As a payment provider operating in various European countries, there is one key learning we drew from over three decades of experience in the industry: it is not primarily technology that drives digital evolution, but culture and the people forming it.

Technological innovations are pointless if consumers are not willing or able to accept and make use of them.

The payment industry is a prime example of this phenomenon.

Comparing the German market with the payment-ecosystem in the UK, observers will notice that most German consumers mainly pay in cash for their goods. Their British counterparts, however, are keen to experiment with innovative payment methods like contactless or mobile payments.

Their eagerness to adopt technological advances gives them the benefits of cashless payments such as security, costs and reduced effort compared to cash handling.

If our goal is to drive digital innovation and thereby business evolution, we need to analyse the reasons for people’s hesitation or distrust concerning new payment solutions — in every market, for each segment.

These insights are what enable us to develop both standardised and individual solutions on relevant devices and across all channels in line with regional customer’s requirements.

Starting from the inside, with a payment infrastructure which is standardised across nearly all of Europe, we work our way to the outside to develop the best possible solutions.

We solve retailers’ challenges by providing standardised products applicable to entire national markets, by implementing national relevant payment methods and technologies.

In addition, we help customers with their unique needs, by digging into specific business processes and sectoral needs.

In doing so we take into account one basic concept: We do business for people – suitable technology is our instrument to meet their needs.

Our integration with Retail Pro provides the customer-centric end-to-end driver that facilitates a lean transaction process and effortless consumer experience to spearhead repeat business.

Amalgamated reporting and reduction of double input from the cashier ensures user confidence, which helps enhance the checkout experience.

Come and see us at RBTE on Stand H150 to discuss this and other topics of high importance for your business.

Book your RBTE appointment today >

About BS Payone:

BS PAYONE GmbH is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main and is one of the leading omnichannel-payment providers in Europe. In addition to providing customer support to numerous Savings Banks (Sparkasse) the full-service payment service provider also provides cashless payment transaction services to more than 255,000 customers from stationary trade to the automated and holistic processing of e-commerce and mobile payments.

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Wednesday, April 25th, 2018 at 11:26 am .

Seamless Middle East 2018, was hosted last week at Dubai International Convention Centre, bringing together the industry’s leaders in commerce, fintech, retail and payments at the Middle East’s most inspiring summit and technology exhibition.

H.H. Lt. General Sheikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior inaugurated the show, where over 350 global players and entrepreneurs showcased their latest products and solutions.

Technologies included the market’s top players in mobile POS, inventory management, mobile payments, and analytics, as well as digital marketing with omnichannel retailing, blockchain and AI.

Speaker sessions featured discussion on Middle East retail’s current trends and key opportunities, including the latest technologies for creating seamless omnichannel customer experiences.

Consumer expectations for their shopping experiences have shifted significantly toward convenience – shopping with retailers on their own terms. So retailers are acting fast to adapt operations and adopt modern technologies that will help them launch their customers experience strategy innovations.

One of the biggest retail players exhibiting at the show, Retail Pro International, showcased its globally proven and completely localized, flexible mobile and desktop POS and inventory management software.

Retail Pro International was joined by some of its expert support partners from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE – Inditech, Retail Technologies, Retail Information Systems, and Crystal Mind. Together with solutions partners Xretail omnichannel platform, Qwikcilver gift cards, and Darwin fashion retail planning, Retail Pro International made a strong case for the end-to-end retail offering.

“We are pleased to have been serving serious retailers with the complete Retail Pro software platform, which is built on 30 years’ experience in specialty retail, and designed specifically for their needs,” commented Retail Pro International CEO, Kerry Lemos. “We know retail, and we specialize in it to help retailers achieve their operational and customer experience strategies. We have been partnering with retailers across the region for many years and are proud to say that the emergence of mobility and unified commerce in the Arab world is well supported by Retail Pro.”

Today, 9000 special retailers – with over 450 based in the Middle East – use Retail Pro to improve efficiency in their store operations and add globally on-trend capabilities.

The POS software is adapted for local KPIs and market knowledge, making Retail Pro the go-to solution for top retailers in the Middle East.

With Retail Pro, retailers can create consistent, impactful customer experiences and improve efficiency at every store, as well as:

• Achieve seamless omnichannel operations by integrating all their retail technologies with Retail Pro, including SAP and other ERPs, loyalty, marketing, accounting, payments, and any other software
• Streamline IT management with one single software for mPOS and fixed POS, available on the retailer’s choice of iOS, Windows, and Android mobile, laptop, and desktop devices
• Easily manage complex tax scenarios, as Retail Pro software already comes equipped with customizable settings for VAT methods and over 15 years of proven track record of supporting VAT, sliding tax, and other complex taxation methods prevalent across the globe
• Get actionable data with real-time visibility into sales performance at all levels of business, whether single brand or multiple-concept franchising models
• Increase sales and customer loyalty by issuing and tracking fully-integrated gift cards, gift certificates and store credit across the entire chain
• And much more

“Middle East retail is quickly moving toward modernization, and top performers are choosing proven software to help them reach the next level – Retail Pro,” said Retail Pro International VP of EMEAA, Bevin Manian. “With our expert value-added resellers supporting retailers’ technology needs, Middle East retail is well-positioned to build their exact strategy and achieve growth.”

Enterprise retailers like Al-Haddad, Robinsons, Puma, Under Armour, MUJI, Pepe Jeans, and Adidas – to name a few – are all building their unique retail strategies on the robust Retail Pro platform.

See Retail Pro in action

Request your demo today >

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Monday, April 23rd, 2018 at 5:28 pm .

Welcome to another All Things Retail webcast with Retail Pro!

With each webcast we focus on a specific topic all of us in retail need to address in our day-to-day business operations.

Together, we will look at how we can accomplish these things in Retail Pro.

You can watch our previous episodes on the Retail Pro International YouTube channel.

In this episode of the All Things Retail webcast, we will look at touch menus, another capability in Retail Pro.

Touch menus are programmable menu buttons which provide fast, one-touch item selection at the point of sale.

Many retailers can benefit from one-touch menu buttons.

Top retailers today are focusing heavily on creating a customer experience.

Touch menus could also be used for customer-facing initiatives like endless aisle and clienteling.

In the example in this episode of our webcast, the retailer added a café to his apparel shop.

This helped enhance his store concept and keep customers more meaningfully engaged.

Touch menus are especially effective for shop-in-shop concepts with limited inventory items, as in this coffee shop example.

They can help increase your transaction speed with easily navigable menus and lead to more efficient POS operations.

In addition, the point of sale using touch menus is the same software as is running in the rest of your store – Retail Pro.

That means the coffee shop barista can easily scan in any other item from your store inventory, giving customers a better experience at checkout.

Watch this episode of the All Things Retail webcast and email in to share how you use touch menus in your stores! newsletter@retailpro.com

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Tuesday, February 27th, 2018 at 3:36 pm .

Guest post from our partners at Targit, makers of the analytics methodology behind Retail Pro Decisions business intelligence and visual analytics platform.

Retail businesses live and die by their numbers. The success or failure of a business in the crowded and complex marketplace comes down to whether your company can meet goals, effectively control inventory, and maintain sales.

Small changes in strategy can create big impacts in the bottom line and no industry rides the waves of trends more than retail.

Consider the prominent U.S. fashion brand J. Crew. In the early 2000s, J. Crew catapulted into women’s closets across the country with their lower cost take on high fashion. It was as if consumers couldn’t get enough sequins, ruffled collars, or chunky costume jewelry. Until, seemingly overnight, they did.

Today, the company is battling increasingly slumping sales, a hefty debt load, and a shakeup of company leadership that has the retail industry wondering if this is the end of one of the most highly sought after brands as they know it.

Only a comprehensive data-driven strategy can help retail companies respond to changing trends proactively to ensure they stay ahead of the curve and aren’t passed over and left to languish like all that chunky jewelry in the bottom my wife””s jewelry box.

Data isn’t just numbers generated by operations. Rather, it is the underlying rationale behind a company’s entire direction.

Fostering a data-driven environment means monitoring and measuring everything, and scouring that information to determine what’s working and what isn’t. This sounds a lot like drinking from a firehose, and without the right tools in place to translate that data, it can be.

With Retail Pro Decisions, powered by the Targit BI and visual analytics platform, you can converge all disparate databases, software tools, and other data sources into one unified view of your retail business – and analyze the data from every department’s angle based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) important to your strategy.

Determining the most important KPIs for your retail company to monitor is a critical first step on that journey towards data-driven optimization. In other words: what questions do you need to answer?

Think of the data that makes up your business intelligence as consisting of cause and effect factors. Those two factors are leading indicators (cause) and lagging indicators (effect).

According to Gartner, 80 percent of companies around the world only measure their lagging indicators. In other words, they don’t know what impacted their results or what to change to improve going forward. The path to unlocking full insight is in measuring both leading and lagging indicators.

Defining the metrics that matter most to your company strategy prevents information overload and ensures employees are focused on the most critical KPIs.

This important first step is often where we see companies struggle most. Many try to focus on too many different metrics without focusing on those that truly matter.

Additionally, companies’ desire to harness big data is increasing, but most aren’t sure where to start with a big data project.

You can learn more about KPIs in this eBook from Targit: The Metrics that Matter.

Our best advice is to start with your goals or the key results that determine your success. Once you know those, you can work your way back to a strategy by clarifying the activities that have the largest impact on reaching those goals. With the objective in mind, it becomes easier to filter the important data from the not so important.

Some questions to help get you started:

• How do your chosen vendors and distributors effect turnover rates across your locations?
• How does each new product introduction effect the sales of existing product lines? Is it the same at every location?
• Are you keeping more inventory on hand than you need? How can you reduce your inventory requirements?
• Where are the hiccups in your supply chain? Can you apply what you know about one location’s supply chain to correct problems in another location?
• Can you more efficiently distribute manpower among your locations?

Questions create questions during this process of determining the right KPIs. Often, answers to one question lead to further questions about why the numbers are what they are. The right analytics platform will help you dig down to the details to reveal the why behind the what.

Monitoring the right KPIs are only the first of several steps in building a data-driven retail organization, but every further step relies on these figures for success. Bad decisions are the direct result of bad data, so choose your KPIs carefully.

Which areas of your business are most critical to your success, and how can a better understanding of the metrics provide better results for your company?

Email in to let us know! newsletter@retailpro.com

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Monday, February 26th, 2018 at 4:02 pm .

At NRF 2018: Retail’s Big Show, retail IT leaders shared how they pushed past pitfalls in choosing or creating technologies for the business in a panel on digital transformation.

Scott Emmons of Neiman Marcus testified to greater progress once the Business Ops and IT teams became more intentional about collaboration in the ideation and planning phases.

“We had to break out of that [approach of] sitting around waiting for business to come up with lots of ideas that we couldn’t execute on,” Emmons said.

Cross-departmental communication between the business and IT teams opens the path to creating more efficient and effective solutions to bottlenecks and challenges faced on the sales floor.

Armed with a better internal understanding of needs, retailers can evaluate software solutions to find the best fit, whether an all-in-one solution or best of breed.

Some retailers are looking for a turnkey solution that will enable them to get the job done without much thought and customization.

Others are executing a more complex strategy or have unique business challenges and want best of breed solutions that will enable them to build out their exact strategy.

The ultimate consensus: tech needs to solve real business challenges, and the retail team needs to be clear on the challenges they’re trying to solve.

The more specific your challenge, the more tailored your software must be to meet that need – and the more you need to work closely with your technology partners. Retailers are making technology choices for the long term, choosing technology partners with expertise and flexibility to help them scale.

The Hershey Company’s Brian Kavanagh, senior director of insights driven performance and retail evolution, commented in an NRF session on the importance of tech companies understanding what is unique about each retailer’s brand proposition and how they approach the market.

This conversation made its way back onto the Expo floor, where technology providers, including yours truly, showcased their solutions and met with retailers to hear their needs.

On January 14 – 16, visit the Retail Pro executive team at NRF booth #3375 to see POS that gives you the flexibility you want. https://t.co/2Kw85zyHpU pic.twitter.com/QZrIRYgkEj

— Retail Pro (@RetailProNews) January 12, 2018

From left: Kevin Connor, Mike Bishop, Ket Venethongkham, Rick Fuentes, Kerry Lemos.

Kavanagh reminded audiences of the bottom line for retail technology choices: sales.

“Enhancing the customer experience is important to physical retailers, but more important is converting foot traffic into sales,” he said.

One retail expert pointed out, “Of the 174 million shoppers over the five-day holiday period post-Thanksgiving, the omnichannel shopper spent, on average, $82 more than an online-only shopper and $49 more than an in-store only shopper.”

Findings from NRF’s Consumer View report, discussed in a panel featuring IBM, showed most shoppers (73% for stores, 54% for online) come with purchase intent toward a particular item, rather than just browsing. 58% ranked ease in getting what they need as their top factor for determining where to shop.

Source: NRF

Levi’s President James ‘JC’ Curleigh spoke to this culmination of technology, experience, and sales in his session at NRF:

Let’s be simple. In a world of difficult decisions picking out your favorite pair of jeans should not be one of them. We need to put you on a simplified course to either keep you in Levi’s or introduce you to Levi’s in a simple way. To deliver that simplicity, we have to take a level of sophistication – in our supply chain, in how we show up in retail, and in productivity solutions so we can continue create that simple frontside of your favorite pair of jeans but delivered in a more sophisticated way than ever before. Simple in the front, sophisticated in the back.

Retailers optimizing their technology to increase shopping convenience across channels are making progress in both customer experience and sales.

Experiential retail drives revenue & growth.
Build it with Retail Pro POS.

Learn more >

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Monday, January 22nd, 2018 at 12:08 pm .

Jan 14 – 16 | NRF Booth #3375

Don’t limit your options for growth with a POS that’s designed to handle just a handful of SKUs and stores.

Add webstores, brick and mortar stores, kiosks, pop-ups, shop-in-shops, and franchises domestically or abroad – all with Retail Pro POS.

On January 14 – 16, visit the Retail Pro executive team at NRF booth #3375 to see the POS and retail management software that gives you the flexibility you want and the robust capabilities you need to manage your stores more effectively and keep growing.

Book Now

Take Control of Inventory

For growing retailers, inventory management can be a labor-intensive bottleneck.

Streamline your pricing, promotions, margins, transfers, and operations with deep visibility and control over inventory.

 
Learn more >

Empower your IT team to optimize

Test your next strategy with a Retail Pro lab environment so you can launch with zero downtime, and empower your team with detailed training resources on the My Retail Pro portal – both included in your Retail Pro Software Assurance plan.
 

Learn more >

Don’t settle for one-size-fits-most

Tailor your Retail Pro user interface to create the exact workflow that makes sense for your business to increase efficiency and speed.

Infuse every screen, receipt, and product label with your branding.

 
Learn more >

Whatever your plans for change in 2018, we can help.
 

Talk to us at NRF to see how Retail Pro can help you keep improving your operations to drive revenue and growth.

Book Now

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Friday, January 12th, 2018 at 12:57 pm .

Visit us at NRF! Jan 14 – 16 | NRF Booth #3375

For many enterprise retailers, 2017 was a year to rethink their strategy, restructure operations, and reinvest their energies into unifying channels. The goal? Creating integrated, memorable experiences that drive repeat sales.

Good products attract customers. Great experiences keep them coming back. And great POS software like Retail Pro gives you robust functionality and flexibility to build out your exact strategy and drive sales.

On January 14 – 16, visit our executive team at NRF booth #3375 to see the POS and retail management software that helps you make retail much more than just a transaction – and let’s build retail experiences together.

 

Book Now

 
 

Deliver consistent customer delight

 
Give customers what they want every time with operational efficiency built on integrated software.

Open APIs for Retail Pro allow you to unify operations across channels by integrating all your retail tools – including ERP, clienteling, loyalty, analytics, RFID, and any other platform you might choose.

Learn more

 
 

Retail everywhere your customers shop

 
With a centralized view of your data, customers, and inventory, and Retail Pro software localized to meet region-specific fiscalization, language, currency, and tax requirements like VAT, you can go everywhere retail is growing — which is everywhere.

 
Whatever your plan for deepening your relationship with customers for 2018, we can help.

Talk to us at NRF to see how Retail Pro can help you build your retail experience and drive revenue and growth.

 

Book Now

 
 

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Wednesday, January 10th, 2018 at 3:28 pm .

Jan 14 – 16 | NRF Booth #3375

Unified commerce has retailers rethinking their strategy to offer shoppers something they can’t just get online: an experience.

This January, visit us at NRF booth #3375 to see how the latest solution from Retail Pro can help you make retail much more than just a transaction.

	Give shoppers a better reason to visit your stores again with irresistible promotions		Capture customer details at the POS to better segment your shoppers and create relevant offers
	Operate your stores more efficiently with workflows tailored to your needs		Minimize lost sales from out-of-stocks with robust replenishment and inventory management
	Scale your business more efficiently with centralized enterprise POS		Enter new markets with tech support that knows regional requirements

Don’t miss this opportunity – book your NRF meeting today to talk to us about your store experience strategy and see how Retail Pro can help.

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Thursday, December 14th, 2017 at 9:24 am .

Retailers of a certain age will be able to cast their minds back to the 1990s, when they didn’t need to look much further than the trusted combo of a ‘POS’ and supply chain management tool. A lot has changed in the decades that have passed since: an ever-increasing amount of functions are running in the back end, so a typical retailer now uses a multitude of systems, including marketing systems, communications, RFID, ECMS, ESS, IMS, ICMS, DSS, WMS and many others. There’s been talk of Big Data across multiple business sectors in recent years, and retail is clearly an area where vast amounts of it have been created.

The growing amount of systems are the cogs that have made the wheels of the omnichannel retail explosion turn; however, for all the benefits they bring, it can prove easier said than done to manage all of them in tandem before you even start thinking about the impact the data generated can have on wider performance.

Put simply, failing to put that data to use means retailers are missing out. As the amount of data has grown, businesses have begun to offer to run analyses for retailers, using data to feed into decision-making, or even predict which American malls might be set to close. Specialist data analyst firms can certainly bring value, but it’s also crucial that as a bare minimum, retailers are on top of their own data, and able to put it to use themselves. Here are three steps retailers can take to ensure they overcome the data deluge:

1. Eliminate siloes

The first step is to make sure all the information generated by the various systems they use is fed back into the wider organization. Without this, the data points gathered will only benefit one isolated part of the organization, and will not be able to inform wider analyses.

Not all retail systems will be built with this in mind, so retailers should not just assume that everything will already be interconnected. They could even consider it as a potential selling point of new retail systems that are brought into the business in the future.

2. Get a holistic view

Once the data points have been connected, retailers need to ensure they are able to look over them from a top level, so they can see the bigger picture. This means having a system in place that allows them to plug all the data insights into one central pane.

This will put them in a position to make sense of it all, whether that’s for a quarterly update meeting with board members, or a luxury retailer being able to check all channels and locations for a specific item, so that it can be supplied to a high-net-worth customer at the drop of a hat.

3. Cast a critical eye

The final and most important step is for retailers to start drawing insight from what the consolidated data points are telling them. This is process turns ‘Big Data’ into ‘Smart Data’. For this to work, retailers must look to use the data to help draw an accurate picture of exactly what has been going on, what’s happening right now, and future trends.

Driving progress

Having taken these three steps, retailers can cut through the noise and be clear on exactly what the data points are that they have access to, and start to think about what they mean. Most serious retailers already have years’ worth of data to begin this process. Learning can come from customer data and their purchasing history, inventory data, vendor performance and brand preferences which then in turn can be used to feed marketing, clienteling and inventory management decisions. Then retailers can think increasingly smarter about the trends and opportunities that will drive future successes. Then they will be able to manage that knowledge in the longer-term, putting them in a great position to be confident they know what their customers want, and satisfy their needs.

This entry was posted by Alexandra Frith on Monday, October 30th, 2017 at 5:19 pm .

Today’s shoppers have immediate access to product information at their fingertips.

Competition is plentiful and fierce, so retailers must differentiate themselves to be top-of-mind.

To be that “go-to” store, retailers increasingly must create personalized experiences that appeal to an individual’s desire to be valued and sought-after.

Retailers must leverage the customer data they have — or should have — to create that unique environment.

Intelligence on customer preferences and their interactions must be accessible and actionable; in other words, if you have information, use it. Analyze it.

And interpret it through the prism of providing a top-notch retail experience.

Why? Because it’s profitable.

Customers report that meaningful personalization does increase spending.

Retailers using personalization strategies experience revenue gains of six to 10 percent, a rate two to three times greater than other retailers, Boston Consulting Group research reports.

Here are three ways to get personalization right:

1.  Create personalized marketing campaign around product usage

Consider how your products or store can help customers achieve their goals.

The data that helps you determine which products customers may be interested in will also help you figure out why they need those items.

That knowledge will help you craft an individual message to every shopper.

Sometimes a group message is appropriate, but most often, the more you treat your customer as an individual with unique needs, the better you can illustrate your brand’s respect for individual customers.

2. Use detailed customer data to meaningfully personalize teasers, promotions and discounts

Communicate through data-driven email.

Personalizing messages requires email segmentation, analyzing customer data and creating a 360-degree customer view from a centralized database.

However, although email list segmentation has proven to lead to higher sales rates, half of marketers surveyed by Tune said they are not segmenting their email lists and less than nine percent of marketers said they aggregate their data within a single system of record.

Targeted email marketing is very successful; 47 percent of marketers told Emma’s 2017 Email Marketing Industry Report that email generates the most ROI for their organizations.

To take full advantage of email’s potential, retailers can send personalized teasers, promotions and discounts to loyal shoppers as well as prospects, in addition to those who’ve abandoned their shopping carts.

3. Engage consumers at key moments in their shopping experiences with push notifications

Text notifications can push shoppers through your door.

Research has found that 57 percent of shoppers spent more money at a retailer after receiving a notification.

An even more impressive figure is that 68 percent of consumers reported an impulse buy after receiving a notification.

Sending push notifications effectively helps boost sales by engaging consumers at key moments in their shopping experiences.

This entry was posted by Jennifer Bosavage on Thursday, October 26th, 2017 at 7:00 am .