Industry insight
Ultimate Outdoors, a growing, family run business, found itself struggling to manage its stock across its five stores. It was experiencing issues with overnight polling, and as a result plans for an ecommerce website were being delayed. John Smale, buyer and former store manager at Ultimate Outdoors, explains: "The business had five stores and the visibility of stock across the estate was becoming an issue for head office. Furthermore the business was looking to go online, but with their old system in place, they would not be able manage the stores and an ecommerce site". John continues, "The data was not live, it was polled overnight. So in effect the data was out of date. Not only did you have to wait overnight for the system to update its stock levels, but when there was a communication problem it turned it into 2 or 3 day old data. So when you are trying to manage stock and replenish, you were always half a week behind which is pretty useless when you work in a fast moving retail environment".
With access to live data becoming critical, Ultimate Outdoors invested in a new EPoS system from Cybertill. "The key thing was real time data," said John. He adds: "The instant updates of data, sales, stockholding, prices, products, customer information, movement of stock between branches were critical. I was working in the store then, and I remember when it came in, it was quite revolutionary and radical to what we had before. Head office explaining if you sell something in another store it will have gone from the system".
After installing Cybertill, Ultimate Outdoors created three different websites all serving different markets. "A huge benefit is linking the ecommerce sites into the Cybertill system. The product file is the same so stock levels are visible across the stores and websites at any one time. The stock data is also visible to customers and we can see customer information from all three sites straight away," comments John.
Meanwhile, Vend shares some positive experiences by its customers that manage their stock through an EPoS system. Hugh MacIntyre, owner of The Little Mule Café in Melbourne, was pleased to put a stop to the guesswork: "We can get rid of underperforming menu items and actually be able to tell someone if we have something in stock".
In addition, Ingrid Starnes, who used to manually manage her two fashion stores and 10 stockists by hand through a system of online spread sheets, comments: "Having all systems talking to each other is what makes this amazing. When we make a sale in-store in Vend it updates our online inventory numbers and sends the sale invoice through. We don't have to do anything except look after the customer."