Solving major challenges of the retail business
Running a business is no cakewalk; owners face various challenges along the way and retail business is no exception. There are numerous hurdles that retailers need to overcome in order for their business to function smoothly. However, most retail business owners do not know what to do when they face these bottlenecks. In this article, we would be sharing four major challenges that most retailers face and ways they could leverage technology to resolve these challenges.
Challenge 1: Handling a wide range of categories and products
Typically, in a retail business, there are scores of categories of products that are sold at the outlets and on online channels. One of the major challenges that retail organizations face is to manage this wide range of stock. For instance, in an apparel-based retail environment, a garment can be categorized based on the size, length, style, pattern, brand, and the like. In such a situation, monitoring a particular product would require a lot of slicing and dicing, which could be a strenuous and erroneous task.
Solution: Retailers must use an inventory management software solution like Ginesys, that can map and monitor all categories of marketable products in a retail environment. This makes managing the inventory stock very easy, smooth, and accurate.
Challenge 2: Identifying and retaining loyal customers
There is no denying the fact that loyal customers bring in a lot of repeat business and even spread positive word-of-mouth. So, it is inevitable for organizations to provide a great personalized experience to these customers. However, in a retail environment, it is next-to-impossible to identify these loyal customers, that have been visiting the outlet repeatedly. Rewarding these customers becomes a far-fetched task.
Solution: Retailers must use a POS solution like Ginesys, that can easily be integrated with customer loyalty programs, to provide tailored offers and special discounts to loyal customers. This way, retailers would easily identify repeat customers and also be able to provide them with incentives to keep coming back and bring in more business.
Taking this a step ahead, retailers must also upgrade their POS solution and invest in an efficient mPOS solution like Ginesys’ Zwing. Using mPOS, retail employees could walk up to customers at the time of checkout and strike up a conversation to understand how the business could better solve the needs of customers and, thus, provide a great shopping experience.
Challenge 3: Upgrading hardware and software
Retailers who have been in the business for many long years are skeptical about changing their hardware and software. One of the major reasons is that they think they might lose valuable data or that they might not be able to synchronize it easily across various branches.
Solution: Retailers must invest in end-to-end ERP solutions like Ginesys that are hosted on cloud platforms. With this, it would become convenient for the retailer to synchronize all the data across all outlets and extract data backup as well. Consequently, it would benefit the business. For instance, if a customer who has made a purchase in city A wishes to initiate a return, it can be smoothly done at an outlet in city B. This would enhance the customer experience and thus increase customer loyalty.
Challenge 4: Gauging ROI
When retailers make an investment in improving their systems and infrastructure, the sole purpose is to grow their business. For evaluating the benefits of making these investments, retailers would have to gauge the profits earned or losses incurred, and the like. Measuring the sales at a large scale is difficult without a proper accounting tool.
Solution: Using a powerful analytics tool along with the accounting software, retail business owners would be able to gain insights on the performance of their business after making these investments. This, in turn, would help them strategize properly to scale up their business.
