As stores move their operations online, they may run into an unusual problem: the brick-and-mortar store and the online store use different systems to keep track of sales.
Here’s what this means in practice: Let’s assume you sell mobile phones, and of a certain phone, you only have one item left. The phone in question is on display in your brick-and-mortar store, but it is also listed in your webstore. Now, let’s assume a customer comes to your online store and buys the phone. It disappears from the online store, but at the point of sales, there is no immediate record of the transaction. Because of this, the person manning the desk at the physical store may sell the phone on display to a customer who has just walked in.
Solution: One System for Both the Point of Sales And the Online Store
As both the point of sales and the online store use the same system to keep track of transactions and the number of items that the store has in inventory, fewer problems and misunderstandings will arise.
Unfortunately, the number of systems that can handle this, is currently very low. Right now, good options are:
- Marknad
- Shopify
- iZettle
Other platforms usually only keep track of online sales, which leaves it up to the seller to manually combine it with data from any other sales.
Save Time, Money, and Effort
Anyone who’s recently opened an online store to go with their previously established point of sales has probably faced this problem. And if, by chance, an established brick-and-mortar store wasn’t already using one of the aforementioned systems when it opened an online store, it was forced to start using two different systems side-by-side.
If you’re running two systems at this time, you should try and change it as soon as possible. Having only one system in place saves not only time and money but also effort and energy. Here are some reasons why one system is better than two:
- You can keep track of all the sales in real time
- Your inventory is always up to date
- You never accidentally sell a customer an item that has been sold out
- No more work in combining data from two systems
- Serving customers becomes more hassle-free
Marknad’s system is a forerunner in online platforms, and Marknad’s clients can manage all of their sales transactions in one place. Furthermore, Marknad offers additional services to improve a store and increase its sales by a large margin.