By Nate Stewart, Zing
As a merchant in today’s world, your customers expect up-to-date information about your products, availability, and what they’ve purchased before, no matter what they’ve purchased, where they’ve purchased it, or how they’ve made their purchases. Nowadays, you’ve probably got a web site and mobile shops on top of your in-store presence, and if you’re not adequately prepared to respond to your customers’ needs and take advantage of the information your POS is generating, you will quickly lose traction within your competitive market. To stay competitive and be able to make real-time decisions nearly 24/7, you need to be able to access the current status of your business, from anywhere, anytime.
So, the question is: Do you need real-time mobile solutions? As someone who specializes in SMBs and their e-Commerce needs, whenever I’m evaluating an e-Commerce setup I size up the situation with a few questions:
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1. Are you a retail SMB? Yes, this is a trick question. What I’m saying here is that in today’s world, you cannot afford to have just a fixed or legacy POS. A mobile POS (mPOS) lets you accept payments anywhere in your store or even remotely and customers can make payments on mobile devices using credit and debit cards or even smartphones. Convenience for everyone.
2. Is your data on one computer? Don’t accept being tethered to a single office computer.What if you’re working from home, mobile, traveling on business? How do you get your data then? If you’re not able to look at your data in any of these instances and cannot respond quickly to what’s going on with your sales, you’re losing time and potential revenue. You want to remain competitive at a high level without having to spend all your time at the office. A mobile solution breaks the tether you have to the office computer that hosts the fixed POS and gives you the flexibility to make real-time changes wherever you are.
3. Do you have access to mobile data, but don’t know its benefits? If you have more than one store, you need the option of being able to pull data from all your hubs in real time so you can analyze it as one. Monitor and control your seasonal and “on sale” supply and demand more effectively and in the moment. With mPOS, you can answer customer questions about stock, features, prices, and more without having to go up front to the register. Again, convenience and smart retailing.
4. Do you have real-time mPOS capabilities but you don’t know how to take advantage of them? If you’re already using a SaaS cloud solution, you might already have access to real-time updates by default. If you’re not sure, contact your vendor rep, web site, or help desk, and ask about their API access along with a list of their real-time integrations. Real-time integrations over API or data exports allow you to connect and transfer your POS, CRM and other customer data points to each other, giving you the flexibility to do whatever you need to do with your data to maximize sales and improve customer experience. Connected, real-time data from POS to CRM helps you boost your marketing efforts with emails to targeted customer segmentation and loyalty programs. If your provider doesn’t provide this functionality or has to customize each integration for you, you’re jeopardizing the real-time nature of your retail environment.
5. Do you have to wait for system batch updates? Another common problem with a legacy POS or CRM is the wait time when you’re doing batch updates. Wait time, batch updates, and anything that requires extra steps, means that you’re losing time and potential revenue. Basically, if you’re waiting for your data at any step of the process, you’re probably paying employees to wait around. A cloud-based solution can insure any updates occur in real time, securely, and without manual intervention. It’s all done in the background as you operate normally.
6. Have you outgrown your current mPOS solution? Not all cloud-based or mPOS solutions are created equal. Many providers tout their solution as a cloud-based, mobile solution, when it’s really a payment terminal on a tablet or phone. To receive deeper levels of functionality like real-time stock notifications or integrations into e-Commerce and accounting software, it’s probably time to move beyond simply a payment terminal.
In today’s mobile-hungry world, using a traditional POS is only part of an e-Commerce solution. To get actionable data that helps you make the right decisions quicker and more efficiently is no longer a nice to have, but a must have especially if you rely on your data to make real-time decisions. Not only do you want to have systems in place that are mobile and real time, but you want the reassurance that your tools provide you with secure access to your data from anywhere you can get an internet connection. With the right cloud POS you can have that mobility while still retaining a high level of data security.
By maintaining a secure, real-time mobile environment, you’ll be able to access and assess the current status of your business, from anywhere and have an edge on your competitors that have yet to upgrade their systems. Know what is selling quickly (and when to restock), which employees are performing (or not), and what your best customers are up to (and how to get more like them).Go mobile now.
Nate Stewart is the Founder and CEO of Zing. He has a history of helping SMBs grow from humble beginnings to million dollar success stories, and has a soft spot for e-Commerce. Send any questions his way at: [email protected]
