How Using a Website Shopping Cart that Interfaces with Your POS Software Can Save Time and Make Life Easier

"How Using a Website Shopping Cart that Interfaces with Your POS Software Can Save Time and Make Life Easier"

- By Jeff Haefner

If you have a retail store front and sell products on your website (or plan to in the future), then you should seriously consider a shopping cart that's interfaced with your POS software.

Here's why...

Reason #1 - An integrated shopping cart - POS software solution can save you a huge amount of time by automatically creating orders and new customers for you.

It goes something like this...

Joe Smith visits your website and orders a few of your products. A short time later, the new order will automatically appear in your POS system with the new customer created.

You simply double check the order, process it, and send it to UPS Online (or whatever method you use).

This is obviously much faster and easier than the manual method.

Just imagine how much time it would take you to enter the new customer and then key-in the order by hand. And keep in mind that, in most situations, 50% to 75% of your web orders will be brand new customers. So without the interface, you'll be constantly adding new customers.

If you have just 10 website orders, this could easily save you 30 to 60 minutes a day.

Reason #2 - An integrated shopping cart - POS software solution can also reduce errors because human data entry is always prone to more mistakes. These mistakes can make your customers angry and waste time. Not to mention it can mess up your inventory and cause other headaches.

Reason #3 - An integrated shopping cart - POS software solution can save you loads of time by synchronizing the inventory information and pricing in your POS software with your website.

Imagine for a moment that you want to start selling a brand new product line on your website. How long would it take you to manually add all those new products added to your website?

With the right technology, all you have to do is check a box in your POS system and that inventory will be uploaded to your website.

Your POS system will send product numbers, descriptions, images, pricing and other various inventory information to your website.

This makes the maintenance of your website MUCH easier and reduces mistakes!

How Do You Find a Website Shopping Cart and a POS Software Solution That Works Well Together?

At this point, you might be thinking that you could really use a solution like this...

But before you go out and buy anything, you need to be aware of some big differences with the shopping cart and POS software interfaces out there.

Unfortunately not all solutions work this smoothly. There are lots of differences and varied levels of sophistication.

To figure out what you'll be getting, here are some of the questions you need to ask:

Can you use your own shopping cart? Or do you have to use the shopping cart supplied by the POS software provider?
Do you have to manually export your orders to file and then import the information? Or does this happen automatically?
Do you have to manually export your inventory to file and then import the information? Or does this happen automatically?
If the updates are automatic, how often does it run (real-time, hourly, daily, etc)?
Can you specify which products get imported into your shopping cart? How do you specify this information?
When a website order comes in, are new customers created automatically? How does the system determine if it's a new customer?
If an item is on back order, can the system automatically send an email to the customer?
Does the shopping cart have the ability to show whether an item is in stock or not? Is this information in real-time?

There are hundreds of different POS systems that offer various levels of shopping cart integration. And sometimes it can be difficult to sort through all your options.

To make this easier, we created a detailed comparison of 18 top POS systems in the retail industry. One of the sections in the POS Software Comparison Chart is about eCommerce and website shopping cart features.

You can get all the details about the POS Software Comparison Chart here:
http://www.possoftwareguide.com/new-chart.html

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To Your Success!

Jeff Haefner

Golden Sales is extremely user friendly, which makes it a dream to use for staff that are not computer literate. It takes the retailer & wholesaler right into the electronic age at a fraction of the cost. Try our simple pos software, Golden Sales