Power of Retail Portals

Posted by CRMJetty on October 21st, 2019

Having a retail shop in this e-commerce era can be a little overwhelming because of the monstrous competition. But when you have one it is important to build relations with customers for maximum retention and success. Do you know when you can communicate the most with your customers?

Point of Sale, yes you heard it right!

At the time of billing, you know about their shopping experience and other interests. You also learn what other things they expect from your store.

On the other side to serve them better, a portal can help enhance their experience. It provides transparency and increase the overall efficiency of your retail business. You can opt for Sugar CRM WordPress Customer Portal if you use WordPress as your backend.

Let's discuss what other things you can provide through portal and how it helps you to manage and grow:

Customer-Centric Flow:

It helps you grow your customer base. Your customers can get special benefits like first access to the product, easily know when the products are back in stock. As a retailer, you can also use it to know which products do your customers frequently purchase. You can send them campaign emails as well. These things help you understand your customer's needs.

For example, you have 50 loyal customers. They always come to your shop to buy clothes as they find your stores collection to be trendy and unique. In case when any new design arrives and by the time they come to buy it, those clothes have gone out of stock. In such a scenario if you have this in your portal they can check the availability and then come.

Multiple Payment Options:

Gone are the days when we were using magstripe or EMV chips for payments. At present, your customers can easily pay via Near-Field Communication (NFC). Thus, your point of sale must support the NFC payment option. The advantage of having a portal solution is that it supports multiple payment options. Additionally, it will also show you the discount coupons so you can apply them directly when the discount campaign is going on.

Employee Management:

The retail portal integrates with your employment management system. This will be helpful as it gives employee check-in, check-out functions. You can track which employee was present when a particular product was sold. The perk of doing so is the streamlined management of your employees.

For instance, you can assign access to the portal role-based for your employees. Managers of your store can have the right to approve leaves, create sales reports and arrange shifts for other employees. And employees who work at billing can have access to invoice generation, catalog management, inventory view access and modification rights of customer directory.

Interactive Dashboard:

Your employees get a personalized dashboard for a quick overview of their daily activities. They can know their working hours, shift details, leaves, etc in visual presentation. Along with this, they can access the inventory and customer directory. With the inventory feature, they can know the details of the stock, products sold, used coupons during the campaign.

The inventory module allows your employees to quickly check if the product is out of stock or is about to expire. The dashboard has the details of sold products, discount coupons you have offered and invoices you have made.

Invoice Management:

It helps you to overcome the drawbacks of generating a manual invoice. You can easily generate it from the system and send it to your customers via email/SMS. You can also save a copy in your CRM system. Your customers can see their order history and invoices in the portal.

Vendor Management:

Suppose one of your best selling products are out of stock. And between all the shop chaos you might forget to notify the vendor about the availability. In such a scenario, your retail portal can be your savior.

With its vendor management section, you can tell your vendors whenever your products are out of stock. Additionally, vendors can get alerts whenever there is low stock. Such a facility makes it easy for them to understand how their product is performing and makes your product management easy. Such a system helps you to notify your vendors with decision making in regards to their business.

Final Words

Apart from these features retails portal has grown a lot, in terms of capabilities. You can find one suitable for your business available on various platforms, like Sugar CRM customer portal, Salesforce customer portal, etc. The advancement of portals has helped retail store owners as well as vendors a lot in their business, and helped them with decision making, knowing their customer requirements and managing the store.


Source: https://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/business-ideas-articles/power-retail-portals-1747051.html

Like it? Share it!


CRMJetty

About the Author

CRMJetty
Joined: March 12th, 2019
Articles Posted: 141

More by this author