Retail Sale Advantages Inherit in Point of Sale Systems

By Rhonda Campbell

It’s hard to imagine how long it would take retailers to track customer purchases, including the specific quantities of each product customers bought, if they had to track the purchases manually. Believe it or not, this is exactly the way retailers once kept up with customer purchases, including mail order purchases. Just completing the process could take retailers days and weeks, requiring them to hire more employees to perform the work. Today, some retailers still use less up-to-date point of sale systems to keep up with customer orders. It’s a reason some retailers could unexpectedly run out of hot store items.

Tracking Customer Behaviors Using Point of Sale Systems

Fortunately, there are more advanced techniques and tools to use to track customer purchases and store inventories. These advanced tracking tools include point of sale systems. Because retailers have unique needs depending on the types of products they sell, some point of sale systems have built-in software programs that benefit shop owners who sell footwear, clothes or sporting goods. Other point of sale systems are designed with software that tracks purchases and inventories for products like groceries, prescriptions and computers.

Capable of seamlessly integrating with a retailer’s existing business solutions, point of sale systems are available on hardware systems like all-in-one cash register terminals and desktop computers. Major manufacturers who build hardware systems used with point of sale systems include Dell and Apple. Software used with retail point of sale systems can be used to ring or scan customer purchases, scan mail order purchases, track customer purchasing histories and behaviors and manage online and offline store inventories.


Point of sale systems are so effective at monitoring and tracking customer purchases and behaviors that they have gained the attention of some media outlets. For example, and as reported in the November 19, 2012 Forbes “This Black Friday, Stores Know Customers Better, via Big Data” article, “Macy’s and Sears might not be psychics or fortune-tellers, but that doesn’t mean they can’t predict the future. Each year, retail giants attempt to forecast the hottest toys and trends of the holiday season, but also to predict how much the different types of consumer will spend and on what.”

The article continues, “This year the average holiday shopper is expected to spend $749.51 this season, up from $740.57 from last year. Of that total, $421.82 will be spent on children, parents and other relatives. The rest will be spent on friends, co-workers, food, flowers, and other goods.” As noted in the article, a lot of consumer spending data comes from surveys. However, other consumer spending data comes from information gathered through point of sale systems.

It’s with point of sale systems that some retailers steer away from running out of popular items like toys, electronics and household goods, during major shopping seasons like Christmas and Black Friday. By using point of sale systems, retailers can also identify loyal customers. Using this information, retailers can start to develop customer loyalty programs to not only recognize but to also reward their loyal customers. This in turn, could help retailers to gain more word-of-mouth sales. As a closing word of advice, retailers who haven’t used point of sale systems before, might find it helpful to work with companies that sell point of sale systems who also provide training programs, technical support and educational seminars to their customers.