Retail is tough around the world and nowhere is this more evident than in retail jewellery businesses.
Retail jewellers need professional and market-specific Tpv Hosteleria Point of Sale software to help them run their businesses.
Good Jewellery software covers the following business areas in a retail jewellery business.
- Point of Sale.
- Customer management including loyalty marketing, email and text message marketing and customer accounts and special orders.
- Lay Away including the ability for you to set your own trading terms.
- Repairs where you repair or arrange to have repaired items brought in by customers.
- Manufactured goods where you put together various components to make an item for sale. This could be a retail gift pack or an item of jewellery like a ring.
- Second hand goods which tracks the buying and selling of second hand items.
- Sales tracking by supplier, employee and other criteria through reports and on screen enquiries.
- Business reporting – from the simple to the comprehensive including the ability to select items to include in reports to suit specific business queries.
- Theft management from providing barriers to theft to reporting on activity which could indicate theft.
- Supplier interaction including processing electronic invoices through to placing orders electronically with suppliers.
- Plus a range of other facilities.
While a general POS system will cover some of the needs in a jewellery business, this will not address jewellery specific needs and this is where generic software can let the business down. Based on years of working with and helping jewellers I would recommend against a generic system.
Jewellery software includes many specific to jewellers facilities which focus on business operational requirements which are specific to this particular retail niche. These include reporting on fast sellers, grading stock by gem type and linking to suppliers specific to the jeweller channel.
A key feature important in jewellery software is security. Security against customer fraud and security against employee theft. With inventory items of considerable value and large sums of cash passing through the business, it is essential for jewellers to have software which protects them at every opportunity.
Good jewellery software is backed by in-store services which ensure that the channel specific facilities are leveraged for the success of the business. It is also linked back to jeweller suppliers to reduce the time taken to manage inventory and deal with suppliers.
Jewellers considering buying software ought to invite the various software companies under consideration to visit their store and demonstrate the software face to face. This provides the potential suppliers an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the needs of the business. It also provides the business an opportunity to more personally assess the potential supplier.
In such an in-store demonstration, take time to look at each function of the software, use it yourself and ask plenty of questions. The decision on choosing software for your jewellery business is for the long term so taking extra time to get it right is wise for the business.