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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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:
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.
Suggest similar or complementary products or services to your customers to increase the average purchase amount.
You can break down a set of multiple products into individual items in your inventory, saving you time in stocking them.
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.
Here’s how Alice POS could benefit franchises, business networks and buying groups:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
To learn more about how Ecwid eCommerce and Alice POS can enable you to sell to multiple locations, see our article on multichannel commerce.
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.
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.