Retailers depend on a point of sale (POS) system to effectively run their business. A POS system can do a lot more for a retailer than simply manage transactions. Finding the right features for a POS system can help your business be more organized, productive, and profitable.
The problem is finding one with the right features to help your business. Garden centers, in particular, face a significant challenge in trying to identify the systems that will best help their business. Here are some of the features that you should look for in selecting a garden center POS system.
User-Friendly Interface
In its core function, a POS system has to handle retail transactions, and it has to handle them rapidly. For a garden center, this doesn’t just mean scanning bar codes, it can also mean handling complex product codes, seasonal and sale discounts, coupons, and individual customer data.
To manage all these details, both behind the scenes and during transactions, you need a user-friendly interface. It should be intuitive, easy to learn, and capable of handling all the different types of transactions you use – quickly.
Capability of Handling Numerous Payment Options
Customers can be highly variable in the ways that they like to pay. Although the majority of transactions these days feature credit and/or debit cards, people like to pay in many different ways. Some prefer using their phone to access a standard bank account or credit card, while others like buy now/pay later (BNPL) apps. In other situations, you might have a corporate client that wants to be invoiced. Others want to be able to submit payment via credit cards or ACH from the internet. Not to mention that some people still prefer good, old-fashioned cash.
The more payment options you give your customers, the more customers you are likely to satisfy. Your POS system needs to be able to handle all of these payment options (and any future ones) so that you have the ability to accept any and all methods that make sense for your garden center.
Inventory Management
You can only sell merchandise that you have on hand. However, having excess merchandise on hand can lead to significant losses. Hitting the sweet spot of ordering and/or growing just enough merchandise to cover demand is one of retail’s most difficult ongoing challenges. A POS system should be able to help you meet this challenge by providing excellent inventory management tools.
Your POS system needs to deliver on many key promises for your garden center, including:
- Real time inventory views
- Set data-driven price rules to adjust prices for demand, supply, or contract situations
- Track serial numbers
- Deliver information that helps you spot sales trends to improve ordering
- Easy forecasting tools
- Ability to handle plant growth and transplanting
These capabilities will make it easier for you to maintain profitability at your garden center.
Customer Relationship Management
For many gardeners, gardening isn’t just a hobby or pastime, it’s an essential part of their identity. It can also be true that their choice of garden center becomes part of that identity. Their trips to the garden center are a part of their annual gardening routine, more a pilgrimage than your average shopping trip.
You want to do what you can to foster and build on strong relationships with your customers. Even if you don’t earn a fanatical level of devotion from your customers, it’s much more profitable to retain existing customers than to attract new ones. Your POS system should give you tools to promote strong relationships with your customers, including customized alerts, promotions, and deals that show your customers that you know them and value their business.
eCommerce Integration
The eCommerce revolution is underway. Currently, eCommerce accounts for more than 16% of all retail sales, and that number is only expected to grow. Garden centers that don’t have the ability to represent themselves in the eCommerce space will be left behind.
At a minimum, garden centers need to be able to put their inventory online for potential customers to browse. Many people like to use their phones to shop while they are physically in the location, and displaying inventory to these shoppers (potentially with useful information like location data) can significantly increase in-person sales as well as online sales.
Reporting and Analytics
Understanding the current state of your business is critical to maintaining high profitability and expanding growth potential for the future. As a central repository of data, your POS system needs to make it easy to create reports and analyze data so that you can figure out how your business is doing and separate the most profitable parts of the business from those that require improvement.
These reports should include a high number of built-in reports that can give you immediate insights right out of the box, as well as the ability to customize reporting to focus on your key areas of concern. The reporting data should be current as well as historical, and it should be easy to share reports with other stakeholders and export them to other applications for easy inclusion in press releases and official documentation.
In addition, you should be able to see your analytics reports regardless of whether you’re in the physical store (some of the most advanced POS systems provide an analytics dashboard that can be viewed online, making this data accessible anywhere).
Vendor Relationship Management
You depend on your vendors to keep supplying quality merchandise that makes your customers happy. You also must make sure you are paying them on time and receiving all the merchandise you paid for as described.
Your POS system needs to help you track transactions with your vendor and follow-up with them about merchandise that was not delivered as promised, whether it is late, missing, or not in the promised condition.
Employee Management
Employees are essential to the proper functioning of your garden center. You need a way to track their hours and their performance to make sure you are paying them properly.
Why have a separate timekeeping system if your POS can do it all? A one-stop system can help you handle this part of the business more efficiently so you can spend less time doing paperwork and devote more time to the parts of the business that you love.
Customization and Expandability
Finally, no matter how good a POS system is for you today, your system needs are likely to evolve over time. That means that you want to make sure your POS system is designed to be customizable and expandable.
How will it handle you opening new locations? What if you decide you want to expand your grow operation or add a landscaping division? Will your POS system be able to handle it?
Choose GreenPoint for These Benefits and More
If you are considering a POS system for your garden center, GreenPoint is a powerful system built around NCR’s inventory engine and CounterPoint point-of-sale software. It offers all the features listed above, as well as many, many more.
In addition, when you work with Mariner Business Solutions, you’ll enjoy numerous benefits thanks to our Personal Advantage Plus™ Approach. With this approach, we will do all the following to help your business succeed:
- Collaborate extensively with your team to understand your garden center’s goals
- Provide customized recommendations to help you get the best system to meet your goals
- Configure your system and integrate it to align with your operations and workflow
- Provide true human support to maximize the value of your system
- Appear on-site to provide assistance when necessary
- Deliver uptime reliability in our systems
- Enable detailed and personalized reporting
- Offer ongoing innovations to meet your garden center’s evolving needs
Want to learn more about how GreenPoint can improve the operations of your garden center? Request a demo today to learn how we can help your garden center grow.
