The mobile POS business is expected to grow from $2 billion in 2015 to $38 billion in 2024, with analysts projecting a 36 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between now and 2019.

Retailers see mobility as a way to improve customer service in store, largely by reducing customer waiting time.

The devices also usher in a closer customer/clerk relationship, because associates can easily answer customer’s questions at the touch of the screen. They can look up inventory, shipping dates and even general product information, all of which leads to improved interactions between customers and their trusted retail advisors.

Even stores that are well known for customer satisfaction such as Nordstrom’s, are constantly innovating to stay on top. The high-end department store arms sales associates with tablets that can check customers out rather than force them to wait at a cash wrap.

But the ability to save customers time on a register line is irrelevant if you can’t get them to the line in the first place. Customers get irritated in stores when they can’t get a price or availability question answered quickly and knowledgeably.

If a store employee doesn’t have the tools to provide a quick answer, customers often simply leave and buy from a competitor.

However, when they are outfitted with mobile devices tied back to the POS and inventory management system, retail associates can immediately help customers, remaining with them throughout the purchasing cycle, and providing information needed to “seal the deal.”

As retailers enter the 2016 holiday season, it becomes increasingly important to encourage salespeople into sales consultants with mobile POS. No longer is it enough to stand behind a register and wait for the customer to come to you.

Today’s retailer must be proactive and engaging. Customer service must be a differentiator.

Mobile POS can provide associates the critical information needed to help customers to make a purchase, close the sale, and even provide up-sell opportunities to drive higher revenue.

Retail has gone through a major paradigm shift over the past few years. How stores predominantly function, with in-store and digital shopping experiences existing as separate entities, is fast becoming an outdated, inefficient model.

Innovative retailers are finding great value in treating their operations holistically and are busy implementing initiatives that add value for the shopper, improve the customer-to-brand interaction, and make products more readily available.

Now retailers have a turnkey way to build omnichannel fulfillment into their store operations with the Retail Pro retail management software platform – and we’re showing you how!

• See what retailers stand to gain from melding brick and mortar with digital
• Discover achievable, measurable ways to tackle omnichannel
• Find out how the Retail Pro and UniteU partnership can help retailers offer flexible fulfillment options like Buy Online Pickup In-Store

Going omnichannel?

Request a demo to see how you can go omnichannel with Retail Pro® today!

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that a security researcher was claiming to have hacked an Amazon server and dumped the information of tens of thousands of users online. (So far, Amazon has dismissed the incident as nonsense.) And fast-food chain Wendy’s is also grappling with a very real breach affecting more than 1,000 outlets nationwide. Those reports underscore just how prevalent security breaches are and how devastating they can be.

Biometrics predicted to become more widespread at POS systems.

Sure, credit card companies are now issuing chip cards, which are more secure than those old magnetic-stripe types. But they aren’t as secure as chip-and-pin, which is standard in Europe. Those cards are equipped with a chip that generates a unique code for each transaction, which makes it more difficult to churn out fake cards for future fraudulent purchases. However, biometrics provide even more security.

Biometrics include technology such as fingerprint systems, facial recognition, iris scanning and voice identification. Biometrics Research Group predicts the global biometrics market to soar to $15 billion this year, up from an estimated $7 million just three years ago. And, technology consulting firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that nearly a half-billion people will be using a smartphone equipped with biometric technology by 2017.

Can You Prove Who You Are?

One of the big benefits biometrics could offer the retail industry is PoS payment authentication. Just as facial recognition can help airports and arenas scan crowds for fugitives, biometrics can help retailers verify shoppers’ identities — even online stores. For example, Amazon has filed a patent application for biometric technology that could be used for identity verification.

Amazon’s technology works like this: The person attempting to sign in or complete a purchase is prompted to “perform an action in view of a camera or sensor.” After completing a sequence of checks, the program identifies the shopper and verifies the person is a living human rather than simply a photograph. The customer might be asked to wave or make another type of gesture, for instance. Once the user is authenticated the transaction can be completed.

Right now, fingerprint recognition is the easiest, most accessible way retailers can bring the security of biometrics into their operations without too much investment. Debuting on Sept. 10, 2013, the iPhone 5s was the first phone to feature such biometric technology. Today, brick and mortar businesses — in particular, cafeterias at schools and nursing facilities — are using fingerprint solutions to allow patrons to quickly access accounts without having to remember passwords or swipe cards.

Moving beyond alphanumeric passwords is critical for continued retail growth. Biometric security technologies can be integrated into just about everything — for retailers both online and off.

The ecommerce market in the Middle East and North Africa is valued at $15b

Sarah Algethami, Gulf News Staff Reporter

Retail Pro International’s Rammohan Nair accepting the Partner Award from University of Dubai – presented by the VC, KHDA Chairman and the Indian Counsel General.

Dubai: The retail industry in the UAE is slow to adopt ecommerce, according to industry experts.

Many retailers are not embracing ecommerce for a number of reasons, such as challenges in delivering goods and being discouraged by the failure of other companies in setting up ecommerce sites, said Rammohan Nair, Director of Strategic Accounts for the Middle East and India at Retail Pro, a global retail management software company. Nair was the moderator for a recent round table discussion with Middle East retail visionaries regarding directions for omnichannel customer experience.

“The addressing system that we have in Dubai is not easy… also, there have been players in the market that have had high expectations but did not meet them. There are bad experiences that have deterred people,” he said on the sidelines of an event organised by Smart Stores Expo in Dubai on Monday.

He also pointed out that some franchisees in the country are not allowed to set up an ecommerce site.

“The big retailers are franchisees and certain franchisee business agreements don’t allow the franchisee to have their own ecommerce sites,” he said, adding that while consumers in the UAE are buying more online, many still prefer to shop at brick and mortar stores.

“Traditionally here, shopping malls have been a place that people visit… visiting a shopping mall in this part of the world is a part of everyone’s life,” he said.

Colin Beaton, managing director of Limelight Creative Services, a retail consultancy in Dubai, said that consumers’ concerns about cyber security is another reason why retailers are slow to adopt ecommerce.

“The UAE is an early adopter of technology for consumer goods. Ecommerce [adoption] is slower here than in some countries,” he said.

The ecommerce market in the Middle East and North Africa is valued at $15 billion, according to Nair. The number of ecommerce users in the region is 90 million and only 15 per cent of businesses have an online presence, he said.

“In the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] … half of internet users purchase something on the web at least once [a month],” he added.

On his outlook for the local retail industry, Nair said that brick and mortar “is here to stay” and that ecommerce will still be “complimentary to the shopping experience.”

“[Ecommerce ] is where people learn more about a product or where should they go and buy it,” he said.

Reposted from Gulf News

As retailers wrap up Q1 2016, now is a good time to reflect on recent retail trends as we look forward to what the future holds.

Understanding the broader environmental shifts can shape our strategies and ensure we aren’t caught off guard. I’m going to highlight five trends retailers should keep in mind as well as insights all employers should consider to improve the customer and employee experience:

• Interconnectivity
• Omni-store
• Beacons and buttons
• Black Friday
• Personalization

In this first post, I’m going to focus on the first two trends. Interconnectivity is a collective digital transformation which has been building over the last several years. Technology spending isn’t simply a nice-to-do, it is a necessity. Traditionally, retailers considered their spending across five distinct categories: in-store hardware, in-store software, marketing and operations solutions, supply chain systems and hardware, and loss prevention/asset protection solutions.

Among the leading retail executives Innovative Retail Technologies (IRT) surveyed, tech spending decisions are no longer being made in these distinct category silos. Instead, they’re being made by cross-disciplinary teams with a holistic understanding of their enterprise and Omni-channel goals.

This digital transformation and new purchasing approach is happening in the name of Omni-channel connectivity. Retail executives’ plans point to an all-out race to connect data from any and all channels to better serve the customer — and the business — wherever both are found. In the retail world this is often referred to as Unified Commerce with the goal of providing one version of truth for data pertaining to customers, products, pricing and sourcing.

Insight: Technology purchases should facilitate connecting data from all channels.

I refer to the second trend as Omni-store because the physical brick-and-mortar store still plays an important role in the retail world even as online channels build. To truly be Omni-channel requires letting go of the legacy systems and practices, such as managerial accounting, and creating reward structures and measurements that don’t simply rely on the physical. This trend ties closely to the first trend as interconnectivity really enables the procurement, sales and delivery or merchandise independent of channel. Here are a few considerations and facts supporting the Omni-store trend:

• Inventory visibility. This year, nearly 62 percent of the IRT survey respondents claimed to have inventory visibility across all channels compared to less than 50 percent the previous year.
• Order management. More than 34 percent of retailers intend to spend on solutions that improve inventory management through better visibility, and more than a third will invest in order management/fulfillment solutions.

Retailers who were maintaining legacy systems and attempting excessive integration (or sometimes not integrating at all due to systems incompatibility,) regret their decision. Instead of improvements in customer experience and business efficiency, they suffered setbacks brought about by the increased complexity.

In conclusion, as companies continue to invest in technology, interconnectivity and the Omni-Store trends will continue to gain traction.

Read the original post on Business2Community

I don’t know what it is about me but I always seems to be the shopper who grabs an item without a price tag. That usually means I end up spending more time at the checkout counter while some poor store employee has to go to the back of the store to find a price tag for whatever I’m buying.

While this may be a minor inconvenience for your customers, the loss in productivity due to an inefficient use of your employee’s time creates a compounding hit to your business over time.

One of the ways you can help your employees be more efficient is to provide them with more data points they can use to find an item in your Retail Pro inventory.

Add user-defined fields to filter your search

Let’s say a customer comes to your cash register with a pair of jeans. Unfortunately, there’s no price tag. You’ve trained your employee to perform an inventory search. She types in the word “jeans” and hundreds of possibilities show up. Way too many to scroll through. She gives up and runs to the back of the store to locate the same pair of jeans and get a price tag.

Now your customers are inconvenienced by long wait times and you’ve lost two times the productivity because she wasted time keying in the item in the search and because she had to hold up the line while she found the jeans in the back room.

Instead, use the User-Defined Fields (UDF) and Auxiliary (AUX) Fields to record information about your products that would help associates pinpoint them in the search.

In our jeans example, we might want to record information about the style of the jeans: the cut, the rise, and the wash. While we might carry hundreds of different combinations, once we take style combinations into account, there may only be a few choices at the register. Selecting from a much smaller list of products will prevent your employees from having to leave the cash register or make the customer wait for someone to locate the same item in the store.

Auto-populate Description2 with info in your Retail Pro

While using inventory UDF and AUX fields to record product information is fairly common, this next trick is what really helps you save time with Retail Pro.
You can auto-populate the Description2 field with information from the UDF and AUX fields.

Why is this important? Because you can’t lookup AUX or UDF information at the point-of-sale. But you can use Description2 as a lookup field. Using the auto-populate feature allows you to use UDF and AUX information as a lookup. And once it’s set up, Retail Pro will manage the data for you.

Let’s go back to our original scenario. The customer comes to the register with a missing price tag.

Now the cashier can use the Description2 field.

She enters codes for low-cut, acid-wash jeans and now only finds a couple of possible choice. She then lists the correct item on the receipt.

Before setting up Retail Pro, this process could have taken as much as 10 minutes, depending on the size of your store, the availability of other sales floor personnel to find the item in the back room, etc. Now, you’re on to the next customer in no time at all and keeping queues short.

How to set up Description2 auto-population in Retail Pro

Step 1

Set up your UDF and AUX fields in
→ System Preferences
→ Local Preferences
→ Merchandise
→ User-Defined / Auxiliary

In the Field Definitions section, name your UDF fields.
In the Field entries section, provide your pre-defined list of items that will appear when you click on the field in Retail Pro. These will be the list of possible choices when you select that field.

Step 2

Check the option to “Append selected UDF / AUX fields to Inventory Description 2 field”. The Description field can be 30 characters long. The Character Count field below will keep track of how much data you are appending to the Description2 field.

Step 3

Enter the order in which the fields will be added to Description2, the starting character, the length of the string, and a separator character.

Let’s say I want to include the first three characters from each field separated by a slash (\).  The table below represents the possible values that would be copied to Description2 for the JeanCut UDF field.  Notice in the code field, only the first three letters appear. That’s what will be copied to Description2.

In my Description2 field, I want the JeanCut to be first, followed by the JeanWsh and JeanRse fields. The example below shows what the final output will look like for a pair of jeans that are bootcut (JeanCut), acid wash (JeanWsh), and low-cut (JeanRse).

boo/aci/low

To get this output, I have to provide Retail Pro with the instructions for auto-populating this field. Enter the following information in the Field Definitions section.

The order column is the order in which the fields will appear. In our example, we have the JeanCut followed next by the JeanWsh field, and finally the JeanRse field.

The 1^st <n> char column is the starting character. Retail Pro will copy over information in these fields starting with this character. In our case, we are starting with the first character.

The length column is the number of characters to copy. We are copying three characters from each field.

Finally, the separator column allows us to pick a character to separate the data. I’ve chosen to use a back slash after the first two fields. I don’t need one after JeanRse because there is no additional information after that. I can include as many fields as I want (up to the 30 character limit) and separate them with any character. In this example we will stop with three parts.

Now, your UDF fields will be available when you create a new inventory item.

As you enter the information in the UDF fields, your Description 2 field will automatically populate with data from these fields.

Step 4

The last step is to set up Retail Pro to use Description2 as a lookup field. Go to System Preferences → Local Preferences → Documents → General. In the Options section, drag Description2 so it is above the line.

Now when you look up an item in a document, you can use information in the Description 2 field. In the example below, we use *boo* to search for items. It returned a list of possible matches, one of which was our new inventory item.

Now a cashier at the register can look up an item based on the attributes of the item. It’s a simple solution to a common problem. Using Retail Pro, you can streamline your processes, make your employees more efficient, and let your customers leave the store after having a great customer service experience.

Didn’t know you can do that?

Get trained and get more from your Retail Pro!

Find out how you can leverage more of the features and functions in your Retail Pro  – with training from Retail Pro University!

E-commerce may only comprise 10% of the total retail market, but that’s a $341.7 billion slice. Quite a big piece, indeed.

With 90% of the retail space not engaged in e-commerce, there’s a huge amount of growth potential in the sector. Typically, local businesses have only a small e-commerce business, if any at all. In effect, those businesses are neglecting an excellent means of promoting their businesses and losing sales — both online and in-store — as a result.

Having even a small e-commerce site can help a small retailer promote its business.

Many local store owners believe having a storefront is enough visibility, and that opening an online store is, frankly, too much of a hassle. A boutique home furnishings store might, for example, have frequently changing inventory. But the ability for a customer to browse the shop’s offerings online may outweigh the potential any given item is not immediately available.

Of course, most shoppers understand that their local merchant might have to order an item or that a similar product might have to be substituted. But the way those shoppers are using the Internet is as a recognizance mission. It is a nuanced meaning of convenience shopping. Rather than ordering the product from the site, they simply want to see if the retailer offers it, or offers a style of the desired product. For example, they want to go to the local natural food store’s web site, see that in fact it does carry essential oils, and then stop in at a convenient time to peruse the offerings in person.

The advantage is not just to provide a means for shoppers buy online, although that certainly is a part of it. Rather, it’s to extend the local merchant’s appeal. Local businesses are far more adept at cultivating relationships that e-commerce merchants are, even those who have sizable brick and mortar presence. It’s far more likely that the neighborhood women’s apparel store will know your name, your children’s names and your shopping preference for your sister than Macy’s will.

And that is the key to small business success: Knowing thy customer. It’s something successful mom-and-pops excel at naturally. It’s an asset that neighborhood stores have naturally and that the big boys must work at constantly. That relationship between small business owner and customer is like gold.

That’s why an e-commerce site is a “thank you” to your loyal customers: “Here is something that will help you shop more efficiently. It’s a recognition of your busy schedule and a tool to assist you.” It keeps your store top of mind and, in combination with other customer relationship management tools, allows you to effectively compete against the behemoths at 1 am on a Wednesday morning.