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ETP is Platinum Sponsor at NRCE 2024, Philippines

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Mr. Veer Ahuja, Director – Solution Architecture, ETP Group will be speaking at the soon to be held National Retail Conference Expo (NRCE) 2024 in Manila, Philippines. In his session ‘Driving Retail Performance Using Unified Commerce’, Veer will talk about how Unified Commerce, as a strategy, helps retailers meet modern customer expectations by providing seamless, personalised experiences across all channels. He will be sharing insights on how integrating retail and e-commerce operations into a single system enhances the customer journey and builds brand loyalty. He will also be throwing light upon how operational efficiency achieved by consolidating information from various touchpoints, allows businesses to analyse customer behaviour and preferences for better service and tailored recommendations.Catch this stimulating presentation at 11:25 am on Day 2 of the event at the Main Stage 1.

The 30th National Retail Conference and Expo (NRCE) 2024, hosted by the Philippines Retailers Association (PRA), is the largest gathering of retail leaders, shopping centre developers, and retail service providers. The event is the go-to platform that brings top industry professionals, experts, and service providers in the Philippines together to discuss the latest trends and technological innovations needed for empowering retail in the near future. The event will provide opportunities for large-scale networking, learning, and collaboration in a lively manner.

#ETPatNRCE2024 – ETP is the Platinum Sponsor at NRCE 2024.

ETP Group is a leading Unified Commerce Software company, with a 36 year track record of delivering enterprise class retail technology solutions. Market leading retailers in Asia Pacific use ETP across hundreds of thousands of employees, over 500 brands and across 24 countries.

ETP’s comprehensive AI powered solution suites, ETP Unify and Ordazzle, encompass a broad spectrum of e-commerce and retail functionality, from POS, CRM, OMS, PIM, Unified Inventory to Unified promotions, Logistics management and seamless integration with marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. ETP’s Unified Commerce Retail Platforms creates a frictionless and consistent shopping experience for consumers across all channels, wherever, whenever, and however they choose to shop.

ETP’s strength lies in its ability to provide robust and innovative retail solutions built with the most scalable and secure technology, MACH architecture and beautiful UI design. ETP’s “asset-light” solutions minimise IT administrative costs, enabling businesses to focus on growth and strategic initiatives.

This year, the event will also give you the opportunity to gain insights about –

  • The secrets to unlocking and revolutionising retail success in the future
  • Innovating Forward: The Next Generation’s Impact on Retail
  • Leveraging loyalty programs to drive repeat purchase and lifetime value
  • TikTok’s influence in the world of retail and e-Commerce businesses
  • Champion mindset in developing a dynamic sports goods retail business

Visit us at Booth No. 99 in NRCE 2024 to know more about how ETP’s Unified Commerce Solutions can help you elevate your retail performance and e-commerce business to the next level and also gain insights on how to kick off your journey to creating amazing customer experiences!

ETP Tigers wins ETP Premier League 2022

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ETP Premier League 2022

Cheers to a day well spent!

ETP International had organised the ETP Premier League 2022 – a box cricket tournament, for its employees on Saturday, 26 November 2022. Taking a break from routine work, #teamETP celebrated the day together discovering hidden cricketing talent while putting on some fantastic displays of top-quality cricket, excellent team bonding, and spot-on sportsmanship. The team put in the same passion and integrity into the games as they do in their work.

All Team

Each of the 6 participating teams – Group A: ETP Indians, ETP Tigers, and ETP Royals; and, Group B: Ordazzle Daredevils, Ordazzle Super Kings, and Ordazzle Knight Riders – competed with the other 2 teams in their respective groups to qualify for the semi-finals. ETP Tigers knocked out Ordazzle Knight Riders in semi-final 1 while Ordazzle Super Kings triumphed over ETP Royals in the other semi-final to qualify for a chance to win the coveted ETP Premier League 2022 trophy.

Congratulations to team ETP Tigers that overcame tense moments during the Final and pipped team Ordazzle Super Kings in the end to win the prized winner’s cup.

The prize recipients were as under: –

6) Winning Team – ETP Tigers7) Runner up Team – Ordazzle Super KingsAll winners

 

All the winners:

  • Best Bowler – Pankaj Sharma, ETP Royals
  • Best Batsman – Satish Bhate, Ordazzle Super Kings
  • Best Fielder – Sohel Khan, Ordazzle Super Kings
  • Woman Player of the Series – Dhanashree Parab, , Ordazzle Knight Riders
  • Man of the Series – Bhavesh Doshi, ETP Tigers

A big kudos to all the participants and the organising committee as well as those who were present at the venue to cheer their colleagues and friends. Thank you Raj Jagasia, Executive Director, ETP Group for coming out to support the teams and present the trophies. A huge shout-out to the ETP HR and Admin teams that helped set-up and execute this league so perfectly. Thank you to the ETP Pune and ETP Hyderabad team members – who showed great enthusiasm and energy on that day in participating and giving their 100% during the matches.

Gratitude to our Management Team Naresh Ahuja – for arranging the fun-filled event that let the ETP family meet and mingle with each other strengthening our team bond more than ever!

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POS & CRM – A Perfect Match

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ETP Blogpost - POS & CRM - A Perfect Match

 

As a retailer, you are most likely already using a retail POS system a retail CRM system. But are you aware of the advantages of having these two systems integrated and working together? If you are, you are already well on your way toward achieving retail success. If you are not, then these programs are probably working against you.

There are many benefits to having an integrated POS and CRM solution including faster transaction time, detailed customer history, and improved customer experience, to name a few. In this article, we will focus specifically on the benefits of capturing detailed customer history, and how the collected data can be used effectively. When your retail POS and CRM are integrated with each other, all your retail sales data is immediately and automatically captured in the CRM – every sale, service request, and customer complaint is logged, giving you a detailed customer profile.

Complete customer profiles provide information that can be extrapolated and applied in a variety of ways.

First, imagine a customer that has come into your retail store — let’s say you specialize in wireless products. The customer browses around for a minute or two and settles on purchasing the latest Bluetooth speaker. When they get up to the till (retail POS solution) for billing, the sales representative scans the item and in doing so, the customer profile is brought forward from the retail CRM software and the sale can be attached to their account. At this point in the integrated system, the sales associate will be able to view this customer’s entire purchase history based on recency-frequency-monetary value and will have access to valuable upgrade information, using which he/she can cross-sell or upsell with additional correlated products, or share deals that may apply to this customer.

Secondly, the customer data you collected can be used to segment your customers as per their purchase history, upgrade eligibility, and even as far as demographic information that can help you identify your purchase audience. The key benefit here is, you can now begin hyper-targeting your customer base and hone marketing efforts based on these unique profiles that bring customers back into stores.

Finally, integrated data collection is a game-changer with the ability to take the customer data and include it in your communication to customers; this is referred to as personalization. The ability to use personalization in your marketing and customer relationship efforts goes a long way, and according to a report by Forrester, the biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and deciphering what is inaccurate data (38%). With an integrated POS and CRM, these key issues with executing personalization are largely alleviated, connecting the sales and customer data and by displaying the information at the POS.

Think back to that customer who came in and bought the Bluetooth speaker. You have already captured their demographic information and because your CRM and POS are integrated, you now have their sales history including details of the product they bought, the store they bought it in, and the sales rep that sold it to them. With this information, a powerful, personalized email can be created and sent to them to make sure they are enjoying their purchase, generating customer loyalty and mostly repeat business.

So I will ask again, is your POS and CRM integrated with each other and working together?

Top 5 Compelling Reasons Why You Need Omni-Channel Retail

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Top 5 Compelling Reasons Why You Need Omni-Channel Retail

 

The concept of omnichannel retailing has now taken over a majority of the retail industry, with retailers focussing on providing a consistent, coordinated omnichannel customer experience across all customer channels using consistent and universal data.

So, what is omnichannel retail?

Omnichannel retail involves a dramatic shift from the multichannel retail approach. This retail strategy refers to a business model wherein all existing channels are integrated to offer customers a seamless and omnichannel shopping experience. The strategy is empowered by centralised data management, which blurs the lines between online and physical channels.

Customers can seamlessly use different channels in their shopping processes and are given a unique opportunity to create their preferable shopping routines. The omnichannel retail approach is adopted simultaneously in inventory management, sales channel, and marketing strategy.

This article aims to help retailers understand the need of investing in omnichannel retail: 

1.Offering A Wonderful Customer Experience

Omnichannel retailing results in an omnichannel customer experience that seamlessly integrates online and offline channels. A retailer’s ultimate goal should not be to generate sales in a specific channel but to allow purchases to occur naturally and conveniently in the channel chosen by their customers.

By integrating online and offline channels, customers can shop from anywhere and experience an optimized retail experience. Be it shopping in brick and mortar stores or via using apps or company websites, customers can interact on all channels, efficiently manage their loyalty points and rewards, and invest in quick transactions. This type of interaction at all levels helps in improving customer relationships and pushes them to interact on a deeper level with retail brands.

2.Improving Sales

With an omnichannel retailing set-up, shoppers can shop from whichever channel they like, physical stores or online channels. With inventory management integration in the retail strategy, retailers receive stock visibility across all channels and gain accessibility into the customer’s favorite channel. This retail strategy also integrates multiple sales channels, and shoppers can pick the most convenient one, thereby leading to an increase in sales.

3.Increased Customer Retention Rates

Shoppers aim to buy products in a way that is most convenient to them. An omnichannel retail strategy is the best way of offering your customers various sales channels and letting them pick one that best suits them. Further, omnichannel retail incorporates multiple payment gateways that ease transaction processes. This leads to optimized checkout rates and quick and secure checkouts, resulting in increased customer retention.

4.Improved Data Collection

With an intelligent omnichannel retail solution, retailers can store all customer data centrally located on cloud databases. The valuable data may include essential customer information like contact details, purchase histories, etc. Retailers can take advantage of this data for creating personalized shopping experiences for customers. They can monitor customers across all channels, understand them better, know their preferences, and create targeted marketing campaigns and customized promotions for every client that makes them feel special.

5.Enhanced Productivity

The omnichannel retail experience offers a 360-degree view of all the customer purchases that helps to serve them better in the future. The integration of loyalty management programs further increases productivity.

Customers can pick, review information, offer feedback, purchase, promote, and like products from anywhere that increasing overall productivity and efficiency.

ETP’s omnichannel retail software offers an amazing omnichannel retailing experience

An intelligent omnichannel retail software integrates all crucial retail operations such as the point-of-sale, inventory management, customer relationship management, etc. by providing a single point solution for all retail processes irrespective of the channel. It perfectly integrates the backend operations with the demand and supply channels, offering physical and digital retail personalization to the customers which improves their overall experience and visibility of the brand.

 

How Does Mobile POS (mPOS) make the Modern Retailer’s Life Easy

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ETP Blog - How Does Mobile POS (mPOS) make the Modern Retailer’s Life Easy

The grueling responsibility of running a retail business efficiently can be made manageable by using a robust and dynamic Mobile POS (MPOS) system. Mobile POS solutions allow retailers and merchants to access POS functionalities on iOS or Android devices. These solutions turn any smartphone, tablet, or wireless device into a powerful, modern-day system that performs the functions of a cash register or electronic POS terminal wirelessly. The correct MPOS system will also help you keep track of sales and customer information, boost employee productivity, and offer a seamless customer experience and service. A capable mPOS system can help retailers in taking their brand or company to the next level in the near future.

A Mobile POS system, also known as a Mobility Retail Solution, works on a tablet or handheld device that is either iOS or Android enabled. It is cloud-based, which means that all the data captured by the device is automatically backed up and saved online. Its advantages in terms of customer service (queue busting, ensuring safe distancing in the stores) and the speed with which it records data and monitors transactions can just not be ignored any longer. Most significantly, it aids in comprehending complex data, allowing business owners to solve issues and tailor their strategies for long-term success.

This blog will help you understand how mobile POS systems can make a retailer’s life easier.

Inventory management

Terrible inventory management is without a doubt bad for retail businesses. After all, it is your stock that attracts customers to your store. With inventory issues across stores and across channels such as stock out and pilferage becoming all too typical these days, it’s clear that retailers need to improve their inventory tracking and management system.

During peak sales periods such as the festive season especially, it is common to see empty shelves and frustrated shoppers. Store staff is unable to replenish the stock on the shelves in time and that leads to unfulfilled sales which leaves the shoppers unsatisfied as they feel they made a wasted trip down to the store. With the endless aisle feature, stores are no longer limited by their shelf space. With the Endless Aisle Item Search functionality, you can easily list your entire inventory across stores and at warehouses online in a single screen and empower your store staff to offer suggestions to in-store shoppers for goods that are not on the shelves and allow them to choose from the entire inventory available.

You can thus monitor your transactions against your existing stocks without breaking a sweat using an MPOS system. This real-time accounting provides you with a realistic picture of the status of your inventory. And, because your MPOS can manage and sort goods by categories, tags, and serial numbers, you can track supply fluctuations and determine which ones need to be replaced.

Provide great customer experience

When it comes to providing an outstanding customer experience, cloud-based mobile point of sale gives your associates more time with their customers. It makes them happy by removing the difficulties they experience when dealing with technology that doesn’t work or isn’t doing its job effectively.

Your employees will give superior service, and your customers will be able to check out on the spot using a mobile point of sale. Your store staff can scan the merchandise anywhere in-store, hold the bill if needed, offer line discounts during the checkout process, and collect the payment to enable queue busting at the store. This improves customer satisfaction, which leads to increased and/or repeat sales. You’ll be able to provide that desired shopping experience by providing your efficient employees with great tools.

Better Analytics Leads to Better Decisions

This is where some of MPOS’s most outstanding features come into play. MPOS includes a robust reporting system that can provide you with real-time or near-real-time sales data. You may usually filter by date, product ID, customer, and other factors in addition to just totaling transactions. These tools allow you to delve deep into your data to determine what is selling and what isn’t, and how to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Digital Receipts

Your customers now expect digital receipts in addition to contactless payments. They are seen as safer, more reliable, and more convenient once again. Offering digital receipts is a highly successful technique to acquire your consumers’ email addresses, adding to your marketing database.

 

Following are 4 main reasons to upgrade to a mobile POS (mPOS) solution:

  1. mPOS solutions are time-saving: They are easy to set up and can be used anywhere along with requiring minimal counter space.
  2. Optimized and Secure checkouts: Intelligent mPOS solutions offer integrations with various payment gateways and loyalty programs, encouraging clients to manage and use their rewards or loyalty points during future purchases.
  3. Cloud integration is standard on mPOS systems as it reduces the requirement for on-site data storage by business owners.
  4. With an mPOS, sales associates can service consumers quickly, reducing queues and turnaround times. By providing prompt and courteous service to customers, has boosted sales and interactions.

 

A fast and secure mPOS solution such as the ETP Mobile Store solution allows you to handle all of the above and more from a single screen. Furthermore, when running your business from the cloud, it’s simple to adapt services and extend capabilities as your company expands and your customers’ needs change. Mobile point-of-sale systems provide a well-organized, quick, and anywhere checkout, allowing store staff to handle clients swiftly. A robust Retail Mobile POS solution also enables a variety of contactless payment choices.

ETP’s Mobile POS solution seamlessly integrates and offers user-friendly experiences. It can also help you scale your business, be more responsive to customer requests, and forecast your revenue. Its unique value proposition is its ability to continuously offer enterprise-grade Omni-channel retail solutions to its clients while also forging decade-long strategic collaborations and partnerships.

Adopting Unified Commerce – the Next Generation of Retail

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Adopting Unified Commerce – the Next Generation of Retail

Imagine you are buying your favourite luxury car that offers you a choice between manual, automatic, and driverless options; passive, active, interconnected front and rear suspensions; disc, drum, or anti-lock braking systems; plush amenities such as higher-quality interiors, high-viability headlights, auto-dimming mirrors, safety features; and, comes in petrol, electric and hybrid variants. But imagine if the car dealer said he could offer you a choice in only one or the other category. What kind of a horrid car buying experience would that be! Versus that, if another car dealership across the town offers you a choice in each of the categories along with a few extra features such as a great infotainment system or a voice-activated security system, wouldn’t that be a truly amazing experience? And now, imagine if the ‘you’ in the example above is actually your end customer, the ‘car dealership’ is your retail brand and the ‘luxury car’ along with its various features is the retail technology suite your brand is relying upon to offer a truly amazing unified shopping experience that makes your customers keep coming back for more.

If you’re in retail or even e-commerce, then you already know that omnichannel retail has changed the game in terms of how businesses reach and interact with their customers. If you want to stay competitive, it’s no longer enough to have a multichannel presence where the different channels function in silos and, it never will be again. What you need is unified commerce solutions, which enable your business to deliver consistent experiences across all channels — in-store, mobile, and digital — to make sure that your brand is staying ahead of the competition.

What Is Unified Commerce? What Does It Mean?

If you’re new to unified commerce, you may be wondering what exactly it is. The term can be defined as one platform serving several use cases. It encompasses many different tools, whether online or in-store, that customers utilize at different points throughout their journeys. Customers make purchases across platforms like mobile apps, websites, retail locations, social media pages, and connected devices. With the proper utilization of all these channels, interactions between brands and consumers can take place in real-time. For example, if an e-commerce company has an app that offers customers an easy way to shop for products anytime or anywhere they want (including on the go), it’s offering a very specific type of unified commerce experience.

Unified Commerce Vs Omnichannel – Evolving into One Version of Transactional Truth

The rapid growth of omnichannel has left retailers with one distinct problem – how to provide a seamless customer experience across all channels when managing multiple systems can be quite complex. The rapid proliferation of digital touchpoints has created complexities that leave retailers struggling to manage multiple systems, networks, and data silos in order to create a customer-centric experience. However, there is hope on the horizon with unified commerce platforms that bring order out of chaos by aggregating product data into a single source of truth. By integrating POS, WMS, ERP, CRM/CMO solutions into a single platform for managing merchandising content, brands can deliver more personalized shopping experiences while also unlocking critical insights about customers throughout their journey.

Retailers Aren’t Yet Delivering the Truly Seamless Customers Experiences that Shoppers Want

If you’re a retailer, then chances are your website is already unified. In fact, you probably already have a mobile shopping app for your brands. But what about in-store shopping? That’s where you might be falling behind. According to Gartner, over 30% of retail sales still take place in physical stores, but in 2025 more than 65% of sales will occur online. If that prediction holds true, then it doesn’t bode well for retailers that aren’t prioritizing unified commerce solutions at their brick-and-mortar locations or on their websites.

What Is a Unified Commerce Platform?

A unified commerce platform is a single, all-encompassing digital storefront that gives customers complete access to your brand, products, customer service channels, mobile apps, social media accounts, websites, etc. The goal of unified commerce is to encourage your customers to interact with your brand through multiple channels while simultaneously making it easy for them to find the information/product they are looking for. To do so successfully requires cross-channel product listings that are consistently accurate. Also critical is an omnichannel experience where any interaction with your brand automatically updates in real-time across every channel. Even more importantly, it allows you to meet each customer on his or her own terms by offering customized interactions tailored directly to their preferences.

Unified Infrastructure Designed for Company Growth

Most retailers are already experiencing growth in sales, which means their infrastructure should be ready to support increased growth. For example, if a company has only 200 customers today but expects 1,000 new customers within 12 months, then unified commerce is critical. With integrated systems across all channels of communication, businesses can better understand who their customers are. This will allow them to deliver an experience that’s personalized for each individual customer. Because of omnichannel capabilities combined with retailer-specific features designed to grow your business, unified commerce helps you grow your bottom line while staying ahead of industry changes.

The Advantages of Delivering Unified Customer Experiences

The first advantage of unified commerce is that it allows businesses to offer customer-centric shopping experiences. Customers want a seamless shopping experience, which means it should be easy for them to browse products on their smartphones and buy those products quickly and efficiently through an e-commerce site or a mobile app. Giving your customers quick access to your inventory as well as options like click-and-collect delivery services increases their chances of making a purchase with you. Giving them multiple ways to complete purchases, such as email receipts and pick-up codes for shoppers who order online but don’t have home delivery service available in their area, also makes purchasing easier for them — and makes them more likely to shop with you again in the future.

How to Deliver Unified Commerce Experiences & Preparing for 2025 and beyond with a Unified Commerce Strategy

When we at ETP were building our product roadmap in 2015-2016, we already had a good idea that omnichannel retail solutions would be one of our most in-demand products over the next six years. However, once we had firmly established ourselves as an Omni-channel Retail Solutions provider for luxury and lifestyle retailers across APAC, India, and the Middle East in 2018-2019, we saw that unified commerce was quickly becoming a trending topic in the immediate future as well. At that point, it was clear that unified commerce was going to be one of our key points of focus for our 2025 strategy. As such, we decided to develop specialized products that can benefit that various types of retailers. We have also created a dedicated page on its core components and main advantages to help you better understand unified commerce and omnichannel retail solutions.

Did you get the festive season preparations right in 2022?

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Customers are always looking for “something extra” in their shopping experiences. And particularly when they do their holiday season purchases for their loved ones, they will not think twice before switching loyalties if the experience is not up to their expectations. If you fail to provide frictionless shopping experiences, IT WILL COST YOU CUSTOMERS! 65% of consumers in a recent retail consumer survey said they’d cut ties with a brand over a single poor customer service experience.

The festive season brings a hot time for retail businesses around the world with all its holidays and preparation for celebrations. Usually, it starts during mid-to-late October with festive occasions such as Halloween (10/31) and Diwali (early November; in the Indian subcontinent), scales up on Single’s Day (11/11), peaks during Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Hanukkah, and Cyber Monday (last week of November) and then continues through Christmas (12/25), and New Year (12/35), finally culminating with the Chinese New Year (late Jan – mid-Feb) every year.

According to a multinational professional audit and consulting services firm, the shopping activity will be 7-9% higher than in 2020 during the November to January timeframe this year. Total sales are expected at $1.28 to $1.3 trillion. The e-commerce sales specifically are expected to demonstrate 11-15% year-over-year growth during the 2022-2023 holiday season. It means online stores can count on total sales between $210 and $218 billion this festive season.

With many consumers still trying to avoid exposure to the COVID-19 variants, an overwhelming majority of retail consumers start their journey online with almost 80-85% of retail shoppers conducting their holiday shopping research online, from the safety of their homes, before buying. The festive season gives a chance for online stores to significantly increase their sales, revenue, and profit numbers. By making a few smart moves, retailers can take advantage of the surge of holiday traffic – and start making more sales! It is an extraordinary opportunity for eCommerce businesses to achieve great profits, which is why it is important to keep up with the demand and provide customers with an amazing, seamless shopping experience.

But if you don’t take the right steps to prepare for the holidays, they can turn into a disaster. Site downtime, loading issues, payment problems, delayed deliveries, and more could plague your store, and damage your reputation and your sales. Each year, you will find some retailers that do it very well — and some retailers miss the mark completely. This year too, there would have been winners and losers this holiday season!

So, what mistakes did you avoid when preparing your physical or eCommerce stores for the holidays in 2022?

  • Did you have trained store staff armed with the right tech ready to welcome back customers in your physical stores?
  • Did you have all your marketing tools in place?
  • Were your integrations sound and robust, ready for the busy period?
  • How was your data looking? Was there any customer information you need to collect for your holiday marketing?

Let’s take a look at the top 6 most common holiday sales preparations that retailers should get right up front. Super, if you got all 6 of them ticked in 2022 already. But if not, preparations for the festive shopping season 2022-23 are merely six months away. Start early and get them right next year –

  1. Prep your physical stores and make them shopper safe and friendly

Consumers expect that a shop will help them during the buying process when online stores are overflowed with holiday offers. Customers may additionally have confusion in shopping process details, they may have doubts regarding the product, etc. Hence, it is of prime importance to have trained store staff ready in-stores to be able to offer the shoppers a pleasant shopping experience. With increased crowds during the holiday season, the store staff needs to be trained to not only be quick in their service and checkout, but also for them to be good in their product knowledge so that they are able to assist customers promptly. The knowledge will help the store to be more efficient in tending to customers’ queries and improving their shopping experience. This in turn helps to manage the crowd and allows the store to serve more customers within a shorter amount of time, decreasing the wait time for customers waiting to enter the store.

Retailers that adequately staff up and strike the right balance of enforcing COVID-19 protocols while also creating a stress-free experience for customers win the holiday season.

 

  1. Use shopper data from the previous years to build promotions and create a buzz

Customer buying history across channels accumulated in an Omni-channel Retail CRM over a sufficient period of time serves as input to the promotions planning engine, enabling you to easily define business rules and roll out promotions specific to customer segments, making their relationship with you a personalized experience.

These promotions can be defined for a specific range of merchandise or for a specific time frame or for a specific channel or store and can be executed based on various parameters like customer age, gender, birth dates, demographics, ticket size, RFM (recency-frequency-monetary value) and more. This will give the retail marketing team the flexibility to run a wide range of campaigns to grow business with loyal customers and to increase same-store sales. It is important to be able to run a large volume of business and yet be able to make your customers feel special every time they interact with you.

 

  1. Be prepared for a surge in holiday traffic

Surges in traffic, both online and offline, are good if you’re prepared for them. But if you’re not, they can cause performance issues that may cost you sales and maybe even loyal customers. As part of the retail ecosystem, we’ve all been there at some point or the other. A holiday sale leads to a surge in traffic. All of a sudden, your loyalty program or inventory management system or the payment processor fails, your e-commerce pages start loading slowly, or your website starts to crash because it can’t handle the traffic.

Make sure that your web host allows you to scale up your website quickly if you need to – add more capacity so that you can keep your site running even if you encounter an unexpectedly high surge in traffic. You should also look for a robust, stable POS system that allows to view and manage customer data and store inventory easily. Newer retail solutions such as an mPOS (mobile POS) prove extremely useful in busting checkout queues and handling surges in in-store traffic.

 

  1. Plan your merchandise and make sure that you’re fully stocked on your inventory

When shopping online more than 65% of clients will delete the item or drop their whole order if they see the out-of-stock sign. Nobody likes to shop for an item and add it to their cart only to find out that it’s out-of-stock, not the right fit, or back-ordered. Before the holidays start, you need to think through your merchandising approach and make sure that you’re fully stocked on your most popular items. Plan for sufficient buffer stock to meet the targeted sales volume for the season. Keep the warehouse inventory handy and the display amply stocked so that customers feel spoilt for choice. With Endless Aisle functionality, such as the one offered by ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions you can easily view the entire inventory available at nearby stores, online/virtual locations, and your warehouses and assist the customer to order from there thus avoiding a stockout/lost sale situation.

Sure, a few stockouts are still inevitable. But by using the data you’ve gathered about your products during the rest of the year, you should be able to predict which ones will be the most popular throughout the holidays and stock up accordingly.

 

  1. Using the right order management system, fulfill 100% of your deliveries on time

Once a customer clicks the “Buy” button, their order’s journey begins. New orders are placed on your eCommerce platform, then whoever is managing your inventory has to select, package, and ship the right products to the right place. This might not seem too hard when you have a brand new business: A few orders come in each day and you can quickly (and cheaply) fulfill them yourself. No problem. Potential obstacles can arise, however, as sales grow, channels multiply, products are added to your inventory, and your customer base expands.

The right order management system can help remove bottlenecks for you as your eCommerce store grows. It is a one-stop-shop to view and manage all customer orders in one place. Order information is passed between your order management system and your eCommerce platform while providing you with visibility into the entire process. This can help automate the flow of sales order information to every piece of the retail supply chain. You can track the entire journey of a customer order, from the “Buy” button to delivery — and even returns. An efficient order management system organizes and automates everything that needs to happen to get customers what they ordered on time and in good condition.

 

  1. Go Omni-channel and complete the digital upheaval of your business

Omni-channel retailing is a consumer-centric approach that refers to the adoption of strategies, a variety of engagement tools, and a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all accessible shopping channels. This not only helps organizations to centralize their business operations and implement infrastructure changes but also enables them to provide a consistent experience to attract and retain customers, thus driving greater sales.

ETP is enabling brick and mortar retailers to embrace unified commerce and drive their brands and customer relationships in a seamless manner. ETP V5 Omni-channel Retail Solutions enable you to deliver a unified omni-channel experience with retail digital transformation features such as Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS), Reserve Online Pickup In-Store (ROPIS), Click and Collect, Click and Deliver, Endless Aisle, Buy Online Return In-Store (BORIS) as well as a holistic view of the inventory and a single view of customers across all channels. This is done using real-time integration of ETP’s POS, CRM, and Promotions engine with webstores and marketplaces using ETP Connect’s secured web services framework, which has the ability to see and manage order flows easily.

 

In addition to trained store staff, attractive discounts and loyalty programs, and multiple delivery options, what is it that you need to proactively be ready to offer your customers when they shop with you during the festive season? Browse through our 9 tips that add the extra sparkle to your sales and profits during festive shopping.

Retailers must double down on consumer research and ensure a positive customer experience. However long this period of turmoil lasts, those companies which will finesse it and succeed will be those that invest in competitive pricing, do research to understand their customers, and make the omnichannel online and hybrid shopping experience a cinch to stay ahead of the competition.