Your point of sale should empower you to focus on your brand, customers, and growth while it provides you with a technology solution that scales with you as you execute on those objectives.
Learn more about the key features you should expect in a modern solution designed for retail today.
1. Capability to Compete
Being equipped to compete against disruptors who are reinventing customer engagement daily is not a “nice to have.” It is mandatory if you plan to execute on your growth plans to make the impact you know you can on the market. So what are the necessary capabilities that must be in a modern, unified point of sale system?
Point of Sale
Delivered as a robust, microservices-driven, ready-to-use SaaS solution, our POS system enables you to curate the customer journey across all touchpoints, including in-store mobile, guided and self-service checkout.
Real-time Inventory
Provides real-time visibility of inventory to optimize order fulfillment across the entire omnichannel supply chain.
Enterprise Promotions
By eliminating silos across store, online, voice, merchandising, and marketing, OneView’s promotion engine ensures that your customer is presented with the most impactful discount, offer or reward in response to their interaction in each channel.
Omnichannel Orchestration
Developed in collaboration with global retail leaders, we provide the ability to tailor omnichannel strategies to increase engagement, target traffic, and eliminate friction from the shopping experience.
2. Agility That Only Comes from Headless Commerce
While you might be a small to midsize retailer, you’ve got fantastic ideas and an innovative growth plan with a small, nimble team who’s ready to execute. At this point, everything you do has to be efficient and smart — including your technology. While you know you want the best technology solutions, your size means you don’t have a huge staff to try to manage it and make it work for you, not against you.
You will need a technology provider who understands that the majority of the investment in your business should be going towards merchandising, inventory and building sales and not into a monolithic technology that doesn’t allow you to capitalize on your nimble strategies. But therein lies the catch 22, as you can’t buy a run of the mill system and still be able to execute on your growth plans while adjusting quickly to the market, the customer and the business. Your system of choice must provide the enterprise-level system depth you need, but with a clear, push-button path to scale the technology as you grow to ensure it is always the right-size for both your needs and your team. This is a critical component to execute your plan and achieve meaningful growth. Without having selected your technology partner carefully, you’ll find you are disrupting the business with a technology upgrade to try to keep pace with what you’ve accomplished.
3. Enterprise-Grade Cloud Partner
The challenge in selecting and managing technology at this point is finding the sweet spot between where you are today, where you plan to be and aligning your technology accordingly. While solutions designed for small to medium businesses are available, as you execute your growth strategies, you will be simultaneously outgrowing your system. This means you’re faced with disrupting the business by having to change technologies once you achieve meaningful growth.
An enterprise-grade cloud partner should have solution tiers that allow you to cost-effectively kickoff while providing a frictionless expansion path to scale the solution as your business grows. Additionally, the architecture must be based on the following modern principles:
Cloud Native
This concept is critical in not just how the application is deployed but how it is built. To be fully native, the cloud infrastructure must be architected purposefully to operate in the elastic and distributed nature required by modern cloud computing platforms.
API-first, Microservices
Absolutely no part of the application or suite should be hard-wired to any infrastructure component. This is critical toensure it will scale up and down on demand while embracing the concept of the immutable infrastructure. An API-First, microservices approach ensures the design has maximum portability, and in best practice, a modern platform leverages these concepts.
Headless Architecture
The cornerstone to modern extensible systems is a headless architecture that removes the dependency of the user experience and interface from the back-end engine. This feature is critical for both SaaS application design as it creates speed, agility, and innovative capability, as well as for long-term platform ownership where a retailer can then own, iterate and innovate on the customer experience as required.
4. Create a Flexible Integration Strategy
As you begin, you’ll be focused on ease of integration and a solution that offers plug-ins for various vital integrations such as customer, payment, and the like. This allows you to focus on running your business, not your technology, by providing fast onboarding to get the system off the ground.
As you accomplish your growth, your team will need new capabilities such as marketing cloud and other places to influence and mold the customer journey. You should be positioned to execute a push-button expansion of your cloud capabilities that will immediately extend functions where you can add integrations, including those specific to your business, without disrupting the in-place technology running your stores.
What you can’t afford at this juncture is a move or upgrade of your systems that causes your people to have to take their time away from executing growth plans. This expansion capability should be available through all levels of growth until you’ve reached the point of total ownership of your systems.
5. Total Control for Exponential Growth
And finally, once you’ve fully achieved your growth plans, you will be ready to take ultimate control of how your customer experience is executed. At this point, you and your team will want the ability to transition in and out of the journey to respond to your explosive growth and brand objectives. The real competitive advantage will come if you are already running your business on a modern application platform that is cloud-native, API-first, and headless. With zero disruption to the business, you can now leverage the same headless architecture that’s been running your business as you’ve scaled to now own the customer experience fully. In a perfect world, you will have selected a cloud provider who can support your need for the ultimate in control without any disruption to your existing systems. That allows you to focus on delivering value to your customers and the business, not spending time moving to a new technology platform and introducing new processes to your stores.
How Modern POS Systems Benefit Retailers
Your Associates
When you use a truly modern and agile system that is capable of changing quickly according to associate needs and training, as well as empower them with the most up-to-date information at their fingertips, your team will be able to perform all necessary tasks faster and with more capability than ever before.
Your Customers
Provide the best customer service possible and inspire more brand loyalty and interactions with a system that offers the most personalization, rewards, and rapid responses in the customer journey.
Reports, Analytics and Insights
To stay competitive and delight both associates and customers, you need up-to-date and insightful data. Using a modern point of sale system allows you to receive the most relevant reports and analytics in the most efficient way. Allowing you to change and adjust quickly in response.
Partner with OneView Commerce for a Truly Modern and Unified Point of Sale System
To compete against the mega disruptors who are currently dominating the market share in retail, you need a technology partner that understands the need to anchor the experience on a platform. The ability to scale from a SaaS entry-level store solution to leveraging full headless commerce capabilities becomes critical when creating a fast-moving innovation cycle in your organization. The OneView Unified Commerce Platform offers fast-start SaaS solutions as well as the ability to grow your use and ownership of the platform as your business expands, allowing you to define, own, and innovate unique customer experiences.
Ready to learn more? We’d love to demo the platform and show you how you can transform your customer experiences with control, agility, and speed.
