling products. These features could include inventory management, forecasting, and multichannel selling. Best for: Pop-up shops; permanent brick-and-mortar stores in a traditional retail environment Restaurant POS: Restaurant POS systems are designed with food-based businesses in mind. Specific features might include menu planning and costing, ingredient-level tracking, dish customizations, and self-serve ordering. Best for: Food-based businesses (fast food, casual, quick-serve, sit-down, etc.) Components of a POS system There are other pieces of hardware that can complement your POS setup: Barcode scanner: In addition to scanning barcodes, you can also use some scanners to add discount codes. There are 1D barcode scanners that use the traditional bar code, and 2D barcode scanners that can read QR codes. Cash drawer: Unless you only process cashless payments, you’ll need somewhere to put the cash customers use to pay for your products. The cash drawer is a safe, secure place to organize bills. Credit and debit card reader: This piece of hardware can read debit and credit cards. There are several ways to read a card, including swipe, tap, and EMV chip. You need this for payment processing so you can receive the funds from the customer’s bank. Receipt printer: These aren’t always essential, especially if you use Shopify POS, because you can send email receipts, but a printer can connect to your POS and spit out receipts on the spot. Label printer: There are some instances where you’ll need to print a label—ship-from-store, for example. With a label printer as part of your POS setup, you can do that on the spot. Scale: If you sell products by weight, you’ll need a scale to be able to determine how much to charge customers. Some scales connect directly to your POS for a seamless checkout. What does a POS system do? Modern POS systems offer far more functionality than simply administering transactions. They can complete other business functions, as well as inform important business decisions, including: Managing inventory across all locations, both online and offline Providing sales metrics and reporting Managing customer data effectively Improving in-store sales Adapting to business needs with customizations Managing inventory across all locations, both online and offline Whether you have inventory at your storefront, pop-up shop, or warehouse, keeping accurate counts across the board is a tricky (and sometimes tedious) task. Inventory is one of your largest expenses as a retailer, and you need a simple way to manage it. That means having the right products in the right place at the right time—and a POS that helps you achieve that goal. A modern POS system should help retailers manage inventory anywhere you keep your products. Not only does this level of inventory management make tracking easier, but fulfilling orders is quicker when you know how much of a product is at a given location at any time. With a POS, you can easily monitor stock counts across all your stores, while keeping customers happy by avoiding stockouts and automatically ceasing sales of products when inventory runs out. Accurate stock counts streamline ordering from vendors so you always have inventory in stock wherever your products are selling best. Complete visibility of your inventory across all locations also makes it easier to move stock from one place to another (e.g., from warehouse to storefront) when you run low on a product. And it’s simpler to create purchase orders and accurately create your demand forecasts. Providing sales metrics and reporting A POS is useful for far more than processing transactions. You also can use crucial information from your point-of-sale solution to make data-informed decisions about your entire business. Modern POS systems make it painless to see analytics across every channel in your retail business, both individually and as part of your business as a whole. The ability to break down and filter sales data this way can often shed light on what’s working—and what isn’t. So, when you’re assessing a POS system, ensure you can easily track the following: Data for both in-store and online sales Sales broken down over time (number of sales by day, week, month, etc.) Sales per employee Sales per channel (across all stores and for each location) Staff activities broken down by employee Product reports (to see what’s selling and what’s still sitting on shelves) Number of orders (broken down by various stages of fulfillment) Easy, intuitive access to this kind of data can help you make better decisions and understand the overall health of your business. Managing customer data effectively A POS should also help you easily collect, track, and manage customer information. Access to these details can help you better understand your ideal customers and identify your most loyal shoppers. When evaluating your shortlist of POS contenders, make sure that your top choice helps you manage the following: Customer profiles. Collect contact details to build in-depth profiles of your customers to help you learn more about them and their shopping habits. Customer order histories. Quick access to a customer’s order history can help you effectively cross-sell and upsell by offering on-the-spot, tailored product recommendations based on past purchases. Customer loyalty programs. A POS should give you access to your loyalty program across all sales channels, whether someone buys online, in-store, or elsewhere. Improving in-store sales The traditional shopping experience has changed, and retailers have to meet the ever-evolving demands of customers in order to compete. But a POS system can help you keep up with a shifting industry. The right POS features can help you appeal to the empowered shopper and make more sales. For example, use your POS to stay in touch with customers and keep your products top of mind after they leave your store. Sales associates can email customers a list of items they were interested in but didn’t purchase while in-store, so, when they’re ready, the customer can buy those items via a feature like Shopify POS Email cart. Providing a variety of shipping options is another way you can serve your customers’ evolving needs. You can use a POS feature to ship a purchase to whatever address is most convenient for a shopper, whether it’s their home, their office, or another location—which can give you a competitive edge. A POS that offers flexible shipping alternatives can minimize the need for returns and exchanges and keep sales strong. That’s why the following pickup, purchase, and delivery options are quickly becoming table stakes: Buy online, pick up in-store. In-store pickup allows customers to buy online and collect their order from the retailer’s physical store or a third-party location. Thousands of stores are decreasing returns and selling more by letting customers check the size, color, and shape of their purchases before walking out—all while offering highly valued flexibility. Home delivery. After customers buy products in-store—especially heavy or large products, like furniture—they don’t necessarily want to lug it home with them. As an added convenience, offer home delivery. Or, if an item isn't available in-store, but is at another location, customers can buy in store and have the item shipped to their home. In-store returns/exchanges for items purchased online. Creating a hassle-free returns experience for customers can actually build loyalty. For example, if a customer wants to return a product they purchased online, they may want to make a return immediately rather than sending the product back via snail mail. Make it simple for them to visit your store to make the return.

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POS Solutions, POS Retail, Ecommerce Merchandising

Realizing Exponential Growth with Top E-commerce Tools

Article | June 10, 2024

When the pandemic first started, most retail stores had to close, and some even suffered financial losses. Know more how retailers up scaled their businesses. Online shopping is quickly becoming the new norm in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most retailers had to migrate their businesses to the cloud in order to meet the current demands of highly tech-savvy consumers, and the use of POS software has become more important than ever. A cloud-hosted POS solution is no longer an option for small and large businesses, but rather a requirement. POS systems have provided retailers with a more efficient way to track inventory and manage sales, replacing the old cash register and traditional methods of selling. As ecommerce grows, POS solutions play an important role in increasing convenience for online customers and providing a customer-centric experience. To keep up with the latest POS system developments, there is a list of the most important POS software trends to watch for. By understanding current POS software adoption reports and key insights, you can maximize the potential of your existing POS solution or, better yet, have better ideas on financing trends by POS that can bring value to your retail business. Consumers had to reorient their purchasing toward needs like food, medicine, and other home items as the viral pandemic threatened everyone's health and safety. The US Census Bureau recently released a report that found that throughout the pandemic, retail stores providing food and beverages saw the biggest monthly growth in retail sales. To better understand how POS systems are assisting retailers in overcoming the challenges posed by the rapidly changing retail landscape, here’s a list of the most recent and importantPOS software trends: Cashless Transactions via Mobile POS Systems Adoption of Cloud-Hosted POS Systems Multichannel Commerce Customer Layout Programs Personalized Shopping Experience AI Integration in POS Systems Use of POS Data Analytics Simple POS Hardware Investing in modern POS systems and maximizing their rich feature sets can help your retail business go a long way, from attracting new customers to retaining a loyal customer base that can drive sales and support your long-term growth.

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POS Retail

5 POINT OF SALE TREND YOU CANNOT MISS IN 2022

Article | January 12, 2022

Point of sale (POS) software is a critical corporate tool that has been well-known as an upgraded alternative to the traditional cash register. This system provides your business with management capabilities like loyalty programs and an improved shopping experience. According to a report carried out by Grand View Research, the worldwide POS terminals market is projected to attain nearly $126 billion by 2027. Here is a point of sale trend list that you will benefit from. You should adopt this point of sale trend. More and more firms are using POS software that allows for quicker checkout time. People tend to have more than a location they wish to drop by. When they visit your store and buy something, they desire to spend as little time as they can, particularly when doing a checkout.

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Signet

Signet Jewelers Limited is the world's largest retailer of diamond jewelry and the largest specialty jewelry retailer in the US, UK and Canada. Signet operates over 3,500 stores primarily under the name brands of Kay Jewelers, Zales, Jared The Galleria Of Jewelry, H.Samuel, Ernest Jones, Peoples and Piercing Pagoda. Signet also operates JamesAllen.com. The company’s annual sales of approximately $6.3 billion derive from the retailing of jewelry, watches and associated services.

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Leading Wireless Retail Platform Provider Real Time Technologies Continues Growth and Expansion With Acquisition of Your Ware Software

Real Time Technologies (RT²) | January 24, 2024

Real Time Technologies, Inc (RT²), the largest enterprise front-end software platform serving Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. wireless industry, announced today its acquisition of Your Ware Software, a provider of customized business intelligence, sales, and compensation reporting for the wireless retail postpaid channel. Trusted by tier-one telecom carriers to provide retail activation, point-of-sale (POS), payments, business intelligence, and inventory management solutions, RT²'s acquisition of Your Ware Software adds key capabilities to its burgeoning retail wireless store solutions, enabling further expansion into postpaid channels for customers. The purchase is expected to add access to another 4,000 postpaid locations for RT²'s industry-leading wireless retail platform, setting the company up for another banner year in 2024. "The acquisition of Your Ware significantly expands RT²'s presence in the postpaid retail environment and adds to our long-standing success as the leading enterprise POS and Payments provider in prepaid wireless channels," said Omar Azrag, CEO of RT². "The Your Ware team has similar DNA to RT² and brings a world-class level of service specializing in building and deploying customized solutions for the postpaid channel. We are thrilled to have them part of the RT2 family," says Ali Koumaiha, Founder & CPO of RT². "For 22 years, Your Ware Software has designed POS, inventory management, and commission-tracking software for authorized retailers representing tier-one U.S. telecom carriers. Our team of world-class developers and engineers are excited to join the RT² family and continue to serve our customers with the industry-leading products and services they've come to expect. This deal is a triumph for our employees and our customers," says Chris Jones, CEO of Your Ware Software. Neither party disclosed the terms of the deal at this time, and it will remain confidential. In August of 2022, RT² acquired IAS, formerly Qpay from InComm Payments, specializing in customizable payment and technology solutions and the payment processor of choice for retailers, master agents and wireless carriers. RT² has since transformed and simplified the payment offering with an industry-first service model, much to the delight of their long-term customers. About Real Time Technologies (RT²) RT² offers the most flexible cutting-edge Retail Management Solutions that encompass POS, inventory management, payment services, frontline employee management & engagement, business intelligence, and digital automation tools for the wireless industry. RT² support Fortune 500 companies unify their customer experience and remove pain points across multiple retail touch points. Now serving over 14,000 retail locations across the US, Territories, and Canada. RT² prides itself on fostering a family culture and a dynamic work environment where team members are set up to make meaningful contributions across the organization. Learn more at www.rt2.com.

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POS Solutions

XY Retail Introduces Cutting-Edge Order Management System for Luxury Retailers

XY Retail | January 08, 2024

XY Retail, a leader in innovative retail solutions, today announces the launch of its latest product, an advanced Order Management System (OMS) that comes fully pre-integrated with the XY Point of Sale (POS) and Clienteling solutions. In response to evolving retailer needs, XY Retail has engineered a comprehensive OMS that not only streamlines order processing but also works seamlessly with the existing XY POS and Clienteling systems. This integrated approach marks a significant leap forward in providing retailers with a unified platform to enhance operational efficiency, customer engagement, and overall business performance. The XY Retail OMS offers: End-to-End Integration: The XY OMS is intricately woven into the fabric of the XY POS and Clienteling systems, fostering a holistic retail ecosystem. This end-to-end integration ensures a fluid and synchronized customer experience across all touchpoints. Effortless Order Processing: With a user-friendly interface, the OMS simplifies and accelerates order management, from initiation to fulfillment. Retailers can now seamlessly track and fulfill customer orders with precision. Real-Time Inventory Visibility: Leveraging the synergy with the XY POS, the OMS provides real-time visibility into inventory levels. This empowers retailers to optimize stock, minimize overstock or stockouts, and enhance overall inventory management. Clienteling Enhancement: The integrated OMS elevates the clienteling experience by consolidating customer information from POS transactions and order history. Sales associates can access a comprehensive view of customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history, enabling personalized and targeted engagement. Data-Driven Decision Making: Harnessing the power of interconnected systems, the XY Retail OMS enables data-driven decision-making. Retailers can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, inventory trends, and sales performance, facilitating strategic planning and business growth. "We're excited to introduce our integrated Order Management System, marking a significant step in advancing retail operations,” said Susan Jeffers, CEO of XY Retail. “By seamlessly merging order management with our POS and Clienteling systems, we provide retailers with a powerful tool to navigate the complexities of modern commerce efficiently and strategically. This integration underscores our commitment to delivering innovative solutions, enhancing operational efficiency, and empowering our clients to stay ahead in a dynamic industry." About XY Retail XY Retail is a trailblazer in the world of unified commerce solutions, revolutionizing the retail landscape with cutting-edge technology and innovation. Our microservices based, API-first, cloud-native platform seamlessly and vertically integrates mobile point of sale, order management, clienteling, and omnichannel capabilities, empowering global brands to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. With a commitment to excellence and a vision for the future of retail, XY Retail is at the forefront of shaping the next generation of innovative and dynamic commerce.

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POS Retail

GK Announces GK Engage, a Highly Personalized Loyalty Solution for Any Retail Touch Point Including Mobile Devices and Point-of-Sale

Business Wire | September 28, 2023

GK today announced its latest solution, GK Engage, a modern, comprehensive and AI-powered loyalty program for every omnichannel retail touch point. This solution empowers retailers to create highly contextualized and personalized outreach including messaging, discounts and rewards that improve customer lifetime value and enrich a retailer’s competitive differentiation. GK Engage was announced at GK’s first-ever Retail Innovation Summit for the Americas, which is taking place Sept. 25-26 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Attendees can view GK Engage, alongside other GK solutions, at the newly unveiled GK Customer Experience Center. GK is a world leader in point-of-sale (POS) technology and, as a result, its product team has talked with retailers who wanted more out of their loyalty systems. To fill this gap, GK developed GK Engage, a modern take on loyalty. The solution draws inspiration from two successful GK solutions, MCA, GK’s mobile loyalty program, and T+ Loyalty. These predecessor technologies have serviced more than one billion transactions per year for over six million registered users. Now, GK Engage customers will reap these benefits at scale using one comprehensive platform that works across a diverse range of online and in-store retail touch points. GK Engage provides retailers with real-time, AI-driven, personalized loyalty offers that surprise and delight customers. The complete solution creates loyalty tiers that automatically track all customer interactions and generate relevant campaigns to safeguard long-term retailer relationships and customer lifetime value. GK Engage can be integrated with merchandise master data and customer data to ensure all recommendations, promotions, coupons and more are beneficial to the individual customer, as well as the retailer’s current inventory availability and financial goals. What’s more, GK Engage is already integrated into GK’s OmniPOS solution across all touch points including traditional POS, self-checkout kiosks, mobile, and frictionless store technology like GK GO. “GK Engage was created for any retailer, regardless of where they are in their loyalty journey,” said Michael Jaszczyk, chief digital transformation officer, GK and CEO, GK Americas. “The solution is extremely flexible. For some retailers, GK Engage will serve as a complete solution, while others may integrate the solution into a CRM or an existing customer offer system. I look forward to presenting GK Engage alongside our other innovative solutions at the now unveiled GK Customer Experience Center.” Today and tomorrow, GK customers and partners from across the U.S., Latin America and Canada are gathering at GK’s US headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina to take part in the 2023 GK Retail Innovation Summit. In addition to hearing from renowned retail experts like Greg Buzek, founder and president, IHL Group, attendees can visit GK’s new Customer Experience Center. The center showcases GK technology and allows viewers to envision a modern, efficient and exceptional shopper experience across various key touch points including the point-of-sale, the fuel pump and the e-commerce site. At the Customer Experience Center, prospective retail customers can hear from solution experts who will help them to design the best solution deployment for their end-customers. The technology featured in the center includes GK Engage, GK OmniPOS, self check-out, GK Drive, GK GO, GK AIR (artificial intelligence for retail) and fraud prevention solutions from Fujitsu, which invested in GK as a strategic investor earlier this year. About GK GK breaks down the barriers to unified commerce with its open CLOUD4RETAIL platform and a broad portfolio based on it, like OmniPOS for point of sale, mobile POS, mobile customer engagement and a full range of store/back-office solutions. The company is a recognized leader in omnichannel retail, offering a single, global software platform for all retail formats and touch points. Ten of the Top 50 retailers worldwide rely on GK, and GK is the fastest growing global POS provider in new installations over the last three years. For more information, visit www.gk-software.com.

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POS Retail

Leading Wireless Retail Platform Provider Real Time Technologies Continues Growth and Expansion With Acquisition of Your Ware Software

Real Time Technologies (RT²) | January 24, 2024

Real Time Technologies, Inc (RT²), the largest enterprise front-end software platform serving Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. wireless industry, announced today its acquisition of Your Ware Software, a provider of customized business intelligence, sales, and compensation reporting for the wireless retail postpaid channel. Trusted by tier-one telecom carriers to provide retail activation, point-of-sale (POS), payments, business intelligence, and inventory management solutions, RT²'s acquisition of Your Ware Software adds key capabilities to its burgeoning retail wireless store solutions, enabling further expansion into postpaid channels for customers. The purchase is expected to add access to another 4,000 postpaid locations for RT²'s industry-leading wireless retail platform, setting the company up for another banner year in 2024. "The acquisition of Your Ware significantly expands RT²'s presence in the postpaid retail environment and adds to our long-standing success as the leading enterprise POS and Payments provider in prepaid wireless channels," said Omar Azrag, CEO of RT². "The Your Ware team has similar DNA to RT² and brings a world-class level of service specializing in building and deploying customized solutions for the postpaid channel. We are thrilled to have them part of the RT2 family," says Ali Koumaiha, Founder & CPO of RT². "For 22 years, Your Ware Software has designed POS, inventory management, and commission-tracking software for authorized retailers representing tier-one U.S. telecom carriers. Our team of world-class developers and engineers are excited to join the RT² family and continue to serve our customers with the industry-leading products and services they've come to expect. This deal is a triumph for our employees and our customers," says Chris Jones, CEO of Your Ware Software. Neither party disclosed the terms of the deal at this time, and it will remain confidential. In August of 2022, RT² acquired IAS, formerly Qpay from InComm Payments, specializing in customizable payment and technology solutions and the payment processor of choice for retailers, master agents and wireless carriers. RT² has since transformed and simplified the payment offering with an industry-first service model, much to the delight of their long-term customers. About Real Time Technologies (RT²) RT² offers the most flexible cutting-edge Retail Management Solutions that encompass POS, inventory management, payment services, frontline employee management & engagement, business intelligence, and digital automation tools for the wireless industry. RT² support Fortune 500 companies unify their customer experience and remove pain points across multiple retail touch points. Now serving over 14,000 retail locations across the US, Territories, and Canada. RT² prides itself on fostering a family culture and a dynamic work environment where team members are set up to make meaningful contributions across the organization. Learn more at www.rt2.com.

Read More

POS Solutions

XY Retail Introduces Cutting-Edge Order Management System for Luxury Retailers

XY Retail | January 08, 2024

XY Retail, a leader in innovative retail solutions, today announces the launch of its latest product, an advanced Order Management System (OMS) that comes fully pre-integrated with the XY Point of Sale (POS) and Clienteling solutions. In response to evolving retailer needs, XY Retail has engineered a comprehensive OMS that not only streamlines order processing but also works seamlessly with the existing XY POS and Clienteling systems. This integrated approach marks a significant leap forward in providing retailers with a unified platform to enhance operational efficiency, customer engagement, and overall business performance. The XY Retail OMS offers: End-to-End Integration: The XY OMS is intricately woven into the fabric of the XY POS and Clienteling systems, fostering a holistic retail ecosystem. This end-to-end integration ensures a fluid and synchronized customer experience across all touchpoints. Effortless Order Processing: With a user-friendly interface, the OMS simplifies and accelerates order management, from initiation to fulfillment. Retailers can now seamlessly track and fulfill customer orders with precision. Real-Time Inventory Visibility: Leveraging the synergy with the XY POS, the OMS provides real-time visibility into inventory levels. This empowers retailers to optimize stock, minimize overstock or stockouts, and enhance overall inventory management. Clienteling Enhancement: The integrated OMS elevates the clienteling experience by consolidating customer information from POS transactions and order history. Sales associates can access a comprehensive view of customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history, enabling personalized and targeted engagement. Data-Driven Decision Making: Harnessing the power of interconnected systems, the XY Retail OMS enables data-driven decision-making. Retailers can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, inventory trends, and sales performance, facilitating strategic planning and business growth. "We're excited to introduce our integrated Order Management System, marking a significant step in advancing retail operations,” said Susan Jeffers, CEO of XY Retail. “By seamlessly merging order management with our POS and Clienteling systems, we provide retailers with a powerful tool to navigate the complexities of modern commerce efficiently and strategically. This integration underscores our commitment to delivering innovative solutions, enhancing operational efficiency, and empowering our clients to stay ahead in a dynamic industry." About XY Retail XY Retail is a trailblazer in the world of unified commerce solutions, revolutionizing the retail landscape with cutting-edge technology and innovation. Our microservices based, API-first, cloud-native platform seamlessly and vertically integrates mobile point of sale, order management, clienteling, and omnichannel capabilities, empowering global brands to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. With a commitment to excellence and a vision for the future of retail, XY Retail is at the forefront of shaping the next generation of innovative and dynamic commerce.

Read More

POS Retail

GK Announces GK Engage, a Highly Personalized Loyalty Solution for Any Retail Touch Point Including Mobile Devices and Point-of-Sale

Business Wire | September 28, 2023

GK today announced its latest solution, GK Engage, a modern, comprehensive and AI-powered loyalty program for every omnichannel retail touch point. This solution empowers retailers to create highly contextualized and personalized outreach including messaging, discounts and rewards that improve customer lifetime value and enrich a retailer’s competitive differentiation. GK Engage was announced at GK’s first-ever Retail Innovation Summit for the Americas, which is taking place Sept. 25-26 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Attendees can view GK Engage, alongside other GK solutions, at the newly unveiled GK Customer Experience Center. GK is a world leader in point-of-sale (POS) technology and, as a result, its product team has talked with retailers who wanted more out of their loyalty systems. To fill this gap, GK developed GK Engage, a modern take on loyalty. The solution draws inspiration from two successful GK solutions, MCA, GK’s mobile loyalty program, and T+ Loyalty. These predecessor technologies have serviced more than one billion transactions per year for over six million registered users. Now, GK Engage customers will reap these benefits at scale using one comprehensive platform that works across a diverse range of online and in-store retail touch points. GK Engage provides retailers with real-time, AI-driven, personalized loyalty offers that surprise and delight customers. The complete solution creates loyalty tiers that automatically track all customer interactions and generate relevant campaigns to safeguard long-term retailer relationships and customer lifetime value. GK Engage can be integrated with merchandise master data and customer data to ensure all recommendations, promotions, coupons and more are beneficial to the individual customer, as well as the retailer’s current inventory availability and financial goals. What’s more, GK Engage is already integrated into GK’s OmniPOS solution across all touch points including traditional POS, self-checkout kiosks, mobile, and frictionless store technology like GK GO. “GK Engage was created for any retailer, regardless of where they are in their loyalty journey,” said Michael Jaszczyk, chief digital transformation officer, GK and CEO, GK Americas. “The solution is extremely flexible. For some retailers, GK Engage will serve as a complete solution, while others may integrate the solution into a CRM or an existing customer offer system. I look forward to presenting GK Engage alongside our other innovative solutions at the now unveiled GK Customer Experience Center.” Today and tomorrow, GK customers and partners from across the U.S., Latin America and Canada are gathering at GK’s US headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina to take part in the 2023 GK Retail Innovation Summit. In addition to hearing from renowned retail experts like Greg Buzek, founder and president, IHL Group, attendees can visit GK’s new Customer Experience Center. The center showcases GK technology and allows viewers to envision a modern, efficient and exceptional shopper experience across various key touch points including the point-of-sale, the fuel pump and the e-commerce site. At the Customer Experience Center, prospective retail customers can hear from solution experts who will help them to design the best solution deployment for their end-customers. The technology featured in the center includes GK Engage, GK OmniPOS, self check-out, GK Drive, GK GO, GK AIR (artificial intelligence for retail) and fraud prevention solutions from Fujitsu, which invested in GK as a strategic investor earlier this year. About GK GK breaks down the barriers to unified commerce with its open CLOUD4RETAIL platform and a broad portfolio based on it, like OmniPOS for point of sale, mobile POS, mobile customer engagement and a full range of store/back-office solutions. The company is a recognized leader in omnichannel retail, offering a single, global software platform for all retail formats and touch points. Ten of the Top 50 retailers worldwide rely on GK, and GK is the fastest growing global POS provider in new installations over the last three years. For more information, visit www.gk-software.com.

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