Barcode Readers

A barcode reader is an electronic device that scans the barcodes and translates the text behind the barcode into a human readable text and passes to your portable devices such as personal computer, mobiles etc, as if you had typed it on the keyboard.

Applications of barcode scanner:

These devices are used in various applications from small scale to large business needs. It includes

• Excel sheets
• Library applications to read the barcodes on books for easy recording of data.
• Databases are connected with barcode scanners to pull the data on items and can easily feed the storage.
• Connected with POS software in retail shops and shopping malls to record the sales.
• Also used in large supply chain inventory management to look up for their inventory levels.

Different styles of devices:

There are various barcode scanners available in market basing on it’s working and range of scanning. There are short scanning range suitable small shops and increased range of barcode scanners for big malls for medium to heavy use.

Barcode scanners are also available with chord and wireless. The wireless devices can operate with bluetooth with-in the range of 300ft. Omnidirectional barcode scanners operate in 360 degree scanning. Imagers to read 2-dimensional barcodes.

The most common type scanners, pen style and hand held scanners can be connected to versatile interfaces such as USB ports, Bluetooth devices

Receipt Printers for Retail Stores

Receipt printers are used to print receipts seen in many shopping malls, retail stores and every where to print bill.

Receipt printers need to be integrated with the point-of-sale devices. The purchased goods need to billed with a paper receipt, where all the items scanned with barcode scanners are displayed on he receipt.

The cost of the printers vary with compromising quality and technology. The three major printers available in market are impact, thermal, and inkjet. Thermal receipt printers use the direct thermal method, impact printers offer an affordable alternative, and inkjet printers offer advanced features.

These POS printers are available with multiple interface options:

USB connections are more popular connecting interface with a limited cable length supporting high speeds of data transfer compared to wireless.

Parallel connections are easy to setup and reliable.

Serial connections are great cheap but with low transfer rates.

Ethernet port printers are connected in a network and can be shared by the network, identified with a network ip-address.

Wireless printers use WIFI (802.11b) or BlueTooth technology to print receipts removes the inappropriate cables running around and can be operated with-in a long range of distance.

Latest Trends of Retail Marketing

The Retail commerce is changing rapidly with growing competition and implementation technologies. To enhance sales some companies tend to apply various marketing strategies to reach the customers and keep their customers bogged to their products.

Video Channels

Recently a retail company has started a food channel to showcase their items. This is suited for middle and large scale industry for effective advertising of their items and can influence the customers to reach their shops. But it is very important to keep the confidence of customers avoiding false advertisement, to retain the customer traffic.

SMS Channels

SMS channels are most vibrantly used source to market their products, it can reach almost everyone and also a cost effective strategy for marketing.

Loyalty cards

This is the latest trend to encourage customer to purchase their products. These cards include reward points and gifts to the person who make purchase on this card specific to a company or group of organizations. These are seen everywhere very flexible to the user and beneficial in saving various costs.

Free Shipping and Delivery

Many companies companies provide free shipping options or pick up from the nearest in-store to cut down the shipping costs for customers. This is a type of marketing to influence the customers to buy products at their site.

Search Engine Marketing

This is a strategy to improve visibility of an online store to the customers impacting the confidence levels of customers convincing them it as the best place for our purchase. Recently, Elemis has appointed a Search engine expert to improve the visibility of their products.  Usually people are with an illusion the site which comes up for their keyword is the best one and this strategy will definitely improve conversion rates.

Coupons

The coupon strategy is seen everywhere, one can get coupons from the retailers, banks, promoting companies, SEM etc to encourage the customers to buy the products.

 Visual Displays

Most for the companies implementing their own specific displays at various places for marketing and purchase of their products. Ex: SmartPods, large display screens introduced in Airports, encourage buyers to order their likely products and get delivered before they reaches their home place.

There are many more like this this goes infinite if we go on talking.

What is POS Terminal at Retail Stores

A POS terminal is an electronic devices used to process payment through cards at retail shops. It is an alternative for cash register used before the advent of POS systems to register transactions.

POS terminal is a hub for payment operations at a retail shops, Shopping malls etc and is capable of connecting various devices to read the product like barcode scanner, card reader, receipt printer etc.

The POS terminal requires a network connection to verify the customer card, check for the availability of funds in his account and transfer the funds to retailer account. When the card is swiped, the card reader scans the magnetic strip on he card, get the customer details which are used to verify the customer and process payment.

The advanced POS systems help the retailer to better understand the sales and proceed with the optimal business option. PC-based POS terminals provide customizable sales reporting, complete inventory tracking, multi-terminal networking and custom inventory reporting.

The scalability of POS can be of various types depending upon the network connection

A shared network connection is used to process money cards at every station of their shopping points. This type of network POS terminal allows connect all its payment terminals or a group of organizations.

Some POS devices need their own dial-up connection but cannot register multiple cash registers. These type of POS devices are expensive.

One affordable POS option is Internet credit card processing. This has better credit card processing rates and can be used by an entire network of POS terminals. Internet credit card processing will reduce costs and save your customers time at the register.

PC POS terminals can be bought either with only hardware and you can fill your own reliable program or a harware packaged with uninstalled software and hardware pre-installed and pre configured.

Bravaria introduces Loyalty Program through apps

Bavaria, the independent dutch brewer had collaborated with Mobile App shop scan save to build apps for iPhone and Android system, to roll-out their beer products all in UK convenience store, offing cost savings on the whole sale of their products.

The stores will be benefitting with additional cost saving procedures, who buy from his apps as a part of loylty program. The smartphone users can load this free app and place orders as per the requirement.

The Ship Scan Save users can save costs on this range of products and hundreds of branded product, which now include Bavaria’s lager shady, larger and alcohol-free beers. These Offers will start with the releasing of app from october. This is an active loyalty program to roll-out all it tasty, alcohol-free beer products.

A Search Engine Marketing Expert for Elemis

Elemis, the leading luxury British spa and skincare brand would like to enable search engine optimization to their website in-order to drive more traffic for valuable search terms, increasing its options to protect its brand.

It has selected Agenda21 as its Search Engine Marketing expert to implement web-analytics to its SEM project. It need to improve the visibility of their websites driving traffic for popular keywords and also should analyse the behavior of customers on their website to improve conversion rates.

Nicola Anderson, head of online and CRM at Elemis, stated: “We have great targets to improve our online sales rate and started this with SEM expert to make our websites visible and easy to find for the people online for Elemis, as well as those seeking beauty products in general.”

Retail Technology Devices for Evolving Commerce

The retail sector has become competitive in the recent years, retail giants need to update their retail technology to entice the customers with better shopping experience in their stores. The latest technology updates had changed the scope of applications and flexibility of customers. The advent of smart phones and smartpod’s had changed the way of shopping searching for their delighted purchases at one touch.

The retail technology has not yet stopped with M-Commerce, retailers are in quest of various channels to reach the customers. The scale of technology and techniques being implemented makes us understand the growing competition among the retail companies. Recently some companies like Footasylum implemented SmartPods, a large screen for in-store shopping kept the organization ahead of other retailers attracting the customers. There are many other options that help the companies better to keep the customer confidence and interest.

POS Devices

The POS devices are the improved alternative of cash registers (used previously for recording the sales of their customers). These are designed to register the customer sales integrated with improved I/O devices. The barcode scanners which are attached to this POS devices, used to read the product bought by the customer and register its details along with the customer details through smart cards, loyalty cards, smart phone etc.

The POS devices add many benefits to the customers as well as shoppers, the registered details are used to provide coupons for the regular customers and also likely products. The Shopper can learn the sales range of products and act accordingly in placing an order. The smart POS devices implemented everywhere in retail shops and supermarkets keeping the flexibility of customers in mind.

Smart Phones

The advent of SmartPhones had changed entire E-Commerce management, now every retailer is spending much on building their mobile E-Commerce. In other words, it is called as M-Commerce. M-Commerce launching special and specific mobile apps for their products implementing flexible buying methods and secure check-out process keeping the confidence of customers.

Special Apps

Recent track record of retail technology conveys the utilization of apps to reach the customers. Retailers are developing their own apps and specialized options for better experience, making their store available within their handset.

Some apps in fashion and clothing stay ahead when comes to shopping through online because in online shopping there may be size variations as they couldn’t get the exact dimensions of what they need. This is reason for rejecting most of the online purchases when come particularly to fashion and clothing products. Apps were designed specific to retailer to get exact dimensions of the product and also manifests the dresses suited to size of the body basing on the certain parameters like age, weight and height etc provided as input to the app.

3D shopping

This was the latest trend to entice the customers, 3D websites are designed to make the customer to feel the shop lively with exact dimensions of the item. This allows the customers to choose the right product suited to their needs.

Price Tags

The digital price tags is one more innovate step, removing the paper based tags and handling of price variations of a product. This removes the enigmatic state between the customers and the retailer at price.

Set-Top boxes

A button on the remote control and the set-top box can deliver an item to the customer. Here, TV acts as a point of sale device which can reach to almost 60% of people. If you wanna make a purchase a book displayed while watching a favorite program, a button on he remote control makes a quick purchase and deliver to your address.

Barcode Scanner

This made easy of recording of products and deliver receipts easily to customers saving customer time. These detail allow retailer to note the purchases of the customers and analysis the Point of Sale statistics.

 

RFID Scanners

The technology has improved so much that it can detect the inventory levels and place to order when necessary. It also applied to home appliances such as Refrigerators, where the RFID Scanners detect the consumption of items and can inform the grocery store to supply grocery products.

Contact-less payment cards

Credit and debit cards need to swiped to pay the bill but increasing technology introduced contact-less payment cards, which is accessible anywhere through a wireless network within the shop or in-store. This types of cards some most of the customers time wasted for waiting in queues to pay bill.

 

 

 

C1000 Enhances it’s EDI Procure-to-Pay process With Descartes Validation Service

C1000, the second largest super market group in Netherlands now in a pace to change its Electronic Data Interchange( EDI ) process, enhancing procure-to-pay process.

C1000 selects Descartes, an on demand software solution provider, for using it’s new validation service improving accuracy in EDI process. The supply chain manager at C1000 says “The service availed from Discartes goes beyond EDI process and it is important to look supply chain as a whole. In a week, we are receiving around 2500 EDI messages in error. This need to be fixed and entitled for seamless flow of EDI data and should completely change our process to meet our future demands. This is reason that why we have sleeted Discartes as our technical solution provider, which can anticipate our needs.”

Descartes specifies EDI messages to validate against GS1 standards, the most widely anticipated standards by many customers. The data validation service of Descartes check both syntactically and also content. There are various parameters used by retailers and those who do not follow the specifications of it’s validation service will fail and are replied with a rejection report.

This functionality helped C1000 to reduce it error rate and also can collaborate with it’s trading partners to further reduce the errors. This saves most of the C1000’s time and also improves its relationship with suppliers and the level of service which it offers.

ERPVAR.com & EDI Solution Developer B2BGateway Collaborates to Stimulate Effective EDI Solution

B2BGateway provides fully integrated EDI solutions to end users with collaboration of various ERP consultants.

Network of ERP consultants partner with B2BGateway to extend fully-integrated EDI solutions to end users.

The global EDI solution provider B2BGatway and ETPVAR.com, a network of Microsoft Dynamics, Epicor, NetSuite, Intacct and Intuit Value-Added Resellers (VARs), partnered to participate in a monthly webcast, to make their customers understand the stupendous solutions provided by their integration. They intend to educate customers how their cloud based integrated solutions will be effective and how can they save their implementations costs suited to their requirements. The webcast also include, outlining the benefits of implementing EDI solutions with automated supply chain process, explained by B2BGateway along with five VAR partners touching the latest trends of B2B.

ERP VAR Founder says, ” B2B Gateway is the leading provider of EDI solutions and we are excited to partner with B2BGateway implementing various effective EDI Solutions through ERP VAR network integrating its add-ons and consultants.”

Ocado implements competitor pricing intelligence

Ocado, a UK online grocer changes it’s pricing mechanism to offer optimized prices compared to it’s competetors. It selects Profitero for implementing this intelligent pricing mechanism.

Ocado has acquired the pricing technology from Profitero to serve the customer better providing them optimized price for the products at their store with the daily online pricing data of its competitors. The precise and timely pricing information of it’s competitors will help Ocado to remak it’s excellence in providing optimized price to customers compared to it’s competitors.

The grocery retailer has choosen Profitero to implement pricing technology as it offers most scalable service suitable to it’s operations. The marketing manager of Profitero said that it delivers highest accuracy and success match rates, achieving 25% to 30% success than their competitors. It also allows customization of products specific to the meeds of customer.

This pricing technology will improve the sales and consumer confidence levels of getting the product at right price. Now there is no need to look a ten places for a valuable product compromising price, it can check all the prices and get the optimal pricing margin. To attain great success rate there need to be a timely and accurate pricing information of the product and the UK retailer Ocado says Profitero is best one to meet our demands.

Thomas Thomaidis, head of grocery merchandising stated“Precise pricing information is important for Ocado to help in improving our value and range of offers to our customers. Profitero have understood our mission to be different and have met all of our challenges in every step of the journey to achieve this.”