Small businesses have no choice but to stay up to date in terms of technology. And we’re not just talking the stuff that could be enormously expensive here. Sure, ensuring point of sales systems are EMV-ready (EuroPay, MasterCard, Visa) is going to become important if you don’t want to shoulder the responsibility of fraud that stems from using a credit card at your POS device. And that will be the case if you aren’t EMV-ready come October.
But even small changes can make a big difference. Adapting and embracing what technology offers will set you apart from competitors and customers will love you for it. Here are just three examples. While they’re very different from one another, the end result was the same – operating more effectively and happier customers.
One Girl Cookies
Joel Branson, manager at One Girl Cookies, took a leap into technology. When he first arrived at his new position, he was faced with good old fashioned cash registers. He know that wasn’t going to help him in his quest to better the company. He needed a way to keep up with things whether he was in the store or not. He not only needed to be able to check numbers and stats anytime from anywhere, he needed something that was smart and could actually decipher what it all meant. For example, not just a bunch of numbers showing the quantity of a certain product that’s been sold. But to clearly see that cupcakes sell better on Mondays for some reason, while cakes sell better on the weekend.
The answer for him was an iPad app – the Shop Keep POS. Using this app required no tedious hardware or software installation. And he could open it up anytime. It gave him the power to know which products are more profitable and even when more staff would be needed to keep up with peak times. The data and insight it made available allowed him to completely sell out of everything on Valentine’s Day. You can find out more about this and a few other technologies that they now use here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmXd6fJQ7aw
