As Bill Clinton once commented - “the single most important factor in your retail business is – your customers”. Whether online or offline, your customers are the main driving factor behind the success or failure of your business. You must always remain on your toes to serve your customers with whatever best possible thing you can manage.

Now, if you are using a Point-of-Sale system, you are actually a few steps ahead of your competitors in wooing customers. POS systems offer some unique features to manage and control discounts and other sales offers that keep you stay in touch with your customers at all time. Let see how a few simple tricks can do wonders for your business!

Putting items on sale
Being a retailer, you must make both your retail and the web store a ‘happening place’ for your shoppers. There should be one or the other promotional activity running on your store. A group of your customers should always be looking for the next sales day or promotion activity. You can name a sale-campaign as “customer appreciation day“, “Value Return week”, “Stock clearance sales”, “Weekender Specials”, etc.

Now, in all cases, you can set the sale prices in your POS system in advance. Before you specify the sales prices of your products, you can specify start and end dates or the campaign or make it a weekly schedule (put some items on sale on Saturdays and Sundays) in your point of sale. When a customer buys an item on sale, POS will automatically take the sale price. When the campaign ends, POS will convert the sale price to the regular price.

You can set sales-schedule in your store. If you are using any POS integrated shopping cart, you can take this complete sales-schedule to your online store and avail these offers to your online shoppers.

Provide a gift with a purchase
In some popular POS systems, you can assign a promotional or gift item (called a “tag along” item) with every item in the database. Thus, when a shopper buys a particular item, the POS will automatically include the gift item in the sale. Even more, you can also specify the quantity of the gift item you want to provide with the purchase.

Before you give a gift for a purchase, you will need to specify an item as gift and place it as a “tag along” item to the item you wish. For example, let us consider that you want to give a skating board to the customer who purchases an item that priced at more than $300.00; you will need to assign the skating board as tag along item to each item whose price is more than $300.00.

If you have shopping cart software that integrates with the POS, these gift details can also be synchronized with the webstore for your online customers.

Setting up discount schedules
Many point-of-sale systems offer two wonderful types of discounting mechanisms; the mix and match - where a customer gets a discount when he/she buys a certain quantity of similar items. The second one is “Buy X, Get Y for Z”, in which the customer gets a certain number of items free or at a discount when he buys a certain quantity of those items at the normal price. In both the options, when a discount is set for an item, the item's price is automatically reduced as that item is added to a sales transaction (or to the shopping cart in case of the POS shopping cart software) and discount conditions are met.


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24Seven Commerce is a global provider of POS Ecommerce Integration and marketplaces solutions for the independent retailers.

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