Go Cashless With A POS System
Retail operations are constantly evolving to offer customers a better shopping experience. And, businesses that fail to keep up with the changing trends fall behind on customer retention and sales revenue.
When it comes to transactions, cash was once the most popular mode of payment in retail stores. Today, this scenario has changed entirely. Presently, customers are increasingly preferring to make payments using debit/credit cards or mobile wallets.
The shift in payment modes largely stems from the downsides of making cash payments. It is both difficult for retail staff members and customers to hold on to cash.
For retail stores, it is time-consuming to move large amounts of cash. Many times, businesses find it challenging to tender the exact change back to customers. Moreover, cash can be easily stolen, misplaced and even lost.
For customers, it is tedious to walk around with large wads of cash. When it comes to making large payments, customers find it more secure to pay through a digital channel, rather than using cash.
Making cashless payments has several advantages. It makes it easier for retail businesses to streamline and manage inflow and outflow of funds. What makes it even more convenient is tracking accounts using a POS solution. Before you go cashless with a POS system, here are 4 qualities to look for in the software you purchase.
Offline transactions
Cashless payments are highly advantageous, but what good is it if you have a power outage, or your network is down? Will you temporarily accept cash payments only? If yes, then that will catch customers off guard and result in poor customer satisfaction.
You can avoid such uncertainties by ensuring that the POS you purchase is capable of accepting offline transactions. This way, you can sync up offline transactions to your server, once the power and network is back on.
Multiple payment options
There are multiple payment gateways in the market. They all undergo maintenance at some point or the other. If you choose to use only one payment gateway, and its servers are down, it will significantly hamper your billing operations.
Before you invest in the POS software, check if you can add multiple payment gateways. As a result, if one payment gateway goes down, you can use alternate payment gateways.
Security
Just like how cash can be stolen, hackers can steal currency digitally. Similar to how you would safeguard your cash with extra security measures, you should also make sure that the POS system you’re investing in has strong encryption layers and security protocols. This will help ward off cyberattacks and hack attempts.
Reliability
When you begin using a POS in your workflow, you will be using it to oversee a myriad of crucial business operations. In addition to billing, you will also be dependent on the software to manage inventory, employees, sales, marketing, customers and more.
You must double check the point of sale software you’re about to buy for its reliability. If it goes down, it can significantly trample on the speed and accuracy of your operations.
Conclusion
Going cashless is great. It is advantageous to both you and your customers. With that objective in mind, it is also crucial to ensure that the POS software you’re willing to buy is reliable, secure and processes payments even when offline. On confirming these features, you are good to buy a brand new POS to take your business to the next level. Get SmartPOS, the most feature-rich, reliable, comprehensive and secure retail billing software from SmartPoint. Contact us to know more.