Holiday shopping season is here, and retailers are working hard to overcome the challenges of the last few years and finish 2022 out strong. A point of sale system can help by providing robust data about products, customers, and trends, providing guidance that will help maximize customer spend. Here …
Is Your POS System Ready for the Holiday Shopping Season?
At Retail Tech, our retail customers are our #1 priority. We want to help you have a successful holiday shopping season and end the year strong. A functional, efficient, and up to date point of sale system will help you achieve that. For a limited time, Retail Tech is offering Holiday Point of …
The Benefits of Self-Checkout
In the years preceding the pandemic, retail stores were beginning to install and integrate self-checkout systems. Larger retailers had already installed self-checkouts, but adoption was slower for small businesses, mainly for budgetary and logistical reasons. When the pandemic began, however, …
How to Create a Customer-Focused Return Policy
Today’s retail customers are shopping online more than ever. There are several reasons for this – ease and convenience, the continuing fluctuation of the pandemic, wider availability, and more. Although online shopping can boost retailer sales, it also leads to an increase in returns and exchanges. …
What is Compassionate Retail?
Amidst rising prices, supply chain challenges, and economic wariness, it’s a tough time for both retailers and consumers. As we navigate a changing retail landscape, we should work together to make life and business easier for all of us. That’s the concept behind compassionate retail, a new movement …
How to Update Retail Merchandising for Spring and Summer
Retailers are always working a season (or more) ahead. Holiday preparations start during the summer months, spring styles arrive in winter, and brands start working on back to school before the previous school year even ends. As the spring and summer shopping seasons get in full swing, here are a …
Retail Lessons from Convenience Stores
In the vast retail landscape, convenience stores are easily overlooked. However, if you’re a retailer or small business searching for new ways to build your customer base and increase sales, you may want to look at the practices of the modern convenience store. The c-store model has takeaways …
Three Metrics to Pull from Point of Sale Data
Now more than ever, retail stores and small business are finding new and inventive ways to do more with less. Whether that’s leveraging digital marketing, offering creative promotions, or shaking up branding and merchandising, retailers are making it work. That includes making full use of every tool …
How to Avert Supply Chain Challenges Using Point of Sale
By now, most U.S. retailers and consumers have felt the effects of the supply chain issues that have plagued much of the world for the last several months. As the holiday shopping season approaches, brands and retailers are working overtime to secure the products they need to sell in order to meet …
What Should Retailers Keep in the Post-Pandemic Era?
As in most industries, there is no “back to normal” for retail after the pandemic. Customer behaviors and expectations have changed significantly over the last 18 months, and many of those changes are here to stay. So what should retailers keep in the post-pandemic era, and what should they leave …
How to Increase Sales in the Checkout Line
The checkout line is one of the best and easiest ways to increase customer engagement and spend. And because it’s generally the last step in a shopping trip, the checkout can either make or break a customer’s in-store experience. But many busy retailers overlook the checkout line and cash wrap. …
5 Ways a POS System Can Support Business Growth
As we begin to put the pandemic behind us, retail stores and small businesses are looking toward the future and planning what comes next. Whether you’re working to make up lost profits or aiming for growth, a point of sale (POS) system can help you reach your goals. Continue reading to learn how …
6 Lessons From 2020 for Retail Success in 2021
After a tumultuous year, retail store owners and managers are beginning 2021 with some degree of clarity on what the year will hold. Hopefully, retail will look more like it did pre-pandemic, but it’s likely that current conditions – capacity limits, mask requirements, and customer hesitation – will …
Get Ready for Holiday Shopping with a Register Health Check
At Retail Tech, retail is our business. Over the past several months, we’ve heard from our customers about the significant challenges and severe impacts that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on their businesses in 2020. Retail Tech wants to help retail stores end the year strong. As retailers prepare …
Managing Returns and Exchanges as Retail Reopens
Returns and exchanges are an inevitable aspect of retail, and that is truer now than ever. Studies show that e-commerce has up to three times the return rate of brick and mortar retail. Stores that pivoted to online sales or curbside pickup during coronavirus closures may be facing an influx of …
Are Your Customers Advocates?
Your retail store has loyal customers. But does it have advocates? The difference between loyal customers and advocates is small, but important. Customers may shop frequently, take advantage of promotions and make large purchases. But an advocate has a relationship with a retail store or brand that …
Use Your POS Data to Improve Product Performance
Retail analytics and performance metrics can be powerful tools for understanding customer behavior, seasonal trends, inventory issues and all other facets of retail management and operations. One benefit of using these tools is that they are already available to store owners and managers – in your …
Engage and Convert with Smart Store Design
Despite the increasing popularity of online shopping, brick and mortar retail stores still – and will always – be the preferred shopping method for many consumers. Physical stores allow customers to see, feel and try items on, to be assisted by sales associates, and to simply have the shopping …
Use Sensory Experiences to Improve Customer Retention
We’ve written extensively on the changing landscape of the retail industry and the shift toward a more personalized, interactive in-store experience. A new study has found that the sensory elements in a store can have a significant impact on the shopping experience. These elements also play a role …
Best Tips to Run Effective Promotions
Sales, specials and promotions can be an effective tool, both for drawing new and existing customers into a store, and getting them to spend more once they’re in. But when promotions are executed broadly, haphazardly, or without a specific goal or target in mind, they can actually hurt the bottom …
Build Customer Loyalty Through Returns
Returns are expensive, disruptive, and time-consuming, but they’re an inevitable fact of life for retailers. A 2018 survey by the National Retail Federation found a median return rate of 10 percent in U.S. retail stores. This adds up to about $370 billion in returned merchandise. Further, return …
Use Retail Trends to Improve the Customer Experience
As we move into the new year, retailers are focused on the bottom line, working to continue the fight against online shopping and improve in-store sales. There are many debates over the best way to do this, but ultimately, it’s pretty simple. By paying attention to retail trends and continually …
Focus on Inventory and Pricing to Maximize Sales
Shoppers tend to have heightened expectations when shopping at a brick and mortar retail store. This can be both good and bad for retailers who are looking to maximize sales. On the positive side, a happy shopper who had previously only shopped online, but who has a positive in-store experience, is …
Turn Holiday Shopping into Year-Round Success
The holiday season creates many opportunities for small business success. During this busy shopping season, especially with the recent movement to “shop small,” local retailers can attract new customers, increase sales, and build momentum for the year to come. However, those things don’t just happen …
Maximizing the Checkout Experience
In today’s retail market, it’s important to take advantage of every opportunity to increase sales and build customer engagement. However, many retailers aren’t fully maximizing one of the most important aspects of the customer experience: the checkout. In a recent study of grocery customers, …
Using Retail Analytics to Drive Sales
Analytics are a key indicator in any type of business, but they’re especially important when sales and customer satisfaction are key to success. We’ve previously written a blog post on the importance of evaluating restaurant analytics, but, of course, restaurants and retail stores can be quite …
Refresh Your Retail Merchandising for Spring
Spring is on the way, which means that retail stores are launching new product lines and in-store displays focused on the upcoming summer months. Spring is a time for new beginnings, which offers a great opportunity to review and think your overall retail merchandising strategy and …
New Tactics Are Essential As Retail Landscape Shifts
The increasing popularity of online shopping, combined with years of chronic overbuilding and shifting consumer preferences, has led to what some are calling the “retail apocalypse.” While the word “apocalypse” is probably much too dramatic, it’s true that traditional retail is experiencing a …
In Today’s Retail Industry, Personal Connection is Key
It seems that every article or thinkpiece that discusses the retail industry has one message: retail is dying. But, as a company that works closely with retailers of all different sizes and in different markets, we at Retail Tech know that is simply not true. Retail is changing, yes, and business …
Adapting to a Changing Retail Industry
There’s no denying it: the retail industry is changing. In fact, some experts claim that retail – or, more accurately, traditional brick and mortar retail – is dying. And in the face of falling profits, store closings and bankruptcies, it may seem as if that’s the case. But retail can’t – and …
4 Mobile Marketing Trends for 2017
How to Use Mobile Marketing to Keep Customers Engaged These days, marketers are investing heavily in mobile as their tactic to keep customers engaged and keep up with expectations. Providing valuable and relevant content is what the consumers look for and what keeps them coming back. As technology …
Consumer Trends Call for New Retail Strategies
Reinventing Retail for 2020 Shopping is a large part of every culture. Whether it is getting the basics or going for the new and fun items, retail has been around for over 100 years. Shopping has evolved from the “mom and pop” shops to giant global corporations that offer just about anything. Now …
Why Your Chip Card is Still Not Accepted Everywhere
Slow Transition for a Big Change to Chip Card Processing Most companies now have chip card readers, but some have been slow to implement the new technology. The United States began accepting chips on credit cards on October 1st, 2015. This also made merchants responsible for fraudulent charges made …
Top 10 Benefits of Using a Point of Sale (POS) System
Cash Registers Vs. POS Systems For many years, cash registers were the only way to go when completing sales in a store, shop, or restaurant. But with the advent of technology, the options have expanded to a variety of systems that work best for your business. Point of Sale systems have many …
Customer Checkout Getting Easier, Faster, Smarter with IBM Retail Systems
ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced retail technology aimed at empowering "bricks-and-mortar" retailers to claim their place at the center of the newest multichannel shopping trends. The technology is part of a growing number of IBM Smarter Commerce offerings …
IT Managers: Are you Asking the Right Questions about POS Hardware?
Is your business looking to upgrade to a new POS Hardware platform? Are you in the process of finding a reliable reseller? If we were IT managers, these are the questions we would ask! What can you tell me about your company? While this may seem obvious, a lot of people forget to ask this …
