6 Things To Consider When Buying A New POS
It can be stressful to select and implement the right point-of-sale (PoS) system for your business. Choosing the wrong system can cause serious, not to mention expensive, issues for your business – undermining all your efforts. The right PoS, however, can help you give customers what they are looking for, drive sales, deliver personalisation for in-store and online shopping, leverage customer loyalty, and support business growth.
Problematically, it’s easy to become buried in the competitive market of PoS service providers and vast array of information available, so how do you choose the right PoS for your business?
Here are 6 factors to consider when buying a new PoS system.
- Intuitive Usability
This sounds obvious, but when vetting a PoS system, investigate how easy it is to install and use. Yes, you want customer support to guide you through hiccoughs and errors, but you don’t want to rely on support to use the platform on a day-to-day basis.
Really, you want the system you choose to be quickly understood, have an intuitive user interface, manage the installation process yourself, and be able to train employees without hassle.
- Reporting & Analytics
Smart companies rely on data to make decisions, develop their strategies, and gain the competitive edge. If not for the streamlined transactional experience, you should consider a PoS system for the access to data that you can use to upgrade your business and boost sales. We’re talking about data that goes beyond ‘type and amount’ and ventures into top-selling items, inventory reorder, sales and inventory by date range, customer activity, and more.
Using the powerful analytic and advanced reporting features built into the right PoS platform, you can create an omnichannel experience, enabling you to check on sales activities transactions, sales value, customer footfall, etc.
Our top tip here is that you should review what types of reports would be available so that you can better match the system to your business needs.
- Super Security
With all the data you’ll be able to collect, it’s vital that your PoS platform is equipped with the necessary security measures to protect it at the access level hierarchy, authentication towards data access, ransomware attacks, and backend security breaches.
Losing data can cost you dearly, but security should prevent cyber attacks, both at the backend and the frontend.
- Improved Integration
Rather than dividing your time into a variety of tasks, you can use the right PoS platform to leverage different business tools simultaneously. A quality PoS platform should allow your apps to interact directly with one another and perform respective tasks at the same time. This way, you can create an omnichannel approach to payment and management, allowing your customers to enjoy a seamless shopping experience.
Additionally, the improved integration functionality of PoS platform should offer you the agility to work with your established operations while also facilitating newer systems, keeping up with technology trends, such as mobile-based POS, scan-and-go apps, and SaaS or cloud-based solutions.
- Upfront Support
Ideally, you want a system that you can get to know instantly, operate intuitively, and never have any questions about. But the reality is that there will be a time when you need customer support, which is why it’s vital that you opt for a PoS solution provider that offers 24/7 customer support. Without support, your staff may have to spend valuable time figuring out the solution on their own leading to a loss of sales and even negative customer reviews – all as a result of something fairly mundane, like a standard system malfunction.
That’s why you need to make sure that you have access to both onboarding and technical support that will lead you to a specific solution quickly.
Our tip here is to cast a more critical eye over PoS systems that are suspiciously cheap, because these solutions may not come with the right kind of support you need. You may have to purchase this as an add-on and these additional fees could end up surpassing the budget price that drew you in.
Remember, if an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.
- The Scalability
In addition to keeping up with the trends of the wider retail industry, the system you choose should be robust, scalable, and flexible so that it can evolve as your business grows. The last thing you want to do is chop and change just because the platform you selected is only suitable for the here and now.
Instead of making your buying decision based on your business’s immediate requirements, we suggest that you consider future growth and possible impact to ensure that your PoS will run smoothly and efficiently at all times – preferably for months and years following implementation.
We Can Help
If you’re looking for the right PoS platform that will do what you need it to, whether it’s combining commerce with your customer engagement or bringing your inventory and fulfillment into a single omnichannel system, then talk to us.
Our in-house experts will gladly help you find the right PoS system and get you connected so it all works.
