POSWizard

By Simit Patel

Simit Patel is a trader, writer, and technology entrepreneur. Simit blogs via Contently.com.

A “door buster” is a loss leader. The idea is to sell a product at or below cost, as a way of getting customers into your store. The expectation is that customers will then purchase additional goods and services that are selling at a higher profit margin. From this perspective, door busters can be a winning marketing tool to help businesses grow their customer base and increase their profits. 

Sadly for merchants, though, door busters don’t always work. Some people only purchase the loss leader, and don’t return, so there are no purchases of additional goods or services to generate profits for the business. Door busters, in these cases, can actually be dangerous, as companies take losses that they may have failed to foresee.  

There are ways to get the most out of door buster strategies, through. Here are three easy and effective tactics store owners can use to both bring in and build business.

Make your door buster deals social

The concept of happy hour in bars is perhaps the quintessential example
of a social door buster, and one that has worked well enough to have
succeeded for decades across generations and cultures. 

To make your door busters social, make your promotion an event so
people will be happy to come, and bring friends or colleagues as well.

Make upselling easy

Restaurateur Cary Friedman found that a door buster he ran was his most successful advertising venture in his more than 29 years of owning a food service business. The key to the success was that his menu made it easier to upsell dessert on the discounted main courses.

Amazon is now using its new tablet computer, the Kindle Fire, as a door buster to draw customers into the Amazon system. Once purchased, it’s making it as easy as possible for buyers to use the tablet to buy additional products. 

Find recurring customers 

Door busters can also be a successful way to secure recurring customers. When planning a door buster deal, it makes sense to know who your ideal customer is, and then, what makes that customer come back when there is no deal available. Applying that information to a special sale will ensure its success.

Merchants who do the necessary market research, and  structure their offers to provide additional sales in conjunction with the door buster deal, as well as return sales from purchasers of loss leader items, will find this an effective way to do business. They’ll penetrate new markets and increase their share of the customer’s spend. 

By Dan Rafter

Dan Rafter is a freelance writer and editor with 15 years of journalism experience. Dan blogs via Contently.com.

Succeeding as a retailer is no easy task in today’s challenging economy. The national unemployment rate refuses to fall under 9%. Housing foreclosures continue to rise as home values keep falling. Consumers are more cautious than ever with their dollars. This means that they’re spending less at their local hardware store, beauty salon, grocery store or bakery.

Retailers who want to survive in this tough economy must cut their costs. One way to do this, and one that is growing in popularity among savvy retailers, is to rely on cloud computing services.

When businesses rely on cloud computing, they are simply removing their business computing programs from their own in-house computers to offline hosts. Most computer users are already familiar with cloud computing even though they might not realize it. Users who get their email from services such as Yahoo! or Hotmail, for instance, are using cloud computing.

For retailers, the benefits of cloud computing are many. Instead of investing in a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint, retailers can log onto the home page of a company that gives them access to a program that works in a similar way.

It’s easy to see more small retailers switching from hosting their own in-house software programs to relying on the cloud to do it for them.

For one, such a move makes obvious financial sense. Instead of paying for an expensive piece of software, businesses simply pay a host company for the amount of time they spend using their software. As a recent post on the Microsoft blog puts it, retailers who commit to the cloud won’t waste financial resources on software they use infrequently

That’s the obvious benefit of cloud computing services. But taken alone, however, it’s not enough to create a future in which cloud computing is the norm. But there are many other benefits that might do this.

For instance, many retailers rely on the work of employees who spend much of their time on the road. Salespeople, consultants and photographers can’t do their jobs while shackled to their desks. Retailers who connect to cloud computing services, though, can give these employees the freedom they need to survive.

As the Microsoft post says, these desk-less employees can log onto shared servers — hosted offline — from wherever they happen to be. They can read email messages from the airport and update PowerPoint presentations from their hotel rooms, saving the results in shared files that their co-workers can easily update from wherever they happen to be.

By using cloud computing, retailers can save money during those times of the year in which their business naturally lags.

Landscaping companies, for instance, see their business grind to a halt during the winter months. Instead of paying full price for presentation software or accounting programs that they’ll rarely use during certain months, retailers can instead “rent” these programs from cloud computing sites for those periods in which their business is actually booming. 

In a recent paper, consulting firm Accenture wrote that retailers can rely on cloud computing services to focus more on the needs of their customers, reduce their own costs of doing business and reach a wider net of customers. The company wrote, too, that no leader in business today can afford to ignore cloud computing.

That’s a bold statement coming from an established consulting firm such as Accenture. It’s also a message that retailers need to hear. With the amount of money that retailers can save by going with cloud computing, it’s easy to picture a time in which businesses who rely solely on the cloud for their computing needs are the norm, and not the exception.

When someone refers to an online point of sale system, they’re usually referring to cloud based point of sale software. This means the POS system runs online and doesn’t require an installation on your local computer or specialized hardware (other than the point of sale machine itself). The majority of systems being programmed these days are cloud based because it’s easier for retailers to use and doesn’t require on-site maintenance or repair.

Additionally, online point of sale software is automatically updated with new features and doesn’t require an manual installation. You just connect your device to the online software and a merchant gateway and you’re ready to process a transaction! This makes it easy to use even complicated features, like inventory tracking, and makes customer service faster.

From a developer’s perspective, online pos software is beneficial because it allows you to make big improvements to your software without requiring a software update on every user’s computer. This makes it easier to tweak your programming and user experience without interrupting service.

Roderick Campbell is the owner of Brevity Works, a boutique marketing agency, and a frequent business development blogger at ChiroHosting.com