Retail Vendors: Forget New Functions. Just Make It Simple And Cheap
Written by Todd L. Michaud"I typically say something like, 'It is our requirements that drive us to that price point. Adding centralized menu management, polling, integrated inventory management and labor management into the mix requires that we buy this type of system. You can’t do that stuff with a cash register or basic POS.' Typically, the response I get is something like: 'So? I don’t care about all of that complicated stuff. I just need to ring sales.' It’s no wonder franchisees think that retail CIOs are out of touch with reality. Here is the really crappy part. When you add in all of the other costs, such as high-speed broadband, hardware maintenance, software maintenance, help desk, installation, inventory management, labor management, training and various upgrades along the way, that $10,000 POS is probably going to cost franchisees $20,000 over five years--not to mention that they wrongfully expect the system to last 7 to 10 years.”
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2 Comments | Read Retail Vendors: Forget New Functions. Just Make It Simple And Cheap
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February 4th, 2010 at 9:51 am
Great points. Depending on the sophistication of the retailer, they may or may not benefit from the additional functionality and data that more advanced POS systems provide. If their store volume does not support the additional overhead to achieve inventory management and effective use of data for marketing, advanced POS systems are not needed. The costs for delivering 5 second credit card processing through high speed connections integrated with POS (and associated PCI costs) are excessive if the transactional volume is not sufficient. Much cheaper, yet slower, to use the old stand alone terminals.
February 10th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
This is so true. Sometimes it seems there is more investment in innovation than basic retail operations. Your basic Costco sold cash register can’t give you the data you need if you are interested in tracking sales but in most cases you can turn any pc or laptop into a register for less than a few hundred in software and peripherals. You can find USB barcode readers cheaply as well.