You can now connect Alice POS to your Ecwid eCommerce store. Alice POS is a point of sale solution designed to help businesses record their sales in person and manage their store branches. Whether it’s a single store or a large franchise, with Alice POS you can manage your sales, inventory, prices, reports, stores all in one place. Ecwid is an e-commerce platform of choice that allows you to sell anywhere at any time.

What are the Advantages of Having Alice POS and Ecwid eCommerce?

Together, Ecwid’s omnichannel solution and Alice POS’s point of sale allow retailers to sell wherever their customers shop, including on their Facebook or Instagram corporate page, and through a third party application on Amazon and eBay. All product orders are automatically synchronized between the seller’s online store and the physical store, saving huge amounts of time and money in terms of inventory and sales management.

What is a Point of Sale System?

A point-of-sale (POS) system is a combination of software and hardware that allows merchants to make in-person sales. The software allows to process transactions, as well as manage orders, inventory, and staff. The hardware may include a POS terminal, a cash drawer, a credit card reader, a receipt printer, a barcode scanner, and a customer facing display. However, the set of hardware products may differ per merchant depending on their specific needs. 

If you sell both online and offline and use a point-of-sale system that connects to e-commerce platforms, this allows you to synchronize your online and in-person sales and keep your inventory up to date in real time. This is especially convenient when you own a brick and mortar store and want to synchronize your physical and virtual inventory, allowing you to better track your inventory.

What is the Difference Between a Payment Terminal and a Point-of-Sale Solution?

Payment processing solutions provide terminals for processing credit or debit card payments, while the point of sale manages customer profiles, inventory and records the transaction. The payment processing solution plays a role after the store has recorded the transaction. It’s important to note that, in many cases, it’s not the store software that provides this service: payment processing is often handled by an external company. For example, Alice POS works closely with certified companies that offer highly secure payment processing solutions. You can learn more about our payment terminal partners here.

Make sure your point-of-sale and terminal are integrated or semi-integrated with your payment processing solution. This feature is very important for many reasons. If your terminal is semi-integrated with your point of sale, it can provide an extra level of security by preventing manual entry errors, payment processing and mistakes in the choice of payment method at the time of sale. 

Choosing a point of sale that is already semi-integrated with your preferred payment solution can also save you costs. If the integration already exists, you can avoid the costs of developing this functionality. If the software does not include this functionality by default, this may result in additional costs for you and your business. 

Who Needs a Point-of-Sale System?

A point-of-sale system can be useful for online merchants and brick & mortar owners who want to better manage their inventory and grow their business.

If you sell online and are considering opening a brick-and-mortar store

Sometimes online merchants want to start selling in-person too, be it in a brick-and-mortar store, or at a kiosk at markets, trade shows, festivals, or in a pop-up shop.

If you sell in person and are considering opening an online store

If you haven’t decided to put your business online yet, it’s time to do so. More and more people are turning to digital commerce: the number of online shoppers is expected to reach 2.14 billion people worldwide by 2021.

Consumers shop on websites, applications, social media platforms and marketplaces. With e-commerce platforms such as Ecwid, you can sell through all the above mentioned channels, reach more people and possibly get more customers. If you use a point of sale system, it will help you synchronize your sales (virtual and physical) and inventory, so you can organize and synch all your sales sources.

If you want to be more efficient in managing your inventory 

If you use a point of sale system that connects to your e-commerce platform, it will synchronize your in-store inventory with your online inventory. This way, you won’t have to hire a resource to manually manage your inventory in multiple locations and you won’t be out of stock unexpectedly due to over-selling. This can help you save on operational costs and provide a better customer experience. Learn more about the importance of customer experience in this article on our blog.

Alice POS for Single Store Owners

Alice POS is an all-in-one cloud-based point-of-sale solution designed to help businesses of all sizes. Alice POS is powerful enough to support a franchise, but it can also benefit individual store owners who are looking to expand.

Alice POS works worldwide and supports three languages: French, English and Spanish.

Increase in-store and online revenue streams

With Alice POS, you can manage rentals, repairs, consignments, trade-ins and second-hand goods. These are key features that are required in certain industries, here are a few examples:

  • Rentals: This feature is useful for store owners who wish to rent items to their customers, such as bicycles and scooters.
  • Repairs : Alice POS allows retailers to manage repairs in their stores, for example sports items such as bicycles or electronics and everything in between.
  • Consignments: This function allows you to hold customers’ merchandise until it’s sold and share the profits with them. It is particularly useful for the used clothing industry, such as second-hand clothing and thrift stores.
  • Exchanges: Video game stores love this feature, which allows them to buy inventory (such as used games) from customers and resell it back to their stores.
  • Second-hand / Used goods: This function is essential for managing the sale of second-hand or used goods. It’s an excellent feature for the sports industry, especially when it comes to hockey equipment, skates and skis.

Each of these features can allow merchants to create new revenue streams, or centrally manage their existing revenue streams to an all-in-one point of sale. Having a single system to manage a variety of selling options saves the cost and time associated with using multiple software systems.

Cross-selling

Suggest similar or complementary products or services to your customers to increase the average purchase amount.

Manage package breakdown 

You can break down a set of multiple products into individual items in your inventory, saving you time in stocking them.

Easily migrate from your current point of sale 

If you already use a POS system but want to try Alice POS, you don’t have to worry about the migration, installation and training process. The Alice POS team will import all your products, customers and inventory list for you. We will also help train your team. To learn more about the migration process, click here.

Alice POS for franchises and networks

Here’s how Alice POS could benefit franchises, business networks and buying groups:

Manage multiple stores from a single dashboard

Alice POS was designed for multi-branch stores such as franchises, buying groups and corporate networks, and allows all stores to be managed from a single dashboard. 

To easily manage such multi-store structures, you can create a Master and SubMaster account. A Master account is usually managed by the head office, and a SubMaster account is usually managed by a store owner who owns more than one store in the network. You can also let managers create custom profiles and provide users with role-based user permissions. 

Easily transfer inventory levels between your physical locations

If you have more than one storage location, you can quickly transfer stock between stores. For example, you can transfer stock from one store to another in case stock levels are low in one of your locations. In addition, managers can control the number of products available in stores, track material transactions, and determine the amount of revenue collected. 

Update prices, promotion terms and conditions for all your stores

You can use your master account or master sub-account to create promotions or change prices once and then apply them to different stores to save time. Stores that receive the price list can accept all changes or adapt prices to their local market. This way, you save time while managing multiple stores.

Give local managers the opportunity to add products and set prices.

Network stores can sell their own products or set their own prices. With Alice POS, you or your store managers can create local products and prices, if the main Master account allows it.

Get reports for all stores in a single dashboard

Alice POS collects reports from the different stores and groups them in one place for easy access and analysis. This means that the head office can view the reports for each store and take action accordingly. Stores can also provide access to an accountant so that he or she can manage accounting remotely. 

Benefit from customised development and training

Alice POS adapts to your needs and offers customized developments that can be particularly important for large networks. The Alice POS team can serve you in English and French.

The Alice POS team will not only train you and your team, it will accompany you at every step and adapt to the specific needs of your company.

Which companies would benefit from Ecwid eCommerce?

With Ecwid eCommerce and Alice POS, retailers can easily connect their online store with powerful third party applications. Ecwid and its partners allow merchants to quickly and easily advertise in Google Shopping. Ecwid offers an easy configuration of the Facebook pixel to re-target ads to people who have visited the retailer’s online shop.

 

Ecwid also allows merchants who already have a created website in a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Wix or Weebly to connect their brand new Ecwid shop to their existing website, and to other websites they manage. This allows them to save time and money on the need to create a website from scratch. If a merchant does not yet have a website, Ecwid e-commerce offers an integrated website that they can use to get started.

 

With Ecwid eCommerce and Alice POS, retailers can:

  • Synchronize order data and inventory from both online and offline channels.
  • Sell almost anywhere, anytime online and in person, extending their business reach.
  • Accept payments online, in person and on the road, without ever missing a sale

To learn more about how Ecwid eCommerce and Alice POS can enable you to sell to multiple locations, see our article on multichannel commerce.

How to connect your Alice POS to Ecwid eCommerce

It’s not always easy to know if the point of sale you want to set up is really adapted to your specific needs. Setting up a new point of sale can represent a significant change in your business, especially in terms of data migration and employee training. 

This is why Alice POS has an easy migration and training process. We want to make sure that your choice is really adapted to your needs before you start. So, if you are considering connecting your Alice POS to Ecwid, simply contact our sales team or fill in this form.

After filling in the form above, the Alice POS team will contact you. During a 15 to 30 minute call, you will be able to talk about your specific needs and learn if Alice POS with Ecwid eCommerce with Alice POS is adapted to your business needs. If you think it is, the Alice POS team will provide you with more information to help you make your choice. If you decide that Alice POS and Ecwid are adapted to your business needs, the integration team will help you migrate your data, train your team and connect your POS to your Ecwid store for seamless in-store and online sales.

Choose the right POS system for your store

POS systems with an eCommerce solution such as Ecwid allow you to synchronize your in-person and online sales as well as your inventory, which is essential for retailers using different sales channels. If you would like to know more about Alice POS, please contact our sales team.

This article was originally published on Ecwid.com and was modified to fit Alice POS’s audience.

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