What makes a retail POS system different from a general, multi-purpose POS system, or a POS system for the hospitality industry (cafes, bars, restaurants)? While a lot of POS systems are equipped to handle both hospitality and retail businesses, some are designed specifically to meet the latter’s demands.
There are quite a few good POS systems for large retail stores, which we’ll tell you all about.
POS systems for large retail stores usually offer capabilities and features to manage or provide the following:
- Scalability to the size of the operation.
- Up-to-date reports.
- Multiple product variants.
- Robust integration.
- Omnichannel selling.
- Extensive customization.
- Support for all necessary hardware.
- Multiple stores and locations.
- Payment processing.
- Accurate inventory.
- Full Featured cloud-based technology.
A retail store owner or manager has to deal with tracking inventory, analyzing sales figures, keeping customers happy and managing employees among other things.
You need a decent retail POS system to help you perform all your tasks and keep your business successful. Indeed, the choices are countless when it comes to POS software. The retail POS system you choose depends on the type and needs of your business.
Best POS for Large Retail Stores
This list starts with Revel, which is best for mid-sized to large retail stores. Its specific features include.
- Hybrid system for Apple hardware.
- Quote-based pricing.
- Robust purchase order functionality.
- Extensive reporting.
- Kiosk functionality.
- Open API and myriad integrations.
Revel has a very solid set of back-end features. This POS system used to focus primarily on the restaurant industry, but its developers have rendered it capable of handling mid-sized to large retailers just as well. Revel features real-time inventory management with a user-friendly style matrix.
It also offers the benefit of highly advanced customer management, letting the user set up extensive marketing and email campaigns and reward his customers for their loyalty.
Revel is a feature-rich, all-in-one system that also makes employee management a breeze. You can run reports to assess your best-performing employees and control scheduling and permissions remotely or from the dashboard.
1] Vend
Vend is great for retail stores of all sizes. Its specific features include.
- Enterprise plan.
- Cloud-based system that works on Google Chrome web-browser.
- Inventory management.
- Purchase Ordering.
- Integrates with eCommerce and accounting.
- Omnichannel.
Vend is the first web-based retail POS system in the world to use the offline cache capabilities of HTML5. Currently deployed in over one hundred countries, it has over 20,000 installations. Vend is user-friendly and intuitive and will work on practically any system as long as you’re using Google Chrome.
2] Shopify
Originally designed with retailers in mind, Shopify is a favorite among retailers of all shapes and sizes, especially web-based ones. Unlike some other POS systems, you get web store functions when you sign up for Shopify regardless of which plan you get.
You can set up a “buy button” feature for your website to make it easy for your clients to purchase your products online. You can sell through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. It’s easy to link a traditional store with this system.
You can link online ordering with the POS system. You can also generate discount codes for customers to use as online coupons while shopping in your online store.
3] ShopKeep
The biggest advantage of this retail POS system is its simplicity. Moreover, it is relatively inexpensive, making it a keeper (pun intended). Shopkeep has almost 25,000 retail clients. As for features, you’d be impressed with its array of staff and inventory management options and multitude of front and back end features.
It is easy to ring up items, add modifiers, accept payment, and give refunds. You can offer discounts at order and item level. This system offers detailed worker shift reports that show you which of your employees is selling what and how much of it. You can see which the busiest hours of the week are to help set the staffing schedule accordingly.
ShopKeep’s analytics and inventory functionality are very helpful. The analytics show which products are selling well and which could use improvement. This way it’s easier to make a decision what to restock or replace.
Finally, the inventory functionality feature helps you generate a report with the reorder criteria in detail, track quantities of each item, and set reorder points. You can import inventory item by item or in bulk.
Tips for Choosing the Right POS System for a Large Retail Store
Today, the POS environment has changed from requiring major hardware investments to cloud POS platforms that can connect or work with your current hardware. What is more, the latter are available for prices completely affordable for a large retail store.
Always look for a POS system that provides maximum value. A POS Data Study by Askuity last year showed that two-thirds of all brands are moving from Excel to POS solutions to leverage analytics and reporting tools POS systems offer.
Moreover, reliable POS systems meet the increasing use of mobile technology through mPOS. Today, people are banking, shopping, and paying for things through their mobile devices more frequently than ever.
A mobile web study by Ad Week found that smartphones would be used in over 33% of total U.S. retail sales in 2019, or more than $1 trillion in purchases! Your POS system of choice needs to have excellent mobile capabilities or be mobile-friendly at the very least.
Final Thoughts
Like the vast majority of business solutions, a POS system should be able to effectively and reliably address the needs of a large retail store and its unique business requirements.
It may have hundreds of features, but if the store needs just a handful of them to run smoothly on a day to day basis, it’s necessary to make a practical decision, especially if you are busy with other things.
Generally, however, a large store will benefit from a wealth of functions, particularly if the owner has plans to expand. After all, the last thing you need to worry about in this situation is whether your POS system will handle the increasing load.
