Best Retail management software in India in 2019

What is retail?

Sale of goods and services from organization or people to the end user for their own use.

What is retailing?

It is a distribution process of a retailer obtaining goods or services and selling them to customer for use. A retailer is a reseller.

Retailing Software

Retailing Software is a platform that contains an integrated set of tools that retailers can use to operate their businesses. For example, a retail management system can contain tools for Inventory Management, Point of Sale (POS), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). NetSuite and Light speed are examples of Retail management software.

Features:

• Inventory Management: Allows to manage every product in inventory in every sales channel, categorizing them by department, class, vendor, location, fabric, season, color, or any other attribute you define.
• Purchasing and Receiving: Helps you to enter inventory data on time.
• Customer Management: Offers advanced customer search using purchase history, records comprehensive customer purchase history, and exports results instantly.
• Sales Data Management: Allows retailers to keep track of all details of deals and contracts and makes it easy to analyze performance quickly and dynamically.
• Barcode Scanning: Allows an inventory system to print barcodes so that a business can keep their items tractable. Employees can scan barcodes when a product enters in a company’s stock, when they ship a product to another store, or when they sell it.
• Loyalty Program: It is a great marketing tool. Retail management software can let businesses set up loyalty programs to reward customers with points for recurring purchases while managing all customer information and preferences in the customer database.
• Reporting: This feature allows monitor your business’s performance in an easy-to-read format.
• Dashboard: It can put key figures in front of you. Real-time performance data can be used to optimize trading, inventory allocation, and staffing.
• Point of sales efficiency: Point of sale means the place where the sale is made and the customer checkout. Most of the retails companies handles this by using computerized format to save time.
• Employee empowerment: When employees have access to the tools for making customer service better, they are happy. The employers can get to know if employees are able to handle the software or not.
• Trust: Most retails management software is integrated with secure payments and transactions making customer able to trust the store and their policies.

Types of Buyers:

• Independent retailers not operating an actual store
• Single-store retailers
• Multi-store retailers
• Enterprise retailers

Benefits:

• Streamline Transaction processing: With the right retail software, transactions become faster and easier.
• Increases Efficiency and minimizes Data Collection Errors: Allows you to capture and store customer information, which can later be used for advertising, promotions, and more. In addition, retail management software organizes, simplifies, and automates day-to-day business processes and transactions, reducing the effort needed for repetitive manual operations.
• Promotions Management: Retail management software helps to plan promotions, predict performance, and then analyze the results. This means that businesses can offer their customers, discounts and promotions while being able to control the impact of those activities on the product’s profitability.
• Improve Inventory Management: A retail management system provides details on current inventory and identifies extra inventory needed to smoothly manage the business. This allows retailers to place the right purchase orders, thus avoiding surpluses and minimizing waste.
• Reports: It generate a reports easy. The retail billing software help you to view the whole history of your business transaction in a single report itself.
• Decision making: Retail management software helps in making a decision easier. It also help in making a better plan with all the information that get from inventory items.

Market Trends followed:

One of the potential application of IOT is that retailers need to update prices on products being sold in-store with printed labels. This will change as retailers adopt electronic labels, allowing them to update all product information through the internet. Hence the market trends followed are:
Contactless Payments: With major acceptance of mobile pay terminals, digital wallets and online transactions, contactless payments are becoming mainstream.
Mobile Support: Online retailers are customizing their shopping experience for mobile phones through building responsive websites that adjust their user-interface as per the device the consumer is using.
Artificial Intelligence: Beyond chat boats, AI can also play role in the back office, allowing merchants to improve their operations. For example:
Marketing and Segmentation:  Datasets are used by AI models can surface suggestions and tips to retailers based on their activity, in real-time.
Supply Chain improvement: AI tools also can predict future demand offer, provide sales solutions that enhance productivity levels of the Salesforce and optimize Inventory management.

Potential issues faced:

Some issues may be faced that are:

• Entry details of customer and their address may be time consuming.
• Need time for your staff to get used with the software.
• Cloud based retail management software may be more expensive and service provider charge monthly fees for it.
• The computer based software require constant updates.
• There is a risk of exposing the PIN when customer want to pay bills by credit card or any similar payment method.