How Technology Can Positively Affect Your Retail Business

3 min read

by Jennifer Sanders

Retail businesses are expected to operate with great accuracy, efficiency, and speed to cope with the changing demands in their environment. Investment in computerized systems to deal with inventory, customer satisfaction, margins, security, and forecasting may be an appropriate way to enable them to achieve this. 

Technology facilitates reducing costs, building brand awareness, saving time, and improving overall planning, enabling businesses to gain a competitive edge to grow and thrive in today’s market. This is how technology can positively affect your retail business.

Implement computerized inventory control

A computerized inventory control system enables an organization to monitor inventory on a timely basis. This can eliminate over-stocking or under-stocking by referring to the sales history of each store to determine the individual item’s optimum stock levels. 

According to experts on essay writing service reviews, the users can connect with the system to determine the preferred days’ supply, which can be modified depending on seasons. The system automatically helps to determine the ordering patterns by referring to the past sales patterns.

The system can also tell you the amount you need to spend on specific categories of goods to get maximum returns by considering past sales cycles. You can query the system to establish the changes in ordering in case of sales fluctuations. 

As such, you can determine the amount of your investment in inventory per month, the first-moving and slow-moving items, and how stock should be maintained in your store at all times. You can also determine your best sales staff and best-selling stores. 

Reduce stockholding costs

Retail management experts for a paper writing service say that retail management can be enhanced through an automated inventory control system. The system can allow you to determine the minimum and maximum stock levels and how much of any specific item you have sold. It can automatically update the stock database every time an item is received or sold and also monitor the flow of stock from one location to another.

Every time you are online, you can track all aspects of your performance. You can avoid overstocking, which may make you incur a lot of holding costs. Experts from MyAssignment.Help explain that the system allows you to view selected products by price, cost, margin, sales date, or UPC codes. You can install quality logistics software that can keep the inventory information up-to-date. 

This can help you quickly make decisions to facilitate a cost-minimization goal for your business. Automatic re-orders can help to minimize costly shortages by combining the software with a perpetual inventory system.

Focus on customer satisfaction

Customers expect better service characterized by immediate response to inquiries. They may get upset if you keep them waiting to confirm the availability of a particular item. An electronic inventory system can facilitate quick response to inquiries hence creating customer satisfaction. 

According to business assignment writing experts, retail businesses can establish live chat options on their websites to serve customers in real-time. Having online interactions with customers can help you determine the goods or services that many customers inquire about to make decisions regarding stocks. Customers value convenience and as such, businesses can use technology to research so that they can understand how best they can achieve this.  

You can track the customers’ online and offline interactions with your system and analyze their feedback as you endeavor to understand their buying behavior. When you listen to your customers, you can uncover important innovations and make improvements that you may not have pursued if there was no automation.

Automatic forecasting

Automated forecasting systems enhance the accuracy of demand forecasting by consolidating past sales data and future orders. Such forecasting systems can be accessed by all employees in their remote locations, bringing chain-wide input into the process using interactive web-based applications. 

Sales forecasting facilitates business planning, risk management, budgeting, and better decision-making. It also allows a business to allocate resources efficiently and enable sales personnel to achieve their goals. 

You can estimate revenues and costs more accurately based on your ability to predict performance. Through automated sales forecasting, you can make better investment decisions such as expanding locations that may be necessary for business growth. Accurate results may enable you to identify and reduce potential problems. 

By reviewing your sales team’s performance, you can notice undesirable trends and try to resolve them fast. Understanding how your sales systems work can help you identify areas that need improvement, such as situations where conversion rates are low.  

Just-In-Time management 

Under the Just-In-Time (JIT) management system, the inventory is made available to customers upon request without necessarily maintaining it in stores. Under this approach, businesses can keep minimum stock while ensuring that stock-outs don’t occur at any one time. 

The idea behind JIT is to balance the goals of avoiding stock-outs and reducing storage costs. Under this approach, suppliers are few and this reduces the vendor relations time by ensuring that the business deals only with reliable ones.

As a retailer, you can take advantage of advanced technology to sell on various channels and having the goods shipped directly to the consumers. JIT inventory management improves productivity and efficiency, reduces wastages, hence contributing to smooth production flows.

This system is suitable where the business has embraced electronic commerce (E-commerce), where buying and selling of goods take place electronically. Through JIT, smaller and frequent orders can allow you to identify product defects easily and take the necessary actions to rectify the orders.

Track your margins

A computerized inventory control system can offer suggestions regarding markdowns and pricing within the predetermined parameters. It can make you aware of the gross margins regarding products in different stores.  

Understanding profit margins for your retail business can help you discover changes that may be necessary for your day-to-day operations to boost your profits. You can preset mark-downs 

The margins can help to measure the ability of your business to convert sales to profits hence boosting growth. Consider installing accounting software to track margins or create automated reports to sow margins in different aspects of your business and determine whether there is recorded growth. 

You can also install mobile apps to reduce the need for physical presence at the business premises. Giving your employees to work from home may motivate them and help to reduce commuter costs.  

Automatic Inventory protection

Safeguarding your inventory against damage and theft is important because it can minimize losses and help your business grow. Incidences of employee theft, shoplifting, supplier fraud, and errors and paperwork errors may lead to massive losses in your business.  

To protect inventory against theft, you can invest in special tags or sensors attached to the items and then be deactivated at the point of exit. These tags identify stock items using a unique serial number encoded into the stock management system. When the stock item is scanned, the system can establish that it has been removed from the store and is paid for. 

Video analytics software and surveillance cameras can help to prevent stock theft. The software identifies any possible suspicious movement, such as a customer getting out of the store without paying. This may give you an instant alert and enable you to track the culprits with great accuracy before it is too late. 

The Conclusion

Adopting technology in your retail business can be an effective way of supporting your long-term goals. Through proper management of inventory, you can save costs, increase the speed of operations, protect the stock against damage or theft, and enhance customer satisfaction. More importantly, you can track your profit margins and make well-informed pricing decisions vital for business growth.

About author

Jennifer Sanders has been working as an editor and a copywriter at Bestessay.com in London for 3 years. She is also a professional college writer and journalist at AustralianWritings in such topics as inspiration, productivity, education, and technologies. As an associate writer at Assignment Geek, she looks to implement her knowledge and experience in academic writing for students all over the world.