Being a small business owner can be a very satisfying vocation. Doing work that improves people’s lives and brings beauty to your community can be very fulfilling. Likewise, providing stable work for your employees is a noble aspect of being an entrepreneur. But the challenges of business ownership can be as challenging as the benefits are rewarding.
The small business owner must overcome a myriad of challenges. In addition to the typical problems an entrepreneur must deal with, like bursting pipes and certain employees’ labor cost, there are also the industry-specific challenges they must face.
Let’s take a look at the lawn and garden center industry. Thousands of plants, seeds, tools, and equipment must be tracked and moved at exactly the right time. Customers love personal service, but with so much on your mind, how can you possibly remember individual preferences? You want to improve your sales, but how do you find time to analyze the data and make the best decisions? And finally, you are jumping back and forth between too many software systems that don’t talk to each other, and valuable data is getting lost that is costing you way too much money.
Below we will take a look at a system you can implement to help eliminate and manage all of those problems.
Inventory Management
An important aspect for any business is inventory management, especially if your business depends on your inventory staying alive. Whether you have items that seem to disappear or if you keep running out of your most popular plants and products, then you know you need a better system for keeping track of what you have. Make it easy on yourself, and have one system tracking inventory from the moment it arrives to the time it sells.
Allow your staff to check inventory as it comes off the delivery truck with a wireless tablet. From here, your garden center point of sale system will keep track of every item in real-time. Additionally, you can automate reordering to make sure you never stock out of products, like your best-selling ferns. With barcode scanning and batch updating, you will be able to keep enough stock in hand to never run out and never have to worry about having too many at any given time.
Customer Management
Customers are wonderful, necessary, and challenging. What makes your business stand out is the personal service you provide. However, it can be a challenge to provide this type of service when you have so many loyal customers coming through your doors. Especially with everything else you have on your plate, how do you keep track of your customer’s individual preferences?
Your garden center POS system can help by providing integrated tools like customer data management, personalized marketing, and customer feedback.
Sales Reporting and Analytics
Sales reporting and analytics is another great tool a POS solution can offer you to manage your customer data and relationship better. Some specific features you’d benefit from should look for to help you with sales reporting and analytics might include:
- Customization: A feature to create custom reports allowing you to create reports that are tailored to your specific needs, such as sales by product, sales by category, or sales by time period.
- Data Tracking: Real-time sales tracking that can provide you with up-to-the-minute information about your sales, allowing you to make informed decisions on the fly.
- Sales Forecasting: Be able to use historical data to predict future sales trends. This feature can help you make intelligent decisions when it comes to making inventory and purchasing options.
- Integration Capabilities: Make sure the POS system you choose can integrate with other software systems. This allows you to combine sales data with other information, such as inventory or customer data, to create a more comprehensive view of your business.
Trying to make decisions without data can leave you feeling lost. If you spend too much on inventory or get the wrong items, your business may have difficulty surviving into the next season. But a powerful garden center POS system can provide useful sales reporting and analytics to help small business owners make informed decisions. To make sure you are not missing out on sales, get the data you need to promote the right products to the right customers.
There are more and more plant lovers finding their passion every day. You never know when the next tulip craze will come, and your local plant fiends will storm your business. Let your garden center POS solution help you see the craze coming with real-time data updates.
Integration with Other Software and Systems
One of the great challenges for small business owners is developing systems that work for your business specifically, not the proverbial square peg in a round hole. Often, small business owners will start using a system because they have a problem that needs to be solved right that moment, but oftentimes they forget to think about the long-term needs of their solution.
Are your systems designed to work together seamlessly, efficiently, and accurately? Your business can fall apart between the cracks of your multitude of systems if they are not connected properly. The right garden center POS system can integrate with other software and systems to create a seamless workflow. Look for a system that works on all of your devices, your computer, and tablets. You’ll want easy-to-use dashboards that give you the most important information in an easy-to-digest format. And finally, you will want your vital POS data backed up offsite so that if the worst happens, you can easily reboot and keep going.
If you can’t wait for summer, make sure your business technology is ready for the busy season. When you make the decision to switch to a garden center POS system that can integrate critical business functions like inventory management, customer engagement, detailed and easy-to-use sales reporting analytics, and a system that can also integrate with other software systems, your business will be able to go to the next level.
Whether you want to grow your business or just take some of the stress out of managing your current business, it is worth your time to research the right garden center POS system for your specific needs. If your business could benefit from the features and functions we have looked at in this article, we would love to talk with you to see if we would be a good fit for your operation. Don’t waste any more time, and contact us today!
