Mobile POS is a good add-on, but ripping out your registers is better!

March 01, 2019

Bob Phibbs (aka “the Retail Doctor”) wrote a great LinkedIn piece on Neiman Marcus and how stagnant old-school culture and process issues are hurting their business.

The story told of his experience visiting a Neiman Marcus flagship store to shop for top-tier apparel. Bob observed aloof floor reps that ignored him, and when he finally paid for his apparel, only then did the clerk mention that he should buy a related accessory at the other end of the store.

There are a couple of concerning issues with this. First, the rep was solely focused on operating a hard-to-use register (and thereby distracted). Secondly, Bob was only offered an upsell after the original sale had been wrung up (at the other end of the store). This netted out to a bad retail experience for Bob and a lost revenue opportunity for Neiman Marcus.

Stores that stick to this old way of doing businesses are handicapped and may not survive long. However, all is not lost.Technology to the rescue.

Adding in a clienteling mobile solution helps a bit. It allows floor staff to strike up conversations with shoppers and offer assistance during their purchases. The problem is that most mobile solutions are essentially ecommerce websites. Because of this, the solution underperforms in busy stores and a legacy POS register solution has to be kept in place for checkout, along with all of the maintenance costs and downtime that comes with it.

A better approach is to use a single app that has the ability to ring up sales and that also supports important clienteling and endless aisle functions. These in-store POS apps can manage customers, track various shopping metrics, provide product information and facilitate ordering of out-of-stock items (so that the shopper does not go elsewhere). Apps like this do exist, but either they are not connected to the supply chain (expensive and risky integration) or they rely on the internet to render the POS (slow and unreliable).

Enter SuitePOS. SuitePOS is a single POS app that works on Apple's iPad and iPhone. It is integrated to NetSuite or Salesforce out-of-the box. Integration to CRM, Marketing, Inventory and Finance becomes a non-issue. More importantly, this same app works for many different in-store situations; fixed-lane, mobile, clienteling and even self-service. By using SuitePOS, you lower your IT costs, free up your clerks to sell and upsell, improve the customer experience and increase revenue.

Doesn’t that make more business sense? You truly can rip out your old registers and solve all in-store inefficiencies with the right mobile technology.
SuiteRetail can help, Contact Us for more information.

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