Choosing the Best POS System for your Convenience Store

Convenience stores are a vital part of any functioning community in the modern world. They are numerous and provide customers with various goods they need in their day to day lives.

Like most businesses, convenience stores have also begun using technology to augment their functionality in this fast-paced digital age. The use of POS systems has become very common among convenience store owners and staff. These systems help automate some parts of the job and helps keep track of vital information that needs to be known to perform at the optimum level.

There are hundreds of options for POS systems for you to choose from. However, it is very important to know how to pick the best one to suit your needs.

Let’s take a look at some of the general features a POS system has to have to be best suited for your convenience store.

Inventory Tracking

Being able to keep track of inventory is one of the major areas to which POS systems brought innovation and convenience. Any convenience store worth its salt deals with all kinds of products, all of which need to be kept track of.

Whether it is serialized inventory to keep track of each individual product (eg: mobile phones), batch inventory to keep track of large numbers of products made at the same time (eg: milk or other perishable goods), variant inventory for items which are the same except for some variant trait (eg: hard drives of the same make and model, but with different drive space), or any other kind of custom product, your store needs to keep track of them.

Having a POS system with robust options to keep track of inventory is vital to the running of a modern convenience store.

Customer Database

Having a comprehensive customer database with purchasing and payment history can help your store in many ways.

These can include being able to discern the preferences of customers, knowing whom to market which product to, having their content information for emergencies or promotions, keeping track of payments or any items taken on credit, and much more.

Your ideal POS system should be able to keep track of this data so that you can use it to your benefit.

Staff Permission Levels

A POS system is a powerful tool with many functions. However, not every function is relevant to every staff. Therefore, a good system must be able to manage permission levels for the different tyles of staff that work for you.

The information and functions needed by you, your managerial staff, your sales staff, and your procurement staff are all different. Not having this distinction can end up making the system hard to learn and use for employees, both old and new.

As such, the best POS system for you must be able to create and maintain these different permission levels for your staff.

Dynamic and Customizable Pricing

Prices changing is commonplace in all convenience stores. Perhaps a certain product is expiring and needs to be moved fast. Or maybe there is a promotion on a new product. There could even be a specific discount that needs to be applied.

In all of these scenarios, being able to alter price on the fly is very important. While it can be done manually, there are much more efficient ways to do it.

The ideal POS system for you should be able to change the recorded price of any item during any sale without much effort. It should also be able to keep track of this change if needed. Your staff should not have to waste effort keeping track of something that the system can easily recall for them.

The aforementioned are some of the must-have features any good POS system must have for it to be useful for your convenience store. Armed with this knowledge, you are more likely to pick a system that really works with the business you do. A system such as Ewity, for instance.

Ewity is an easy-to-use cloud-based POS system that can be easily customized for the specific needs of your convenience store. It is packed to the brim with tons of helpful features, including the ones mentioned in this very article. It offers a streamlined POS experience that can help take your convenience store to the next level in this fast-paced digital age.

If you’re curious to learn more, head over to our website and see what we are about. The Starter Plan offers a robust number of features for you to try and see what Ewity can bring to your place of business.

Click here to sign up for the Starter Plan, absolutely free!