How a smart terminal can take the fear out of holiday inventory management for your boutique

The products that you so carefully curate for your boutique’s customers are its very life blood. 

As the holiday gift-giving season approaches, it is vital that you have total awareness of what is trending, your patrons’ buying histories, your supply counts, and the amount of stock you have on hand at all times. 

Although juggling all of these elements can be overwhelming, you don’t have to do it alone. Your smart terminal point of sale system is here to help.

The secret to your terminal’s power.

There was a time when your POS was nothing more than an efficient suite of hardware and software that facilitated the acceptance of customer payments. These days, this task, while crucial, is just one of the feats that your smart terminal can assist you in accomplishing. 

In addition to customer relationships, employee management, report generation, and integration with third-party software, your POS has another talent that will relieve your holiday woes: inventory tracking and management.

Just how does your smart terminal help you with product selections and counts? 

It starts with the barcode scanner peripheral that comes with your POS solution. This accessory can be used to enter details on every piece of merchandise that is delivered to your warehouse into your database. 

From there, the journey of each piece can be tracked, enabling you to gain access to important intelligence that you can use to drive your future inventory decisions.

Ways your smart terminal can revolutionize inventory management.

Your smart terminal can do a lot more than just track your inventory at all touchpoints, from delivery until it goes into the hands or the electronic shopping cart of your customer. 

It can also be configured to use that information to send you vital notifications, including alerts letting you know when counts on certain pieces of merchandise are running critically low. 

Armed with this data, you can avoid back-orders and drastically reduce the number of times that customers leave disappointed without the items they want.

Your software also enables you to drill down into particular attributes of your products. For instance, it could be helpful to learn what styles or colors are out-selling their counterparts, making it possible for you to refine your re-ordering quantities to meet the emerging need that your terminal’s reports are revealing.

Your POS can let you know how sales are going in each of your channels and locations. It can even be configured to tell you which of your employees is the most adept at moving a particular item or product type. 

As a busy entrepreneur who is managing multiple responsibilities, having access to this valuable insight can help you to delegate and train staff in ways that would otherwise be difficult to accomplish.

Your smart terminal and its associated POS solution can integrate with supply chain management (SCM) integrations. As a result, you can look forward to seamless communication with all of the various stakeholders who work to manufacture the products you sell – and bring them to your door. 

With these positive relationships in place, you can optimize order fulfillment, delivery processes, and stock replenishment.

What’s more, your smart terminal can assist you with managing inventory throughout multiple warehouses, distribution centers, or stores. 

Your software will provide you with a panoramic view of stock types and quantities across all channels, enabling you to make informed decisions and allocate resources fairly across assets. When these strategies are put in place, the accuracy and efficiency of order fulfillment is enhanced, leading to increased customer satisfaction.

Finally, your system is a master of automation. Computerized processes remove the need for humans to spend time devoted to tasks such as sending reorder notifications, checking stock counts and manually entering orders into the system. As a direct result, the overall efficiency and accuracy of your ordering and reordering processes will be enhanced.

Perhaps best of all, your smart terminal’s capabilities are cloud-based. That means you will always be able to get the most recent patches and updates and will be able to access information in the system from anywhere.

As long as you play your cards right, the upcoming holiday season could be the most lucrative time of the year for your boutique. 

If you are unsure about the capabilities of your current smart terminal or want to upgrade your system, talk to your payment processor for boutiques at your earliest convenience to learn about the many choices available to you. 

Making this move truly can be a game-changer for you and your boutique business.