Don’t let the uncertainty of the holidays catch you off guard. While customer shopping trends can vary from year to year, the right point of sale (POS) technology, including retail inventory management software and reporting features, can be a valuable tool to help prime your retail business for holiday season success.
Smart retailers can utilize this technology to better forecast sales, customer foot-traffic, and more by reviewing and analyzing last year’s data. Leveraging retail technology to your benefit can help you adapt to ever-changing customer preferences by discovering high-demand items as the season progresses, and learn what’s promoting growth as it becomes successful. Create popular promotions that burn through your slow-moving inventory and make way for hotter items.
Here are three ways you can deploy retail inventory management software to keep your store ahead of the game this holiday season:
Manage Inventory and Optimize Labor
Your inventory management software can make sure your labor force isn’t blindsided by a sudden influx of customers— or left bored by an unexpected lackluster turnout. You can use your system to plan your labor around the sales data from last year’s holiday season.
Did you experience overstaffing or understaffing issues last year? Your retail inventory management system keeps track of your labor needs as they fluctuate from day to day. Review the data from previous years to analyze whether there were any notable trends last season that you might expect again, and which specific days and times where sales and customer traffic peaked. That way, you can adapt your labor needs to accommodate the anticipated busy days.
Predict Hot Items
What was good and fresh last year might be old news this year. Customers’ demands and desires are constantly shifting with the market. The last thing a retailer wants is an inventory full of outdated flavor-of-the-month items. Moreover, it’s difficult to predict what’s going to turn out to be hot this year until the trends present themselves.
That’s where your inventory management system steps up to the plate again. Not only are you able to review last year’s data, you can also review this year’s sales data and trends as the most desirable items are flying off the shelves. You will have greater insight into appropriate ordering to keep the inventory—and revenue—flowing.
Create Effective Promotions
Your retail inventory management system can not only track the hot items, but those that are slow moving as well. As the holiday season progresses, use your inventory management system to discover which items are crawling off the shelves—or not moving at all. Then, organize excellent sales and promotions to empty your inventory and make space for the goods that you can really get a return on. Additionally, make use of past data related to the performance of previous promotions to identify those that have been especially effective, and implement a repeat of that promotion.
The Value of Data
Retrieving extremely valuable customer and business data has never been easier or more convenient. Combat the uncertainty of this holiday season by utilizing your retail inventory management system to learn from the past and adapt to the present to keep the revenue coming, and the customers coming back.
