QuickBooks POS Online: Smoothen Your Retail Service This Holiday Season

In this holiday season, retailers need to make the most of opportunities that come their way. On the one hand, the holiday season is a time for people to rejoice, whereas, for the retailers, it is a time to brace the competition and stay ahead.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) has already forecasted the holiday retail sales to increase between 4.3 to 4.8 percent as compared to 2017.  The statistics indicate that there is a lot of sales up for grabs for the retailers, that is, if they play their cards right.

However, with the advent of eCommerce websites, the brick-and-mortar retailers will have to up their game in order to encourage customers to visit their stores. As the online retail business offers the obvious convenience of shopping from home while avoiding the crowd, the retailers tend to get attracted towards buying online. However, according to Barbara Thau for Forbes, all but one of the top ten U.S. retailers are physical chains.

This is because the customers still value the conventional “human connect” while shopping and the retailers should look to offer them with delightful customer experience. An efficient POS system is one of the essential elements for improving the retail experience.

QuickBooks POS, an Intuit product, is the most favorite POS software among retailers all over the world. It offers retailers with various features like multiple payment methods, syncing data with QuickBooks, integration with barcode scanner, among others to streamline your retail service.

However, QuickBooks POS, when setup locally can be restricted due to certain hardware-related limitations. A better solution is QuickBooks POS cloud hosting, also known as QuickBooks POS Online.

Here are some of the features of QuickBooks POS Online that would prove beneficial for the retailers in increasing sales during the holiday season.

1. Track Inventory of Multiple Stores with Ease!

QuickBooks POS has an inbuilt feature for tracking as well as updating the inventory of a retail store with every purchase. However, if you are the owner of multiple stores, you will have to keep track of every store individually. It can drain a lot of your time and energy as you have to be in sync with all the store managers in order to restock the inventory in time.

One thing that the customers loathe the most is visiting the store only to find that the product they are looking for is unavailable. The dreadful “out of stock” sign drives the customer out of the store. It is anyways not favorable to the customer experience, however, during the holiday season, not restocking the inventory can prove disastrous.

QuickBooks POS Online offers you a vantage point to view the status of the inventory of multiple stores simultaneously.  In addition to this, the status of the inventory is updated in real-time for you to restock the items. Hence, you can view the status of your inventory and restock beforehand.

2. Get Total Availability for Your QuickBooks POS!

You cannot even bear the thought of downtime of your QuickBooks POS during the holiday season. Imagine a long line of customers waiting for checkout and your QuickBooks POS software stops functioning. There can also be an issue with the hardware on which the software is installed. As a local software, it is bonded to the operating system, and you cannot do anything about it.

Whereas, in the case of QuickBooks POS Online, your QuickBooks POS software is hosted on the cloud which makes it independent of any hardware-related issues that could hamper your productivity.

Moreover, the QuickBooks POS Online providers offer you with 24/7 support which ensures that you can contact them anytime for the resolution of your issues. The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans implemented by the cloud providers ensure that your software is available even in times of a disaster.

3. Make the Checkout Process Faster!

Like any other software, the QuickBooks POS software needs a minimum hardware specification to be installed. However, the high density of the number of customers during the holiday season leads to high amounts of data, and therefore, the requirement of faster data processing.

If the local hardware is not able to handle the load, it crashes, leaving you high and dry in front of a long line of customers. A better way to handle high amounts of data is QuickBooks POS Online. As your data, as well as software, is hosted on highly scalable cloud servers, any increase in resource requirement is met instantaneously.

Also, the high-performance servers ensure that the payment processing is rapid, leading to an efficient checkout process.

4. Data Protection is a Must!

According to Carbon Black, global organizations encountered a 57.5% increase in attempted cyberattacks during the 2017 holiday shopping season. This includes both the online as well as the traditional retailers.

It is more the reason for retailers to be careful during the 2018 holiday season. When you host your data on the cloud, the competent cloud providers ensure the security of your data by implementing multiple security measures and safeguards such as data encryption, Intrusion Prevention and Detection System (IPS & IDS), multi-factor authentication, advanced firewalls, access control systems, among others.

To implement such level of security in your local setup would cost you an excessive amount of revenue.

In addition to this, the backup policy implemented by the cloud providers ensure that your QuickBooks POS data is backed up regularly.

Stay Focused This Holiday Season!

QuickBooks POS Online helps eliminate the hardware-related bottlenecks and offers a secure environment for your QuickBooks POS for retail businesses. You can track the inventory of multiple stores simultaneously, and in real-time.

This enables the store owners to enhance inventory management and restock the items in time. The retailers can also make the checkout process swift by hosting QuickBooks POS on high-performance cloud servers.

This holiday season, if you are focused on optimizing your retail service and offering a good shopping experience for your customers, the sales are bound to increase than the previous year.

Have you opted for QuickBooks POS Online yet? Don’t wait, try our QuickBooks POS cloud hosting free for 10 days.