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5 business tools every successful retailer is using

by Joanna Foyle on 31 Jan 2023 (5-minute read)
5-business-tools-successful-retail-business

Retailers in the UK invested £ 1.1 billion in technology in 2018 which was 29% more compared to 2017. This was in spite of the fact that revenue growth between 2017 and 2018 was only 5%. This is because retailers have understood the importance of technology and have embraced it as the future of the sector.

Here are 5 software every retailer online or otherwise is using to stay relevant, profitable, and growing:

5businesstools

Accounting software

Accounting software is simply a tool that allows you to automate your bookkeeping process. They are ideally cloud-hosted and record all your business’s transactions. As of 2021, 58% of enterprises and 78% of small businesses use cloud-hosted accounting software.

Quickbooks, NetSuite, and Zoho books are some examples of accounting software.

Benefits of having an accounting software for your business:

• Avoid common accounting errors like transposition errors, reverse entries, errors of omission, and not reconciling books.

• Stored and organises all your invoices, statements, and records which makes tax filing a breeze.

• Makes reporting very easy

• Save time, money, and effort involved in manual bookkeeping.

Price intelligence software

Research suggests that for 60% of all shoppers, price is the primary factor they consider when making a purchase decision. This means in an aggressively competitive sector like retail, your product prices could make or break your business.

Price Intelligence Software allows you to track and monitor the prices and promotions of your competitors so you can make intelligent pricing decisions that let you stay a step ahead of them. Pricechecker goes one step further and stacks your competitor’s stock status and also gives you price and promotion history, giving you more dimensions to include in your price and promotion strategy.

Benefits of having a Price Intelligence Software for your business:

• Automatically tracks, monitors, and records your competitors' product prices, promotions, and stock statuses

•Let’s you make intelligent price and promotion decisions based on present and past data

• Helps you with price, sales, and inventory forecasting

• Allows you to test and experiment with your pricing strategy.

• Shows you where you stand in terms of price and affordability in your industry.

• Allows you to provide the best deals and experience for your customers

Pricechecker is an advanced competitor monitoring system that enables businesses to optimise their pricing by tracking their competitors real-time.

Inventory management system

The primary issue over 40% of warehouses face is human error and rectifying this was the primary purpose of inventory management systems. An Inventory Management System basically allows you to continuously know and monitor your stock levels. However, modern IMS allows you to do a lot more including reporting and forecasting.

Benefits of having an inventory management system for your business:

• Gives you better visibility and control over your stock

• Reduces errors that lead to low or excess stocks, deadstock, and stockouts

• Enables you to deliver better customer experience

• Lets you automate most of your manual inventory tasks

Customer Relationship Management

A 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25% to 95% increase in profits and this is exactly what a CRM helps you achieve.

A customer relationship management system allows you to record all your customer information and transactions in one place making it easy for you to analyse and understand them. This in turn allows you to provide personalised customer experiences by tracking your customers’ journey through the purchase and post-purchase phases.

Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho are some examples of customer relationship management systems.

Benefits of having a CRM for your business:

Automatically records and organises customer information

• Allows you to personalise the way you approach your customers

• Let’s you optimise, and automate communication with your customers across channels

• Acts as a centralised database of all your customer information and interactions that lets you segment and analyse them easily

Content Management System

Considering over 60% of all retail shopping begins online even if they all don’t shop online. This makes having a digital presence crucial for the success of your retail business. This includes building a website that works well with other business tools and keeping it regularly updated so customers find the most relevant information when they are looking for something.

On average, building a basic website can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000, 2-3 months, and a lot of technical knowledge. This is where CMS or Content Management Systems come in handy. They allow you to build and maintain a custom website by yourself or with comparatively less outside help. For that matter, most professional developers prefer to build websites using a CMS as it makes the building and maintenance process significantly easier.

WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace are some examples of Content Management Systems.

Benefits of having a CMS for your business:

• Allows you to update your website from anywhere, anytime while ensuring consistency in design and flow

• Integrates with other business applications like accounting software, Price monitoring systems, inventory management systems, and CRMs

• Make simple updates to your website by yourself or non-tech staff with little training.

• Store all your content in one place for future reference

Final thoughts

If you are a retailer looking to stay relevant, profitable, and ahead of your competition, you must be leveraging technology to improve your business processes and customer experience. The good news is that you need not be very tech-savvy to do this anymore. Almost all retail business tools, especially the ones mentioned above, are now plug-and-play and involve very few steps to get started. So, what are you waiting for?