Omnichannel Order Management for Independent Retailers

An accurate and up-to-date view of your inventory is vital for enabling omnichannel sales. The inventory management software on your POS system ensures that your stock levels stay updated every time you receive an invoice or make a sale.

It doesn’t just provide better visibility, either. Functions like low-stock alerts can be set based on your supplier lead times and sales data, prompting you to reorder with vendors automatically when the time is right.

Perhaps most importantly for omnichannel sales, a modern inventory management system is a must as it connects your online and in-store inventory. This ensures that your product SKUs, product descriptions, and stock levels are all up to date, no matter where your customer shops.

Having inconsistent sales and promotional pricing across your sales channels is a recipe for disappointed (or confused) customers. When your POS system doesn’t update discounts everywhere, how do your customers know what the “real” price is? Worse, some customers might feel like they’re getting ripped off.

Being able to set consistent pricing everywhere you sell is essential for effective cross-channel sales. Ideally, you want a system that can do this automatically, pushing price updates to any specified channels.

It’s also important to use a system that gives you the flexibility to run both brand-wide and channel-specific sales. There are situations where you may want to run sales only in specific places:

• A hardware store looks to drive foot traffic with in-store only discounts, with the hope of clearing seasonal inventory and increasing upselling with impulse buys.
• A grocery store highlights a new partnership with InstaCart by offering a 20% discount for first-time orders.
• A multi-location liquor store has overstocked on tequilas, which are now taking up space in the warehouse, so they run an online-only flash sale on select bottles to clear excess inventory.

Like all things in marketing, the more flexibility you have, the more creative you can get with discounts and sales. Just remember, if you do run any channel-specific sales, communicate to customers exactly where and how the sale works to avoid confusion.

As your business starts to appear in more places and sales pick up, you need a centralized place to receive, prioritize, and organize orders. Trying to manage different channels on multiple systems is a recipe for chaos, delays, and missed orders.

Modern POS systems can aggregate all orders, regardless of source, into a central order management dashboard. Orders can then be automatically flagged based on requested pickup and delivery dates. Picklists can also be created for each order so staff know exactly where and how to prep each item.

As an item is prepared and updated in the system, communications will be sent out automatically to customers, ensuring that they stay in the loop.

A centralized order management system ensures that you can create an efficient and scalable process built to handle multiple types of sales.

Like most of us, you probably have certain things you prefer to buy in person and others that you’d happily get online. If a business has separate customer data for each channel, it paints an incomplete picture that makes it harder to create a personalized shopping experience.

And personalized experiences are incredibly important — according to a study by McKinsey & Company, over 70% of customers expect some level of personalization from the businesses they choose. In other words, if your customers feel like you see them as just another anonymous buyer, they’re more likely to go somewhere else.

A unified source of customer data is at the heart of creating more consistent and tailored shopping experiences. Shared customer data across channels allows you to:

• Let customer loyalty members earn points on purchases from any source.
• Segment customers based on primary sales channel, product preferences, and other factors to create personalized offers.
• Improve returns, exchanges, and customer service by seeing all of a customer’s previous orders, communication history, and order preferences.
• Stay more secure against fraud by spotting suspicious activity (e.g. multiple high-value orders from a single account across platforms or a pattern of high-value returns) and responding to it quickly.
• Improve advanced fulfillment options like buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) by having accurate customer information for identity verification and communication.

With an omnichannel-capable POS system, your customers can get the same great shopping experience everywhere they interact with your brand.

It’s hard to make smart decisions for your business if you don’t have a clear picture of store performance — and that picture gets even muddier if you’re selling across multiple channels on different systems.

One of the biggest advantages of using a fully integrated POS system is that all sales, inventory, and customer information flows into a central reporting engine. This allows you to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer preferences so you can improve your selection, eliminate waste, and hone your promotional tactics.

The reporting and analytics tools on your POS system help visualize and identify important information like:

• Bestsellers (by product, by product category, by sales channel, etc.)
• Average order size
• Sales volume by channel
• Profit margins
• Seasonal trends (useful for demand forecasting)
• Inventory turnover
• Shrinkage sources
• Items that are bought together
• Customer retention rate

These metrics will help you seize opportunities and make smarter business decisions.