Advertorial A New Dawn for Point
of Sale Technology by David Spratt, Business Systems Sales Manager at Epson UK
Despite many high street brands announcing profits this year, retailer optimism is not widespread. Its not enough for retailers to tread water; It’s about identifying and filling every gap possible.
The cost of downtime
Research from Epson and independent research firm Coleman Parkes found that one in three UK retailers (36%) are losing up to an hour of sales time each week due to till-point down-time. This weakness is one of the gaps which could be tackled, saving UK retailers an average of 52 sales hours per year – or 5 working days of revenue generating opportunity.
Electronic point of sale (PoS) systems are now ubiquitous in retail stores and the PoS experience has had to transform over the years to meet their needs. We’ve seen this transition in many ways – with the introduction of modern electronic terminals, chip & pin and wireless card reader devices through to a point today where modern retailers can deliver a very different retail experience to that of traditional shopping basket sales. Many retailers today aspire to the Apple retail model – where a personalised ‘showrooming’ experience allows for a whole new class of customer service and engagement. Unfortunately, many are still stuck one or more generations behind and can only dream of such a proposition, instead coping with the downtime and inefficiency characteristic of the old paradigm.
When a point of sale system goes down, it can hurt sales and customer satisfaction. Employees often need to process payments manually and write out paper receipts, with the correlating complexity that results in terms of updating inventory records, booking sales and filing returns. Shops even run the risk of losing all card sales totally as customers lose patience and shop elsewhere.
Queue rage
People are less willing to accept queues. People hate queues so much that Brit’s referred to queues as the most irritating facet of their high street shopping experience and a fifth of us admit to storming out after queuing for three minutes or less.
Improving customer wait times will help retailers to overcome the ‘congestion cost’ they’re facing at point of sale. By automating the ordering process, modern POS systems can also offer a retailer the opportunity to reduce staff costs or redirect staff to more customer-focused activities.
For example in a hospitality setting, if you could order food and drinks prior to arriving at a restaurant or coffee shop and, once you registered your arrival, your meal could be promptly brought to your table, this would not only be more efficient but represent a pretty compelling customer experience.
A new retail experience
Loyal customers buy more frequently, spend more money and act as evangelists for the retailer. Cloud-based POS technology can assist here as it allows retailers to avoid pitfalls and increase their sales revenue by adding new sales channels, offering modern, personalised customer experiences and empowering their sales staff.
Cloud-based POS systems, where the points of sale are connected to servers in the cloud, allows retailers a greater choice of devices to be integrated into the system. It is a significant shift in how retailers do
business, but the benefits are plentiful. For example, being able to use consumer devices as POS terminals, and having the flexibility to create custom applications, opens up the possibilities for mobile POS in the retail industry.
The UK experience
Despite the innovation in UK retail, when it comes to cloud POS, we are a little behind the curve. Fewer than half (41%) of UK retailers interviewed in our study use the cloud for POS services. One of the immediate preconceptions held by retailers is if there’s a failure in internet connectivity that renders everything useless, however this is no longer the case: many modern cloud-based POS will support offline transactions, synchronising automatically when connectivity returns. Encouragingly, our research shows three- quarters (75%) of respondents not currently using the cloud plan to switch to cloud-based POS systems in the next five years.
British consumers are increasingly demanding of any kind of shopping experience. Through understanding and being aware of key developments in POS technology, retailers can differentiate themselves from their competition by adding value and giving shoppers the ability to pay in the way most suited to them.
Contact Epson
W:
www.epson.co.uk
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