Whether expanding locations and pursuing a more robust system or seeking to upgrade to a platform with deeper insights that can future-proof your position in the market, switching to a new POS system isn’t to be taken lightly.
Searching for a new POS system for your growing home furnishing business can be complicated. How do you know what you need to ask? What features are necessary to help your business expand and thrive?
Having the right technology can be a make-or-break for sales performance. We found that 68% of retailers said adopting new technology had a positive impact on their business. Do your research before making a decision and risk investing in something you may not need. We’re offering advice on what to look for when embarking on this hunt.
Make sure to ask these nine questions that outline what to look for in a POS system:
- How does the POS handle inventory?
- How does the POS system serve omnichannel and multilocation operations?
- Does the POS system empower your staff?
- Can you offer a personalized experience?
- Does the POS support your success?
- Does the POS system offer reporting and analytics?
- Does the POS system have embedded payments with a straightforward rate?
- Can the POS system enable you to run targeted marketing campaigns?
- Will the POS system support your business’ growth?
- What are the common questions to ask before choosing a POS?
1. How does the POS handle inventory management?
As a home goods retailer, your inventory (along with your customer service) is the heart of your business. You need a system that can keep up. That means when you’re buying a POS, you should ensure the system has not only organizational tools but also built-in purchasing.
You should be able to handle complex inventory, such as serialized items and products with multiple attributes—cushions that vary in color and size, for example. Beyond that, you should be able to add custom tags to products to organize and manage items that may be grouped together thematically if not at the categorical level. For example, you don’t want seasonal inventory cluttering your POS when the season ends. Being able to tag inventory means it’ll be easier to find for archiving.
Don’t settle for inefficient purchasing workflows. Your new POS system should have purchasing tools built in, like allowing you to create and receive purchase orders without leaving the point of sale back office. You should also be able to set reorder points—points at which a report will tell you that you need to order new stock before you have an empty shelf.
What to look for:
- Organizational tools like product matrices, customizable categories, and tags
- An item import tool to get your stock set up quickly
- The ability to handle serialized inventory
- Native purchasing functions, like the ability to store vendor information, built-in purchase orders, and reorder points
2. How does the POS system serve omnichannel and multilocation operations?
Imagine a store that never closes—that’s the power of running an omnichannel retail operation.
There’s little doubt that retailers selling across various locations and online platforms bring in significantly more revenue than those who sell through one channel alone. In a recent survey Lightspeed conducted of retail businesses worldwide, omnichannel retailers beat out single-channel retailers for sales growth.
That’s why the right POS helps brick-and-mortar retailers grow their businesses, open more locations, and sell through more channels. Having various disconnected systems isn’t enough. You need a commerce platform to streamline multichannel sales, centralize data, and increase efficiency.
Tanda Jarest, Owner of Opulence of Southern Pines, explains that her favorite part of Lightspeed is how it helps her run all her locations and manage inventory from just one platform. She says, “My favorite feature is the inventory control. If my team needs something from another store, they’ll do a stock transfer. The other store gets it, they pull the merchandise, and it arrives within a week. It runs very smoothly.”
She says, “With Lightspeed, my inventory is current. My stores can easily talk to one another, and managers from other locations can easily hop on and help my staff.”
What to look for:
- Synchronization between the web and your physical stores when it comes to inventory, sales, and order requests
- Consolidated reports on total sales, sales per physical store, and sales from your eCommerce business
- The ability to extend your brand consistency between sales channels
3. Does the POS system empower your staff?
Customers have every resource at their disposal, from the Internet to their friends and family. Before entering a store, they often conduct research and are loaded up with questions to ask—ready to come in and get out. 81% of shoppers research their purchases online before coming into the store.
Retail employees need to feel as informed as the customers they work with, and smart mobile technologies are the way to accomplish that.
A good POS system shouldn’t waste employees’ time or make them want to pull their hair out. It should immediately offer them the information they need to serve customers and move people through the store. They’re the ambassadors of your brand; don’t leave them out of the equation when you consider your store’s technology.
Tanda Jarest of Opulence of Southern Pines chose to upgrade her antiquated POS to Lightspeed because of its “intuitive and user-friendly” qualities. Not only was it easy to set up with help from the onboarding team, but training staff on it has been just as effortless. She says, “I can start an employee on it in the morning, and by the afternoon, they’re running it.”
What to look for:
- Secure logins for every employee
- Dashboards that can be customized for every employee
- Intuitive interface that minimizes training time
- The capacity to fill out detailed inventory entries, including photos
- Easy-to-use tools that employees feel comfortable using
4. Can you offer a personalized experience?
Building off of the last question, you’ll want to make sure the new POS system offers your customers as good an experience as it can offer your staff.
The system should store customer profiles, including purchase histories, so your employees can make tailored product recommendations. With those customer profiles in hand, it doesn’t matter who is on shift or how senior a sales associate is. Every customer who walks in the door can feel like a regular, encouraging loyalty.
Before you buy a POS system, make sure it has built-in loyalty tools and the option to add deeper tools as needed. At the very least, you should be able to set up the ability to earn financial incentives through purchases—loyalty dollars for money spent—to encourage repeat visits.
Steffanie Evans, Owner of Rutherford’s Design, takes full advantage of her customer data to strengthen relationships and serve customers better. She says, “It’s just important for us to not only track sales but also leave quotes and document the paper trail of what our customers want to buy and purchase. Lightspeed helps us do all that and more.”
What to look for:
- Built-in customer profiles that store purchase histories
- The ability to use the POS on an iPad so employees can serve customers anywhere in the store
- Loyalty integrations that let you make the most of your customer data
5. Does the POS support your success?
People and retailers are different. Although the principles may be the same, each store and employee has differences and has its own preferred workflows, challenges, preferences, requirements, and goals.
When you’re buying a POS system, a good vendor helps you determine whether the software fits your needs (if it will help your store succeed). They will also help you with onboarding sessions and offer technical support for those times when something just doesn’t make sense. You shouldn’t be left alone as soon as the purchase is made, so always make sure to ask about what kind of post-sales support your vendor offers.
With the help of its POS provider, Linen House grew its business from two to 24 locations. Its director of IT, Tez Ozma, explains that Lightspeed scaled up with them, saving them money along the way: “The switch to Lightspeed works out very well from a cost perspective. We’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars in POS hardware, maintenance, and consultancy fees—even though we’ve increased our retail locations five-fold.”
What to look for in a POS system:
- Multiple ways to reach the support team, such as over the phone, online tickets, and live chat
- Local channel partners—specialists who provide on-site consultation, installation, and troubleshooting services
- Variety of training materials, including online help and product information, courses, videos, or webinars
- Published customer satisfaction ratings and online product reviews
- Onboarding sessions for managers and employees
- An online social media presence for communicating more closely with the organization
6. Does the POS system offer reporting and analytics?
With legacy systems, retailers didn’t always have an accurate business picture. Goods came and went, but business managers had only a vague idea of profits and performance. Times have changed.
In today’s highly competitive environment, retailers can’t afford to take risks. Many have turned to using data to make business decisions, but only 16% say they’re experts at using that data.
That’s why a good POS will show you how well you’re doing and where you can improve to capitalize on new opportunities and pivot when the retail winds change. At the very least, you should be able to dive deep into the data your POS is processing every day to pinpoint best sellers and overall sales performance.
LUC Design thrives on using built-in reporting to examine what’s working. “Having up-to-date stock levels in Lightspeed has made stocktake much easier than before. It’s also helped our end-of-month reconciliations and made it so much easier working with my accountant,” says their founder, Lucy Given.
What to look for:
- Reports that show your most profitable products, top-selling products, lowest selling products, top-performing sales associates, busiest store hours, top brands, and online vs. in-store sales
- Dashboards highlighting the information you need
- Easy access to information for better decision-making, such as for inventory purchasing and staff scheduling
With Lightspeed Insights, you can customize your home dashboard and add additional metrics for you and your team, including average sale value, discounts, or top products sold under Things to Know. This allows your store managers to quickly see the most important metrics throughout the day and make informed decisions.
7. Does the POS have embedded payments with a straightforward rate?
You could have the world’s most advanced inventory management system—and the best possible customer loyalty tools—but if you’re overpaying for your payments, or worse, if they’re inefficient and unintegrated, your POS system isn’t doing enough for you.
Embedded payments, like Lightspeed Payments, reduce the possibility of human error because the amount to pay is automatically pushed to your payment terminal. That also reduces the amount of time spent at checkout and cuts the amount of receipt paper you need in half.
You’ll also want those embedded payments to have a straightforward fee scheme so you always know what you’re paying. Interchange plus rates can be murky and confusing, as you don’t always know what fee a particular customer’s card will have. With a flat fee structure, you know exactly what to budget for.
Finally, when the same company develops your payment processor and POS system, you’ll never need to bounce between companies if you have a question.
What to look for:
- Embedded payments that save you time
- Reports on your payment data from your POS
- An easy-to-predict fee structure
- A 24/7 support team that is knowledgeable about your payments and your POS
8. Can the POS system enable you to run targeted marketing campaigns?
It’s generally accepted that existing customers are more valuable—and more likely to make a purchase—than new customers. As a result, today’s leading marketers are no longer sending generic email blasts to everyone who has ever interacted with a company. They’re crafting consumer conversations and pinpointing what their customers actually want to know.
Buying the right POS system can help improve your relationships with shoppers and send relevant communications tailored to their preferences.
You’ll want to integrate with loyalty tools that can use the customer data in your new POS system to send out tailored promotions, like birthday rewards.
What to look for:
- Customer database for capturing names, contact information, preferred methods of communication, previous furniture and decór purchases, and more
- Integrates with email marketing software for emailing customers and tracking click-through rates
- Features for segmenting your customer database and tailoring promotions to fit those segments
9. Will the POS system support your business’s growth?
When buying a POS system, consider the long-term costs and what you may need in the future.
While it can be tempting to choose the cheapest and simplest system when you’re getting started, you’ll regret it when you outgrow it in a year. Retailers need scalable systems that can grow with their business.
Basically, if you don’t budget for a POS equipped for long-term success now, you’ll pay in time and money when you need to switch.
Linen House exemplifies this through its success with Lightspeed. To realize its ambitions to grow, it knew it needed the right technology to support it. Tez says, “In the last 14 months, we’ve opened nine new stores that run Lightspeed POS…Store managers and staff love using Lightspeed, too, which took a lot of the stress out of getting our new stores up and running.”
What to look for:
- Registers that you can add as you need, whether it’s for a permanent new location or a pop-up shop
- Support for multiple locations, integrating inventory reporting
- Integration with common and useful software, such as MailChimp, Google Analytics, and QuickBooks
- Open technology so independent developers can easily develop apps that you can add to your POS
10. What are the common questions when choosing a POS?
Choosing a point-of-sale system is a critical step in any business. There are a variety of considerations when it comes to selecting a POS that is right for your business, including:
- Your specific home furnishing business needs
- Range of features and functionality
- Ease of use
- Compatibility
- Ease of integration
- Scalability
- Hardware requirements
- Payment processing
- Security
- Customer support and training
- Costs & pricing structure
- Reviews & recommendations
- Offline capabilities
- Customization
- Updates and maintenance
What makes a good POS?
In selecting the right POS (point of sale) for your business, you want something that optimizes efficiency for your business needs and provides a more valuable experience to staff and customers. When doing your research, you should look at various characteristics, such as a user-friendly interface, efficient transaction processing, inventory management, integration and customization options, offline capabilities, reporting, and payment processing options.
Can you run a POS system without the Internet?
Yes, it is possible to run a POS without the Internet. Some point-of-sale systems are designed to work offline to provide business owners with flexibility and continued smooth operations even in the absence of the Internet. Systems that allow this typically have an offline mode and local data storage for transactions. Verify that the POS system has security measures to protect data during offline transactions and devise a set of backup procedures.
Buy a POS system that fits your store’s needs
As you implement a new POS system inside your retail store (or multiple stores), you need to make sure that it’s something you won’t need to update in a month. A business management tool that helps you move online and add locations as you need is a tool that you’ll be happy training your staff on and can use for a long while moving forward.
Whether you’re looking to open new stores, dig into your analytics, increase loyalty, or anything in between, your POS system plays a pivotal role in your business’s success. With the right tools and technology powering your operations, you’re one step closer to achieving your goals and unlocking your business’ full potential.
