Mobile POS Will Prepare You for the Holiday Season

Massive holiday sales are upon us. Will you be ready?

Customers flood through your doors, eyes sparkling with determination, on a mission to find gifts for their loved ones and secure great deals. Black Friday and the holidays are an exciting and hectic time during which retailers can expect a huge bump in shopping activity. This additional volume brings in more foot traffic, which presents an all-too-familiar set of challenges for your holiday operation: long lines, crowded aisles and agitated customers. We live in an age of instant gratification, and whether or not you want to adhere to this ideology, your customers do not have the patience they used to when shopping. The average shopper can tolerate waiting to check out for no longer than four minutes.

Does your store have that level of efficiency? If you are already operating with mobile POS, it probably does, and you can anticipate a very profitable season and happy customers. If you are not operating with mobile POS, now is the time to consider it.

Mobile POS versus the Impatient Customer

Mobile units, such as an iPad POS or any tablet POS, are increasing the flexibility for retailers to manage their in-store checkout process and are often integrated as part of retailers’ existing retail software solutions. By implementing mobile devices, sales clerks can step away from the counter to:

• Quickly open a new line for checkout
• Assist a high-value client as a personal shopper
• Help customer with product and inventory information directly on the sales floor

Think of the potential profit from the dense crowds that form at your store during the holidays. Things can quickly fall apart if the lines from these crowds become too severe. If you make the wait time almost nil by offering to check a customer out securely right there in the aisle, your customer’s experience will undoubtedly be a happier one.

Make Your Employees Armed (Technologically) and Ready to Sell

You appreciate your employees for servicing a large number of customers within a stressful eight-hour shift and securing high sales during the holiday shopping season. Not having a facilitative operating system for them becomes exhausting and consequentially diminishes their sales. But with mobile POS, your sales associates can join shoppers right on the sales floor, armed with devices like a Surface Pro tablet or an iPad that contain information about your products, inventory levels, purchase histories and more.
In a recent poll of retail employees, 68% believed that the use of mobile POS units would allow them to serve their customers better.
Having access to such crucial data empowers sales associates and instills confidence in the shoppers they assist, while simultaneously expanding the opportunity for upselling on the sales floor.

The Bottom Line

In preparation for the upcoming holiday season, it’s wise to incorporate a mobile POS system within your retail business. In addition to an improved customer experience, this strategy also brings budget benefits, since it is much more cost-effective to purchase a small tablet as opposed to a new cash wrap desktop machine. Additional cost savings come with reduced maintenance, since there’s no installation necessary with devices and tablets.
A little less than a year ago, David Marcus, the former president of PayPal, predicted that point-of-sale terminals would become increasingly mobile, while the traditional cash wrap would fade into nostalgia.
With a low up-front cost, the investment in mobile point of sale for your store can result in immediate returns in both revenue and customer satisfaction, and perhaps even deliver a merrier holiday season. Happy holidays and happy selling!