Is Your Business’ POS Ready For Black Friday?

Periods of increased retail traffic, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and even the time leading up to Christmas, can present both physical and online stores with big challenges. To that end, a lot of prep is required to ensure that your customers can transact easily, and if you have staff, to support these people during the checkout process so they can better serve your customers without feeling overwhelmed by a system that’s faulty or too complicated to use. 

Make no mistake, Black Friday is crucial for many businesses, and the more prepared your business is to handle the influx of transactions, the more profitable Black Friday will be.

Here are the three main tips that we believe will help you prepare your business to ring in sale after sale, after sale with ease.

1. Know Your Enemy

During Black Friday, every shortcoming can cost you money. The last thing you want is something like loadshedding affecting your ability to transact. Unfortunately, one of the most common threats to retail in South Africa is loadshedding – killing pay points, causing queues to lengthen, and frustration to build among customers who have better things to do.

If the power goes out and your area is affected, your fixed and portable card machines will rely on their batteries and when these run out, you’re out of POS options. Even if your area isn’t affected, your cellular providers could be… which will impact your machine’s ability to connect with your bank. 

While most of South Africa’s cellular providers have backup batteries, these only last so long and because fixed and portable machines, as well as mobile solutions, all rely on connectivity to work. For the sake of your business, your POS connectivity needs a backup solution so that you can keep racking up those Black Friday sales even when your connection is down.

2. Embrace The New

If you’ve experienced any of the challenges that we’ve mentioned so far and you’re still hanging onto your old POS system or haven’t invested in a backup solution, it’s time to make a change.

Here’s a wake-up call – your trusty old POS is now or soon will be incapable of handling the kind of traffic that Black Friday promises. You don’t want to find out mid-Black Friday that transactions are failing left, right and centre. Not when you could invest in a smart POS system that can empower your business to operate more efficiently, improve customer experiences, give you better control of your inventory, and provide you with rich marketing insights specific to your business with which you can make data-driven decisions. 

3. Bulk Up Your Connectivity

Importantly, you should also need to review your connectivity service, because it may not be capable of keeping your POS system up and running during these peak sale seasons.

We have discussed POS Connectivity options in this article, “Will Your POS Connectivity Handle Black Friday?” However to recap, there are four main options, including:

• Fibre – High speeds, reliable connection, coupled with low latency so that your customers benefit from faster transactions.
• 4G/5G – Decent data transfer speeds, secure connections, and increased coverage which is a huge plus if you use mobile terminals.
• WiFi – With a good router, you’ll get a speedy connection, but just make sure you have a UPS as a failover for when loadshedding kills the power.
• Ethernet – A wired connection, connecting your POS terminal through an Ethernet cable that’s plugged into your terminal. 
• SIM Connection – Using a POS with a SIM card allows for a mobile network connection (think moving around the business and allowing customers to transact from wherever), which can be as quick as fibre and can act as a failover if there’s loadshedding. 

4. Get Backup

What happens when your POS connectivity is inefficient, succumbs to a cyber attack, or loadshedding knocks your system out? The obvious answer is that inconvenienced customers may choose to shop elsewhere. But there’s also the possibility of transaction errors, weakened security, increased data loss, and customer privacy breaches. 

All of these result in lost profits, not forgetting the damage to your reputation.

Ultimately, you need a contingency plan in the form of some sort of fail over / backup solution.

While we have more details about the features that come with our Fail Over/Backup Connectivity solution right here, we can share that this type of solution can be used to route POS transactions if your connectivity fails. It also includes an Etherpad that has access to both Vodacom and MTN networks to enable switching automatically between the two on defined signal strength and latency parameters. 

Additionally, we offer a Fixed LTE-A Solution – a fast, cost-effective, and reliable connectivity service that includes a proactive monitoring on the status of your Primary and Fixed LTE-A Backup Link. It also aggregates your backup data usage across multiple sites and seamlessly connects over to the Huge Connects Fixed LTE-A network as a backup link when your Primary Broadband Access Link fails or is temporarily unavailable.

That’s a lot to take in, so if you want to find out how our Fixed LTE-A Backup works and the pricing model, just click here to check out our handy guide. This will explain how a fixed LTE backup solution can save your proverbial bacon by re-establishing your Internet connection when there’s a disruption to your connection. 

READY. FOR. SUCCESS.

Black Friday is now a fixture on our retail calendars and it’s no longer just a few discounts in-store. It’s a full-on opportunity to make more sales, increase profits, and entice new customers to your business. 

Any investment into making it easier for customers to buy from you is a solid investment that will give you the kind of ROI you can only dream of.

Importantly, our team at Huge Connect are on hand to help you choose and implement a useful, customisable POS and connectivity solution that supports your business.

Want to get ready? Let’s connect.