POS Solutions, POS Retail, Ecommerce Merchandising
Article | June 7, 2024
For many years, payment terminals have been a vital tool for businesses that complete their customer transactions in-store. The familiar hand-held devices have reliably taken card payments and offered simple additional services like mobile phone top-ups, cashback or electronic tipping solutions.
However, with recent technical innovation, boosted by the urgency surrounding Covid-19, the humble payment terminal is shedding its hard exterior - no longer is it, as some would argue, simply a commoditised, hardware-based necessity. As many within the payments space have predicted, the payment terminal is truly becoming a digital enabler and vital pivot point of modernisation for any business that accepts electronic transactions.
The Android Operating System leads the way
Today, payment terminals come in many forms. Though the traditional, handheld counter-top devices remain, many businesses now use off-the-shelf smartphones or tablets enabled with SPOC and CPOC technology.
Regardless of their physical form, truly modern payment terminals share a commonality – enhanced functionality which allows businesses to update and adapt quickly to changing performance, environments, and customer needs.
The Android operating system has been at the centre of a latest wave of innovation, facilitating the rise of mobile payment devices - pushed hard by the likes of Visa - and supporting the budding versatilities presented by Open Banking and PSD2 initiatives.
Combined, this new choice and flexibility has the potential to deliver significant advantages to businesses deploying Android point-of-sale (POS) solutions. These include integrated EPOS, strong authentication, and an array of alternative payment methods such as bank-to-bank payments, QR codes and even crypto currencies.
It’s about more than being just Covid-ready
Getting the timing right to make adjustments and improvements is now a focus for businesses across the UK as we start to emerge from Covid-19 restrictions and resume face-to-face interactions. The conventional payment terminal can play a central part in engineering the essential adjustments needed to create a Covid-safe environment – the new £100 contactless limit being the most obvious example.
However, functionality provided by the latest payment terminals allows businesses to do more than just make their premises Covid-ready.
For more commercial gains, payment terminals running on the Android OS allow for this same POS functionality but combine it with other essential business systems such as stock management, visual itemisation, and centralised booking systems.
As well as providing greater visibility of a business’ health and finances, more information also means friction points such as wait times and queues in store can be better managed. More data about customer behaviour also makes the in-store experience more customisable, for example, businesses can use this data to identify their busiest periods, explore seasonal changes or test new product lines and structure their staff planning and stock levels accordingly.
Coupled with more vital operational efficiencies, payment terminals can allow for a speed and flexibility of payments that can directly enhance the bottom line.
As the pace in retail environments ramps up to match that of the pre-Covid days, meeting new customer expectations and new environmental changes will be critical in staying relevant. An ability to accept the latest types and methods of payment could actually play a part in helping a business survive through difficult economic times.
Bolstering cash flow will also take on added importance as businesses rebuild. Payment terminals powered by better internet connections mean transactions are already faster, but internet speed alone is not enough. Today, terminals can be updated in ways that allow merchants to process those transactions faster still and get funds deposited into bank accounts in batches throughout the day, often completing within the hour.
Payment terminals and Big Data
With data becoming the bedrock of all modern businesses, it is the Android operating system’s ability to generate such an impressive wealth of data that adds to its compelling proposition. The value of Big Data and analytics to filter large volumes of information and uncover actionable insights is well known to the business world. Useable information can help leaders learn about their customers, make better decisions and, ultimately, produce more revenue. Customer data, for example, makes it possible for a business to learn about the buying behaviours of an individual customer or of defined customer segments.
When a business knows the time of day (or night) their customers shop and what type of purchases they make, it becomes easier to plan when inventories are stocked and with what items. Android payment terminals can provide data in a way that offers easy visibility of key trends and which specific hours of the day produce the most sales, allowing businesses to investigate possible reasons and react accordingly.
Such knowledge can then be used for a variety of purposes including the ability to upsell to future customers with greater success and the tactical arrangement of items in store. Crucially now, it will also enable businesses to maintain a Covid-safe environment by planning ahead for in-store activity and capacity limits.
With hundreds of applications already available to download from the app store, it’s important that SMEs are able to use this scale of choice to their advantage rather than become overwhelmed or distracted by it. Indeed, by taking the time to explore the apps available, smaller businesses can find the tools which allow them to level the playing field by bringing their operational efficiencies in line with larger brands and by leveraging the solutions that allow them to compete on customer service.
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POS Solutions
Article | March 18, 2024
Top e-commerce marketing tools help companies provide frictionless shopping experiences to their customers. Discover how leading e-commerce platforms help companies spur inimitable success and ROI.
Contents
1. The Strategic Relevance of E-commerce Platforms
2. Prominent Trends in E-commerce Platform Development
3. Top E-Commerce Tools Driving Operational Efficiency and Growth
3.1 FastSpring
3.2 X-Cart
3.3 Emporix
3.4 Elastic Path
3.5 Kibo Commerce
3.6 Cleverbridge
3.7 Vendasta
3.8 BetterCommerce
3.9 CommentSold
3.10 Virto Commerce
4. In a Nutshell
1. The Strategic Relevance of E-commerce Platforms
Today's leading e-commerce platforms offer remarkable perks like business expansion, unmatched personalization, and data insights, holding immense strategic relevance for businesses worldwide. The inclination toward digitizing commercial operations has further intensified with varied environmental, economic, or social factors that induce consumers and clients to engage in online shopping and interactions from the comfort of their homes. Leveraging these platforms, firms successfully offer their customers exceptional product varieties, ease of return, and exciting discount offers, elevating their brand image and user satisfaction.
Moreover, as essential tools guaranteeing operational excellence, e-commerce platforms are helping businesses optimize their sales performance, providing them with a solid online presence and streamlined purchase processes. With crucial consumer behavior insights, these tools empower companies to fine-tune their product offerings,marketing pursuits, POS techniques, and other strategies. Therefore, investing in the best e-commerce tools and implementing a well-thought-out internet commerce strategy have become imperative for companies to thrive in the digital marketplace and address the shifting consumer demands.
2. Prominent Trends in E-commerce Platform Development
Emerging e-commerce platform development trends are optimizing business processes to ensure the best customer experiences.
Here’s a glimpse at the prominent trends gaining momentum among e-commerce businesses:
Preference for Personalization
With the effective implementation of advanced AI technologies and data analytics for marketing enhancement, e-commerce platforms today are affording businesses impressive customization abilities, including personalized product offerings and marketing messages, which secure greater customer satisfaction.
The Surge in Mobile Commerce
Mobile commerce has become another notable trend in e-commerce platform development, accounting for a considerable part of retail e-commerce sales. Likewise, many e-commerce websites are establishing dedicated mobile apps to offer an easy shopping experience to users across different devices, elevating conversions and brand image.
Subscription-based Offerings
Subscription services have become more influential in the digital business arena, for they foster customer loyalty toward a brand and ensure long-term relationships with them. Providing consumers with repeated services or product deliveries, these offerings secure a steady revenue stream and help companies engage in sound financial planning due to income predictability.
APIs for an Omnipresent Business
The present era of e-commerce is especially marked by API-led omnichannel integrations, which facilitate easy data exchange and communication between systems. By simplifying order management, enabling personalized experiences, and unifying data access, APIs help businesses offer seamless shopping experiences to customers across digital touchpoints.
Augmentation of Shopping Experiences with AR and VR
Today, businesses are more inclined to explore AR and VR technologies because of their ability to provide immersive shopping experiences. From enhancing customer engagement to limiting cart abandonments, such technologies have, therefore, emerged as essential stimulants of sales and revenue growth.
Scaling with Headless Commerce
Often called the future of digital commerce, headless technology has become a favorite among e-commerce businesses. As the technology provides greater flexibility and scaling, enterprises are increasingly integrating with headless setups, benefitting from limitless personalization and advanced tools.
The Growth of Voice and Social Commerce
Voice commerce helps businesses offer hands-free shopping experiences to their customers, elevating checkout processes and decreasing cart abandonment. Likewise, social commerce is gaining traction, owing to the employment of social media platforms as search engines. E-commerce platforms, therefore, leverage this impact and drive sales by creating shoppable posts and allowing in-app purchases.
Promotion of Sustainable Practices
With ‘sustainability’ as the catchphrase, e-commerce companies are endeavoring to highlight their sustainable practices by offering eco-friendly products, contributing to carbon footprint reduction, and providing information regarding sourcing and production processes.
3. Top E-commerce Tools Driving Operational Efficiency and Growth
Leading e-commerce marketing tools offer robust technical support to online businesses, helping firms augment productivity and carve a niche in the digital marketplace.
Here’s a list of the top e-commerce tools that companies leverage to outshine their competitors:
3.1 FastSpring
An ingenious tool for managing subscriptions, payments, and global sales taxes, FastSpring is a comprehensive payment and subscription platform catering specifically to software, SaaS, and online content providers. With its impeccable features, the tool facilitates easy global expansion for companies, helping them handle tax collection in different jurisdictions, streamline functions, and provide excellent purchasing experiences to customers.
The notable features of the tool enabling effective e-commerce internationalization include:
International Payments: FastSpring ensures exceptional revenue potential and unmatched transaction acceptance rates globally for companies. The tool allows smooth receipt of global payments, entailing single-time purchases, recurring payments, and SaaS subscriptions.
Easy Subscription Management: By streamlining subscription management processes, FastSpring further empowers businesses to customize their plans with upgrades, downgrades, trial periods, etc. It augments customer satisfaction through features like pause subscriptions and billing intervals.
Matchless Checkout Experiences: Another prominent aspect of the advanced tool is its ability to drive conversions and enhance revenue at the POS through remarkable checkout experiences. Accordingly, by simplifying checkout processes, the tool ensures minimized cart abandonments and promotes customer loyalty.
Simplified Tax Compliance: FastSpring’s tax management feature secures complete tax compliance across jurisdictions. This relieves businesses of the burden of handling intricate tax requirements, enabling them to focus on core e-commerce operations.
Comprehensive Dashboards for Data Analysis: The innovative tool further offers businesses easy-to-understand analytics dashboards for quick evaluation of subscription and revenue data, helping them leverage crucial customer insights and make well-informed decisions to enhance efficiency.
B2B Order Handling: With FastSpring, B2B businesses can simplify their order management processes by combining payment and subscription features with orders. The tool further streamlines billing operations and decreases system complexities.
3.2 X-Cart
X-Cart is an enterprise e-commerce platform that helps businesses with their scaling endeavors, securing long-term success and high ROI. It offers API-backed solutions to businesses, allowing them to benefit from featured integrations and customizable design options. It further ensures data-driven growth for companies using robust marketing tools and analytics.
Why X-Cart remains a perfect choice for businesses to optimize their operations includes its exceptional features, such as:
E-commerce Hosting and Development: X-Cart ensures platforms’ agility and reliability by employing super quick solid-state drives (SSD) for speedy page loading. The tool significantly entails features like a dedicated IP address, regular data backups, PCI-compliant hosting, etc. It offers tailored platform development solutions to businesses, including automated platform updates and maintenance of thoroughly tested online stores.
Store Handling and Personalization Services: X-Cart further provides impressive support services to businesses, covering different aspects of customization and store management, such as software installation, log analysis, etc. It also facilitates easy personalization through Template Editor and Template Tweaker options.
SEO Benefits: The far-reaching tool improves search rankings and website traffic. Through practical content evaluation, customer analysis, and server optimizations, it promises businesses elevated visibility and drives organic growth.
Round-the-Clock Technical Assistance: Significantly, the tool renders timely support at every stage of businesses’ e-commerce journey. The prompt assistance allows companies to address challenges effectively, increasing efficiency and minimizing downtime.
3.3 Emporix
Offering compelling features for B2B, B2C, and D2C companies, Emporix offers an innovative commerce orchestration platform that helps businesses elevate their operations, enhance customer experiences, and make real-time modifications based on relevant data insights. With API-first design and cloud-native architecture, the tool notably induces considerable progress for businesses.
The key attributes of the forward-thinking e-commerce tool include:
Advanced B2B Capabilities: Through its composable architecture, Emporix effectively meets the challenging demands of the B2B world, offering solutions such as catalog management and personalized pricing. The tool further streamlines the quotation management processes and simplifies invoicing with its Purchase Orders feature.
Unified Multi-Channel Experience: With Emporix, businesses can leverage a multi-site platform to sell across diverse channels, administer all their online websites from a centralized location, and ensure separated customer data and configurations. Companies can also establish a single master product catalog while handling diverse offerings based on brand, customers, location, and availability.
Composable Solutions for B2B Wholesalers and Distributors: Catering to the diverse needs of the wholesale and distribution industry, Emporix offers ultra-modern solutions to companies for handling large-quantity transactions. Accordingly, the tool boasts excellent features like advanced quoting, pricing, and discount capabilities. It further automates processes and allows easy scalability.
Success Enabler for Technology-driven Start-ups: With its API-first strategy, the tool helps technology start-ups expedite their software development processes, manage their proprietary IP, and enhance the value of their offerings.
3.4 Elastic Path
As a game-changing headless solution, Elastic Path can easily integrate with businesses’ ERP systems as middleware. The platform boasts an API-based design, which renders considerable agility to companies in meeting present-day e-commerce challenges. Essentially, it operates without fixed templates and provides tailorable e-commerce solutions to firms, helping them gain from advanced commerce features and composable architecture.
The remarkable properties of Elastic Path include:
Greater Autonomy to Merchandisers: Elastic Path transforms traditional product and catalog management, allowing merchandisers to create various product setups without relying on the IT department and quickly catering to changing customer preferences.
Superlative Commerce Capabilities: The robust tool boasts excellent commerce capabilities, which companies can leverage to offer consistent pricing, manage product offerings, enable smooth checkouts, and provide unique shopping experiences.
Subscriptions Management Solution: With Elastic Path’s API-first subscriptions management feature, companies effectively streamline subscription-based services and extend uniform payment experiences across various geographies, establishing steady revenue streams and elevating customer trust.
Ease of Payment: Elastic Path optimizes payment processes and ensures the delivery of consistent payment experiences across various locations and brands, resulting in enhanced sales and customer satisfaction.
3.5 Kibo Commerce
Kibo Commerce affords exceptional software solutions to companies, helping them streamline core processes like customer handling, search functions, and inventory management. Using superlative composable technology, the promising tool ensures flexible deployment, decreased fulfillment times, elevated order value, and increased conversion rates.
The revolutionary tool, Kibo Commerce, comes with many significant features, such as:
Order Management and Dispatch: Kibo Commerce helps businesses coordinate and direct orders effectively, ensuring speedy fulfillment and decreased turnaround times. It optimizes delivery routes and inventory distribution, augmenting operational efficiency and promptly meeting customer demands.
Easy Inventory Tracking: Another crucial feature of Kibo Commerce is real-time inventory visibility, which allows companies to check their inventory levels across multiple channels and make well-informed decisions regarding marketing and purchasing strategies. The attribute also benefits POS systems, reflecting current stock levels and ensuring satisfying shopping experiences.
Multi-channel Pricing and Promotions: By employing the comprehensive tool, businesses can maintain consistency in promotional and pricing activities across varied sales channels, driving growth and ensuring an exceptional brand image.
Catalog and Subscriptions Handling: Kibo Commerce allows businesses to effortlessly manage product attributes, catalogs, and categories, structuring and modifying their product offerings according to market demands. It also streamlines subscription management processes, ensuring prompt fulfillment of recurring orders.
Unified Checkouts: The ingenious tool facilitates the integration of cart and checkout processes across various digital touchpoints. The unified feature helps businesses maintain substantial consistencies and limit card abandonments, securing frictionless shopping and high customer loyalty.
Intuitive Search Functionality: By proffering user-friendly search capabilities, Kibo Commerce significantly enhances customers’ navigation experience, promoting engagement and making it easy to find products, information, and services.
3.6 Cleverbridge
The next-generation e-commerce tool, Cleverbridge, enhances customer lifetime value (CLV) through compelling commerce solutions, empowering businesses to earn considerable financial gains. The tool guarantees frictionless transactions, boasting an impressive uptime and presenting businesses with effective solutions for finance automation, subscription management, global payments, etc.
The most prominent components of Cleverbridge include:
Subscription APIs Promising Speed to Market: With Cleverbridge, businesses can get their services and products to the market faster by employing innovative subscription APIs and documentation. Businesses can easily integrate subscription options into their offerings, simplifying development endeavors and speeding up time to market.
Integrated Payment Solution: Supporting multiple payment options and currencies, Cleverbridge ensures secure financial transactions, fraud protection, adherence to industrial standards, and effortless global expansion. The tool further accommodates various payment preferences, boosting user delight and conversion rates.
CLV Growth Engine: Inducing high customer retention, Cleverbridge’s CLV growth engine leverages AI-powered processes to help customer teams ensure high audience engagement. The tool achieves this by automatically reaching customers, effectively upselling, and renewing subscriptions.
Wide-ranging E-commerce Solutions: From transaction automation to renewal simplification, Cleverbridge helps companies optimize buying processes by managing administrative tasks, compliance measures, retention marketing, and partner management. This feature lets businesses focus on critical operations, enhancing sales functions and driving higher profits.
3.7 Vendasta
Catering to independent software vendors, marketing agencies, and media companies, Vendasta is a comprehensive e-commerce tool that allows reselling and rebranding online services to local business clients. Leveraging this leading-edge tool, companies can widen their service offerings, foster client relationships, and ensure profitable growth.
Some of the chief aspects of the forward-thinking tool comprise:
Easy Scalability: With Vendasta, users can easily automate repetitive tasks and optimize business operations. These merits allow them to manage a more significant number of projects and clients, ensuring sustained success in the long run.
Enhanced Product Offerings and Secure Transactions: The exceptional tool allows users to widen their catalogs by combining their products with premium market solutions. Furthermore, it leverages encrypted billing and payment processes to ensure safe transactions, gaining customer confidence.
Task and Project Management: With in-house fulfillment teams, Vendasta allows businesses to offload time-extensive tasks and focus on key operations. Its white-labeled communication feature further promotes easy interaction between clients and fulfillment teams, inducing successful project execution. Its impressive project and task management tools empower companies to organize, track, and prioritize tasks, streamline workflows, and decrease turnaround times.
Sales Intelligence: Businesses can benefit from crucial client insights by employing Vendasta, as the tool offers snapshot reports. These reports scan the web for complete operation data, permitting effective identification of growth potential, customization of sales pitches, and building client trust.
Personalized Marketing: The remarkable tool further automates marketing tasks and processes to optimize users’ marketing endeavors, ensuring the delivery of tailored content and messages to the target audience. It also allows for the smooth execution of email campaigns, elevating client engagement, and driving operational success.
3.8 BetterCommerce
BetterCommerce, a digital market tool, chiefly caters to retailers and D2C brands. It provides composable commerce solutions to users, offering high scalability and allowing them to adapt to shifting consumer demands quickly. With components like a PIM, CMS, order management system and engagement tools, it helps businesses secure excellent buyer journeys.
Promising high efficiency, the advanced tool boasts the following features:
Extraordinary E-commerce Capabilities: With BetterCommerce, companies can leverage a headless architecture to process transactions, manage product offerings, and deliver excellent shopping experiences to customers across multiple touchpoints. This effective selection of headless architecture helps businesses drive sales and yield financial benefits.
Centralized Product Data: The tool entails a splendid product information management (PIM) system, which lets users handle and publish updated product information across multiple listings, ensuring uniformity and preciseness across channels.
Agile Content Delivery: The tool uses a headless CMS and renders phenomenal flexibility in content delivery, allowing users to conveniently create, modify, and publish content across digital touchpoints.
Performance Insights: BetterCommerce notably encourages sound decision-making by providing crucial insights into customer behavior, sales performance, and marketing efficiency. Such insights further optimize businesses’ strategies and drive profits.
3.9 CommentSold
Harnessing the possibilities of video commerce, CommentSold is a pioneering e-commerce solution that boasts live selling technology and redefines customer shopping experiences. The tool offers users engaging virtual experiences and comprises prominent features like Shoppable Videos, Smart Meta Chat Automation, and AI-generated Videos, which enhance productivity, engagement, and profitability.
The top attributes that make CommentSold a preferred choice for businesses include:
Customized Solutions: With CommentSold, businesses can capitalize on tailored solutions to address present-day business challenges. These include advanced POS systems, marketing automation tools, and warehouse optimization.
Live Selling Feature: CommentSold empowers sellers to make excellent sales pitches. It allows companies to interact with customers through live videos, demonstrate products, and answer customer queries, inducing higher customer engagement and product purchases.
Advanced POS System: The forward-looking tool comes with the latest POS system, which manages in-store and online sales through an integrated platform, enabling smooth checkout experiences.
Inventory Control: Providing an all-inclusive inventory management system, CommentSold automates tasks such as dropshipping and wholesaling and allows businesses to focus on their strengths for augmented efficiency.
3.10 Virto Commerce
A pioneering tool, Virto Commerce increases customer retention by providing superlative marketplace solutions to businesses backed by training, consulting, and assistance services. This budget-friendly tool helps companies with their expansion pursuits, rendering solutions, such as Virto Commerce Cloud, Virto Marketplace, etc., and securing high effectiveness.
The principal attributes of Virto Commerce entail the following:
Support for Decoupled Commerce: Offering a modular architecture and support for headless commerce via API, Virto Commerce allows companies to easily customize different components without impacting the system’s core functionality. It facilitates the management of various channels within the same e-commerce ecosystem.
Capacity for Limitless Catalogs: The tool affords infinite catalogs containing myriad products. It allows companies to store product data in physical and online synchronized listings, securing tailored category structures and avoiding data duplication.
Customized Offers and Diverse Currency Support: With Virto Commerce, vendors can assess and control their offers, implementing personalized pricing per quantity, discounts, and sales terms. The tool significantly supports diverse currencies, helping businesses scale their operations without hassle.
Comprehensive Order Management: Virto Commerce’s Orders feature lets firms simplify their order processing tasks, providing them with complete oversight and notifications for quick order management.
4. In a Nutshell
The importance of e-commerce platforms in today's business world can hardly be overstated. From facilitating expansion to helping companies tweak their strategies, leading e-commerce platforms allow unparalleled growth and ROI enhancement. Notably, businesses employ top e-commerce tools, benefitting from unmatched customer experiences and high operational efficiency.
Furthermore, with emerging trends like mobile commerce, subscription-based services, voice-enabled shopping, and social commerce, the future of e-commerce holds substantial potential. These trends will transform the way customers buy products and promise further advancements in the sector. In particular, innovations like drone delivery and live shopping technology continue to gain traction, offering even more exciting opportunities to businesses, letting consumers make purchases from anywhere in the world, and driving boosted revenues for e-commerce companies.
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