3 Revenue-Boosting Features Health Food Stores Should Look For In A POS System
Posted on: 8 September 2021
Your health food store's point-of-sale system is a vital part of accepting payments and tracking inventory, but upgrading an aging POS system often doesn't receive much consideration from owners as long as the current system is working fine. Unfortunately, this can result in lost revenue — modern POS systems offer better software integration into the rest of your business that can help you make better business decisions.
Detailed analysis about customer purchases, for example, can help you fine-tune vendor orders to minimize waste due to spoilage and maximize revenue by ensuring you don't run out of items that customers are interested in. If your health food store isn't using a modern POS system, read on to learn three features to look for in a new one that can help your business thrive.
1. Loyalty Program Support
One of the challenges that specialty health food stores face is that normal grocery store chains are increasingly integrating healthy foods into their normal stock. Since these stores are larger, they're sometimes able to offer these items at lower prices due to volume purchasing discounts, which makes large grocery store chains a dangerous competitor for small health food stores.
One way that smaller stores can help combat the encroachment of large chains into their market is to offer loyalty programs to customers. In order to offer one, you'll need to switch to a POS system that offers loyalty program support. Customers can be tracked individually by a loyalty card or by their phone number, and customers who frequently make purchases at your store can be given a discount. Giving a discount to frequent customers entices them to continue shopping at your store in order to maintain the discount, which helps prevent them from shopping at your competition.
2. Customer Purchase Analysis
Your health food store's POS software should also give you up-to-date data on the purchases that your customers are making. Tracking inventory allows you to know when to reorder, and it also knows which items have recently become big sellers. The market for health food and supplements tends to react strongly to recent trends — new papers published in medical journals about a certain herb or supplement, for example, often results in suddenly increased consumer interest in that item.
Up-to-date data on customer purchases allows you to spot these trends immediately, which enables you to immediately order more stock from your distributor in order to avoid shortfalls. Without instant access to changes in customer preferences, you could miss out on sales simply because you aren't stocking the right items.
3. E-Commerce Integration
Finally, the POS system for your health food store needs to have some form of integration with an e-commerce platform. Opening your own e-commerce site for your health food store and integrating it with your store's inventory has two benefits. The first is that customers can easily see what items you sell, their prices, and whether or not they're currently in stock based on inventory data from your POS software. Customers who are looking for a specific item and know that it's in stock in your store will be much more likely to come into your store, and they'll likely make other purchases as well.
The second benefit of e-commerce integration is that it makes it easier for you to diversify into e-commerce. Even if most of your sales come from customers entering your brick and mortar store, e-commerce is lucrative for health food stores — herbs and supplements are lightweight, so they're easy to ship. An e-commerce platform can be a lucrative source of added income, and it's easy to set up when the platform can easily pull inventory data from your POS software.
With numerous POS systems on the market catered towards small businesses, it can be difficult to pick the one that's right for your health food store. If your health food store's POS system isn't providing you the features that you need, consider transitioning to a modern system that can provide you with the software integration you need to make inventory decisions. Reach out to a local provider of POS systems like RMH POS to learn more.
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