Key results
- Fast rollout of unattended fuel sites
- No need to run multiple systems across channels
- Easily repurpose existing systems and infrastructure
When Z Energy (Z) launched the U-GO fuel station brand in New Zealand earlier this year, it was looking to meet the needs of customers who want to match great value with fast and convenient self-service. It was also building on its reputation as a leading fuel retailer in the New Zealand market.
With a nationwide network of retail service stations, Z offers customers a range of full-service amenities, including hot food, snacks and coffee, car washes, EV charging and trailer hire, as well as the Z Rewards loyalty programme.
By converting select existing stations into U-GO sites that offer only pay-at-the-pump fuel delivery, the company was able to keep serving its customers in a way that best suited them but without incurring the cost of building new locations from the ground up.
As Z’s Customer General Manager Tim Bailey said, “We've identified a small number of locations in our current network where a self-service fuel station would better meet customer needs. We're working to convert these into U-GO branded sites now. Z and U-GO have different offers and are designed to appeal to different customers.”
In making the transition, Z turned to its long-term partner Triquestra to provide the retail solution that would underpin the new offering, via the Infinity retail management system.
Triquestra has worked alongside Z to deliver a range of services and offers at its attended sites, including the Pumped and Z Rewards loyalty schemes, virtual fuel solution Sharetank, as well as comprehensive wet stock and dry stock POS functionality. Infinity’s flexibility meant that U-GO could use the same underlying retail solution, stripped back to suit the needs of unattended sites.
It also meant that U-GO sites could be up and running quickly. Implementing a single, modular platform across all retail channels allowed Z to scale efficiently and avoid the usual complexity that comes with managing multiple systems. The result has been a quick and seamless rollout at unattended sites.
“We’ve been able to roll out technology quickly by configuring existing tools instead of building custom solutions. This has allowed us to tailor the solution to the market in just a few days.”
By leveraging the power of Infinity, U-GO has brought greater competition into the self-service fuel retail market in New Zealand, offering competitive local fuel pricing for all U-GO customers.
For Z, partnering with Triquestra and Infinity has allowed them to build on an existing relationship to deliver for all their customers, wherever they are and whatever they need, in a seamless, cost-effective way.
Changing your POS? 7 questions to ask before taking the leap
In a recent blog, we talked about how the retail store is and will likely remain vital for customers who value trusted advice, social engagement and tactile product discovery. And those customers will continue to have high expectations of the instore experience, including the expectation that it will be harmonised with the shopping they do online.
As your store evolves to meet a future where it can serve as an experiential hub and as mission control for customer fulfilment, you need to ensure that your retail platform is keeping pace rather than holding you back.
Here we look at the challenges retailers experience when making the shift to a new POS, and the important questions you need to ask before choosing a new platform.
The POS upgrade challenge
Preparing the point of sale for a future where tech-savvy consumers expect ‘phygital’ omnichannel experiences can be daunting.
Retailers need to keep up with shoppers’ demand for a unified, cross-channel buying journey, but many have outdated point of sale systems that aren’t suited to the task.
Making the shift to a new point of sale comes with challenges, though, especially when margins are tight. Fear of losing revenue through potential disruption to current operations and having to invest in staff training while perhaps not achieving anticipated returns can deter retailers from taking the leap.
You don’t want a project that fails to deliver the desired returns because the wrong product was selected.
So how do you select the right system for your business requirements?
Here are the 7 questions to ask when looking for a new POS.
1. Can it be implemented and deployed rapidly?
The number one priority for most of the retailers we speak with is speed of deployment.
To minimise the operational disruption, you’ll need a platform built on a modern architecture. All your core requirements need to come out-of-the-box, along with the ability to customise and easily add new functionality.
When you choose a partner with a mature platform, they can focus on delivering innovation because the core functionality you need already exists.
Check the provider has recent and proven success planning, implementing and managing complex, large-scale deployments across multiple stores, formats and geographies. They’ll need to understand your fast-paced, data-intensive environment where any significant level of downtime is unacceptable. And their people will need to be skilled in helping you plan and implement your projects so that they work for you now and into the future.
Our client Z Energy was able to quickly and seamlessly convert some of its existing fuel locations into unattended self-service U-GO sites.
“By using a modular platform, we’ve been able to roll out technology quickly by configuring existing tools instead of building custom solutions. This has allowed us to tailor the solution to the market in just a few days.”
2. Will it support your unified commerce business model?
Today, the store is the epicentre for all your unified commerce activity.
That means you’ll want a point of sale system that supports endless aisle, click and collect, store fulfilment, pricing and promotions, clienteling and loyalty, as well as functions that allow customers to search, transact, acquire and consume products across all your channels.
You don’t want to be tied to a point player that can only provide parts of a total solution.
“The reason unified commerce resonated with me is that it would give us one core platform to do the heavy lifting and a single source of truth to manage the customer data, inventory and order orchestration, rather than relying on too many systems to push and pull data everywhere.”
3. Does it allow your store team to deliver exceptional service?
The new solution needs to empower store teams to deliver a superior, frictionless customer experience that maximises their productivity, no matter where they are in the store.
An easy-to-use UX and straightforward setup will enable new employees to quickly learn the system and begin selling almost right away. By removing the frustrations caused by complex technology, you'll also help lower staff turnover.
In addition, by consolidating store technology onto a single POS-based retail system, your teams can do everything in a single view, from sales transactions, customer loyalty, pricing, product and promotions through to virtual appointments and endless aisle access to stock.
4. Will the system work offline?
Delivering exceptional customer service is irrelevant if your staff can’t complete sales.
When inevitable network outages happen, you need to know that your POS will keep all your stores operational without any disruption.
When implemented correctly, the offline POS experience should be so seamless that your staff may not even realise the system is offline.
Though some features may be limited, it's essential to know what transactions can still be processed during the loss of connectivity. For example, the system should handle card and cash payments, process returns, capture customer data and link it to profiles, and continue scanning products for smooth checkouts.
5. Can it grow with you, and adapt to change?
Whether you're expanding into new locations or launching pop-up stores, your POS system must be scalable and adaptable to change. While it might seem obvious, scalability can easily be overlooked in the excitement of cutting-edge technology.
Your growth plans should account for how your physical stores can complement your online presence, so that your POS solution can function across channels in the same way as your ecommerce platform.
It should operate seamlessly across tablets, phones and fixed tills, allowing transactions to flow between devices effortlessly. This flexibility not only opens up possibilities for innovative store layouts but also provides the practical benefit of better backup strategies for your devices.
Your partner should let third-party solutions connect via APIs so that you are free to focus your development efforts on the front-end. You can be more agile and create a community of third-party apps and systems that work together in an ecosystem. As a result, you’ll reduce integration and maintenance overheads, increase real-time accuracy and enjoy virtually limitless scalability and agility.
6. Will it make complex sales simple?
Enterprise retailers with multiple brands, B2B operations or franchises will need a POS system that makes complex sales simple.
You’ll want the power to set pricing and promotion rules, permissions, return and refund validation, discounting and cash management from either head office or at store level.
And you’ll want to ensure the solution supports complex sales like charge-to-account, quote management by channel, debtor management, loyalty and all types of pricing, including retail, trade, contract, promotional, project, customer-specific and rules based.
“Infinity is one of the few platforms able to accommodate our diverse business model, with both retail and wholesale customers requiring multiple volume breaks and bulk purchasing. And Infinity’s New Zealand presence gives us an out-of-the box solution with local capabilities that can be customised to our requirements.”
7. Can you rely on the vendor for new functionality and ongoing support?
Working with the right people and processes will make the rollout of your new point of sale much easier and deliver results much faster.
A partner located in the Australia-New Zealand market means you’ll have direct access to second- and third-level support, as well as direct contact with people committed to your success.
You’ll also have more influence on the product roadmap and have to deal with less bureaucracy to get things done. And a mid-size partner is more likely to view you as an important customer of influence.
This blog was originally published in September 2024 and updated November 2025.
Want help to modernise your point of sale?
As you transform your customer experience to deliver the seamless and personalised buying journeys your customers crave, your point of sale system must transform as well. If you’re looking for help to shape your strategy and extend your omnichannel capabilities, get in touch. We’d love to help you develop the solutions you need now and guide you to where you’re headed next.
For more on how a move to a unified commerce strategy gives you the flexibility and agility you need to keep in step with consumers’ changing needs, download our ebook:
New in Infinity — October 2025
Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team reduce operational complexity and create a differentiated omnichannel customer experience.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
INVENTORY
Schedule pre-defined POS stock takes at back office and head office
Infinity’s stock take schedule function is a great way to run pre-defined, repeatable stock takes at the point of sale. Managing site-specific schedules is even easier now that stores can create and maintain their own scheduled stock takes without the risk that they will be overwritten by the head office.
CUSTOMER AND LOYALTY
Enhance your gift card offering
Enticing your customers with regular loyalty offers and redemptions is a key to unlocking repeat business. You have even more ways to keep them coming back now that you can use gift cards with PIN numbers, offering shoppers a wider range of options for collecting and redeeming dollar amounts at your stores.
Note that this enhancement relates to any digital gift cards using the epay New Zealand solution on Windcave devices.
REPORTS AND ANALYTICS
Easily see the theoretical GP items should sell at, today
Setting items’ sell price can be a make-or-break decision for a retail business. You need to base that decision on the best information available, and you need to know that you won’t be selling at a loss.
Infinity’s new Theoretical GP Report gives you all this and more. It supports both your promotional and buying activity by calculating the theoretical gross profit an item should sell at right now. You can use it to get a single view of retail prices, promotional prices and the value of stock on hand based on current item and rules-based pricing master data, not sales data.
And because it doesn’t rely on sales to have taken place, you can set promotional pricing without the risk of selling items at a loss, giving you confidence that you’re making informed decisions that support your business’s profitability.
POINT OF SALE
Quickly identify premium delivery orders
When customers ask for items to be delivered they expect fast, reliable service. And if you offer a paid premium delivery service, such as those supported by Uber Eats and Delivereasy, expectations go to the next level.
Using Infinity, you can now easily identify priority orders at the point of sale both on screen and by way of a sound notification. Your store staff are alerted to which orders they need to act on first, allowing them to deliver the great, speedy service customers demand.
Leverage the efficiency of Adyen referenced refunds
Spending time ensuring customers are being refunded correct amounts can add unwanted cost to your business. Infinity’s integration to Adyen now reduces this burden through referenced refunds, which tie refunds to specific payments.
Omnichannel as well as in-store transactions are supported. Online refunds can be refunded to the original card in-store either with or without the customer being present, giving both you and your customers greater flexibility and peace of mind when it comes to processing refunds.
TECHNOLOGY
Use AOAGs to manage failovers
Infinity ETL licensing now supports Always On Availability Groups (AOAG). It uses the listener’s name instead of the name of the server running the SQL server instance, saving you the time and effort of having to manually intervene in case of a failover.
Note that if you currently have ETL installed, you’ll need to relicense it for this enhancement to work. Also, if the SQL Server is not part of an AOAG, the licensing logic remains unchanged.
Save time cleaning up email messages
If you use Infinity Messaging to send emails and attachments to customers, you’ll no longer need to manually clean up the database and remove obsolete records. Instead, you can use the new message cleanup processor to automatically remove these records at regular intervals, saving you time and freeing up precious space.
Get the benefit of the latest RabbitMQ features
Infinity APIs are now compatible with RabbitMQ 4, allowing you to operate the API platform on the most recent version and giving you access to the latest security features and functionality.
For customers using multiple RabbitMQ instances for high availability, the Infinity platform now supports Quorum Queues within RabbitMQ to provide the maximum availability and performance.
To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
Integrating Infinity and Xero for the best of both financial worlds
Keeping a watchful eye on profit and loss and cashflow data is key to running any successful retail business, but that information won’t do your operation much good unless it’s current, accurate and reliable.
For years, many retailers have relied on Xero accounting software to give them the up-to-date view of their business they need, while some have also used the power of Infinity to manage inventory and point of sale transactions.
Now, you can get the best of both worlds through an integration between these two leading platforms.
The Infinity Xero Integration sends POS sales and other transactional data from Infinity to Xero, which then handles business accounting activities, seamlessly updating the financial information that’s the cornerstone of your business.
The result? An accurate daily picture of profit and loss plus tax in Xero based on selling activity within Infinity that lets you spend less time buried in spreadsheets and more time building relationships with your customers.
Key Benefits
- Real-time financial insights with up-to-date reporting and tax position.
- Improved cashflow and cost management through reconciliation and payment tracking.
- Greater operational efficiency by syncing stock adjustments, transfers and receipts directly into Xero.
- Enhanced accuracy and compliance with consistent data across POS and accounting.
- Time savings that allow teams to focus on customer relationships and strategic growth.
How it works
A wide range of everyday transactions are handled, including cash sales, debtor sales and refunds, stock adjustments, stock transfers, stock receipts, supplier invoices, stock takes, till adjustments and bank reconciliations.
When it comes to debtor transactions, you can choose between two options, depending on which suits your business best. You can manage all debtor activity in Infinity and use Xero as a sub-ledger, so that transactions are sent as journals. Alternatively, you can opt to maintain debtor activity in Xero, so debtor sales and credits are sent from Infinity to Xero for processing. In this mode, Xero debtor payments that have been matched to an invoice are sent to Infinity. That way, debtors’ credit position in Infinity is kept accurate and reflects payments that have been received directly via Xero.
Updated transaction data is sent from Infinity to Xero, and vice versa, either automatically at a specified interval or manually whenever is convenient, giving you total control over the update process.
Granular view of complex transactions
The integration offers a granular level of posting for complex transactions, so you get fine-grained cost management that enables accurate profit and loss reporting.
So, for example, if you import inventory from offshore suppliers, you can pay them in their local currency. Any freight costs that have been added to supplier invoices and disbursed across the items can be posted as GRNI, to give you a more accurate view of the cost of goods sold.
You also get granular control over how bank fees are posted, including card fees, making bank reconciliations faster and more accurate.
And when it comes to tracking revenue, you can make use of multiple revenue categories, including cash sales and trade sales. You can even track revenue based on payment type.
Suited to all environments
Its easy-to-use interface means the integration suits every type of retail business, from multi-branch chains to standalone stores.
It’s also straightforward to deploy and support, with enhanced logging and troubleshooting that lets you track errors and quickly address any issues.
What’s more, by integrating Infinity with Xero you get to leverage Xero’s ecosystem of business tools, allowing you to manage everything from payroll to sales and marketing contacts.
There’s never been a better time to integrate Infinity and Xero so you get the timely, granular, automatically updated accounting information you need.
Interested in using the Infinity Xero Integration to streamline and simplify your accounting processes? Get in touch.
New in Infinity – August 2025
PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Help us develop and improve Infinity
As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we’re giving you the option to share information with us about how you use Infinity. We’ll use this information to identify features that can be enhanced or retired, as well as any opportunities for user training and upskilling.
When you upgrade Infinity, you’ll be able to choose whether to opt in or out of sharing data with us. If you opt in, we’ll capture and analyse menu clicks at both the Head Office and the Back Office, along with technical information such as operating system and SQL versions. This will allow us to see which features are used heavily and which aren’t being used frequently, as well as giving us an understanding of the systems Infinity is being run on.
It’s important to note that we won’t capture any data that can identify individuals, including passwords or user names.
Taking part in data sharing means you can help shape the way Infinity evolves and ensure that it remains relevant and useful to you. Even if you initially decide not to share data with us, you can opt in at any time, and vice versa.
If you have questions or concerns please contact Infinity Support.
INVENTORY
Easily order and manage non-stock items
Ordering and managing stock can be tricky if your business needs a regular supply of items that you don’t necessarily want to bring into your inventory. So, for example, if you sell coffee you’ll need a steady number of coffee cups to be on hand, but you aren’t going to want those cups to be counted as stock items that are sold on their own. Similarly, if the coffee machine breaks down, you need an easy way of paying for a repair by purchase order without treating the repair as an item.
To help make the ordering of these items more seamless, Infinity now allows you to include non-stock items in purchase orders. When you receipt them, the quantity on hand won’t increase, so you can keep these items on hand without them impacting your inventory.
CUSTOMER AND LOYALTY
Expand your fuel offering with automatic discounts
If you’re a fuel retailer who uses Infinity’s loyalty solution and you offer cents-per-litre discounts, you now have even more options when it comes to rewarding customers for their business. We’ve introduced discounts that apply automatically, so that purchasers save on fuel without your store staff having to manually select which discount applies, thereby speeding up transaction times while still offering customers meaningful savings.
INTEGRATIONS
Leverage seamless integration of accounting data into Xero
If you use Xero as your accounting software, or are thinking about moving to Xero, you now have even more reason to integrate it with Infinity. We’ve listened to feedback and introduced improvements that make our Xero solution easier to deploy, use and support.
We’ve improved the overall experience by polishing the user interface, simplifying installation, enhancing logging so you can easily track errors and providing you with better troubleshooting to quickly address issues.
There’s never been a better time to integrate Infinity and Xero so you get the timely, granular, automatically updated accounting information you need while also leveraging Xero’s ecosystem of business tools.
Charge fees directly from EFTPOS devices
If you use Windcave as your EFTPOS provider, you can now add surcharges to these transactions from the EFTPOS device. This means you can charge a fee for things like contactless payments and have it recorded in Infinity, so you’ll get an accurate view of these charges in reports and transaction records.
To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
New in Infinity – June 2025
Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team reduce operational complexity and create a differentiated omnichannel customer experience.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
INFINITY API
Leverage real-time cost information
Our Products API now lets you see a real-time value for weighted average costs if you create transactions or carry out inventory analysis in an external system.
PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Quickly locate branch item information in clusters
Searching for detailed stock item information can be time consuming, especially if you have a lot of stores offering different prices or sourcing items from different suppliers. Head office staff can find the branch information for an item in a cluster more quickly now that they can sort branches alphabetically instead of having to know the branch’s numerical ID.
INVENTORY
Get a consistent view of stock take results
Stock taking is one of the most important tasks in your business, and getting the count right is vital to maintaining accurate inventory data. To help your staff quickly identify and double-check variances before they complete the stock take, you can now choose to list items in the printed stock take report in the same order they appear on screen, meaning staff don’t waste time trying to match what they see on screen with what’s in the report.
REPORTS & ANALYTICS
Summarise stock takes by stock count group
We’ve also enhanced stock taking by giving you a new report that summarises stock takes that have been carried out based on stock count group. The Stocktake Count Group Summary Report provides an overview of stock takes that have been carried out at branches, lets you see variances and gives you the option to list results according to individual stock count groups.
POINT OF SALE
Monitor staff safety at the point of sale
Staff safety is a growing issue across the retail sector, with some staff regularly dealing with threatening or abusive behaviour from customers. You can now keep track of how often your staff are facing this problem by using new functionality at the POS. When your staff feel threatened, they can press an on-screen button that records the event, allowing you to monitor how often these incidences are happening and enhancing your people’s sense of well-being.
Speed up processing of sales by under-age staff
If you sell age-restricted items, such as alcohol, you need to be sure that you’re complying with the law without compromising speed of service. To help you serve customers quickly and efficiently while meeting your legal obligations, Infinity now recognises an under-age staff member each time they complete a new transaction, instead of forcing them to log back in after every sale.
ADMINISTRATION
Send invoices and statements to multiple debtor contacts
Managing debtor customers is a more seamless experience now that you can automatically send invoices and statements to more than one email address, saving you the hassle of manually emailing documents to the relevant people in the business and enhancing lines of communication.
So, for example, when the customer buys an item in-store, you can send the invoice to the purchasing team as well as to the customer’s primary contact. And at the end of each period, you can send statements to the primary contact and to the customer’s accounts payable, so that the right people see the amount due.
Enhance financial integrity of trading days
If you use Infinity’s extended cash management module, you can now require store staff to complete any draft trading days before creating a new one. Trading days can also be completed the next day if necessary even if new sales have been processed, giving you peace of mind that all transactions are correctly accounted for.
TECHNOLOGY
Use the latest Microsoft technologies
Infinity now ships with SQL Server 2022 as default, giving you the most recent version of SQL Server currently in Microsoft’s mainstream support. We also continue to support SQL Server 2016, 2017 and 2019, while customers on SQL Server 2012 and 2014 should be planning to update to a later version.
Proactively address database-related performance issues
If you use a version of SQL Server Express, you’ll now be warned when the database size reaches a threshold of 9.8GB or higher, allowing you to proactively address issues before they affect your store operations.
To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.
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Striking the Stock Balance: Managing Inventory in a Tight Market
Managing inventory is one of retailers’ biggest challenges and largest costs — no matter their size or sector. Striking the right stock levels and adjusting them to meet customer demand is vital to maintaining profitability and driving down cost, especially when the retail market is tight.
Here, we look at some of the ways that inventory management impacts the bottom line and offer solutions to the problem of having the right amount of stock in the right place at the right time.
Empty shelves vs buffers
Deciding how much stock to keep on hand can be tricky at the best of times, but when consumer spending falls it can be the difference between profit and loss. Medium-sized retailers without large warehousing facilities, in particular, often face an impossible choice — buy in more stock and risk having excess inventory or be cautious and potentially disappoint customers and miss out on sales.
Either way, you lose. Overstocking can tie up your working capital and see you paying for excess floor space, while also resulting in markdowns that can hurt your margins and limit your ability to invest precious resources in new products and innovations that give you a competitive edge. It can also expose you to losses from theft, fraud, spoilage or administrative lapses.
Meanwhile, understocking puts you at risk of not being able to complete sales and of losing revenue. Research shows that a third of in-store shoppers will go elsewhere if what they’re looking for is out of stock, while almost half would simply walk out and abandon the purchase altogether.
However you choose to connect with your customers, whether it be in-store or online, getting stock levels right is essential to delivering the kind of service that boosts sales and keeps customers coming back, while also containing the costs of doing business.
The curse of poor stock visibility
You can only avoid over- or understocking when you know what stock you have coming in, what is being sold and what you have on hand. When retailers struggle with the fundamentals of inventory control, such as stock taking, demand forecasting, planning and receipting, they set themselves up for botched sales and increased costs.
Incorrect inventory information can be a particular pain point for shoppers browsing online. A recent study found that 40% of retailers have to cancel at least one in ten customer orders, primarily due to inaccurate inventory data. What’s more, customers don’t just use webstores because they’re convenient — they use them to ensure that what they want to buy will be there when they walk into the store. If they come in only to find the items they want aren’t available, they will lose trust in you and think twice about coming back.
On the other hand, poor stock visibility can also lead retailers to remove items from the webstore so that they’re available for click-and-collect orders when, in reality, plenty of stock is on hand, once again resulting in disappointed customers and lost sales.
And poor inventory visibility doesn’t just lose sales and increase costs. Store and call centre employees have to deal with all the problems that arise, including upset shoppers, misplaced products and inaccuracies across different systems. That means inventory inconsistencies not only churn customers — they also churn staff.
Getting on top of inventory
The first step towards making better inventory decisions is ensuring you have high-quality data at your fingertips. This begins with the human factor, so that your staff are trained and supported to enter accurate information on time when completing essential tasks like stock taking and receipting.
As well as implementing good processes that are correctly followed, you can use a retail management system that maintains stock in a central location, so it can be actively managed for optimal results and without unnecessary and potentially inaccurate replication of effort. It should also easily and accurately receipt stock, with unders and overs seamlessly identified.
With a robust system in place, you can arm your staff with a single, real-time view of all stock across the business so they can make sure they are ordering what’s needed and that it’s available to meet demand in your physical or online stores. And by having visibility of items that have been allocated to customer orders, they can be sure they aren’t selling goods that are already committed.
Then, with unified inventory management across all locations and customer touch points, you can take an ‘endless aisle’ approach to fulfilment without the need for expensive warehousing or having to keep stock on hand just in case it’s needed at a particular store. Using this approach you can:
Reduce inventory costs by moving stock to the right location when it’s needed and cutting your overall stock requirements
Lower fulfilment costs by delivering direct to the customer using store-to-door, click-and-collect, kerbside pickup or optimised sourcing
Reduce overselling or underselling with real-time inventory updates that remove the issues of selling unavailable stock or having more stock than listed online
Offer more purchasing and fulfilment options to customers so they can locate items in-store, buy online, collect in-store, reserve online, receive the same day or at a time and location of their choice
Of course, implementing these changes also comes with costs, so it’s important to involve your CFO right at the start. Getting their buy-in and endorsement means assessing how the investment in a retail system that meets your inventory visibility needs helps to deliver cost savings and real value over its entire lifespan.
Create a budget by calculating how much the system will cost in terms of licences, implementation, training and maintenance. Then compare these costs to the benefits you expect to see from an accurate enterprise-wide view of inventory, including tangible and intangible returns, such as cost savings, increased revenue, improved decision-making, enhanced scalability or competitive advantage.
A cost-benefit analysis should show with absolute clarity how a new system can deliver a positive ROI.
Want help to achieve better inventory visibility?
If you’re struggling with inventory management and are looking at how to build a foundation for a seamless customer experience, talk to us about how to start with a real-time view of inventory.
Keeping it Simple: Streamlining Pricing and Promotion for Optimal Results
While 94% of retail leaders are deploying multi-channel strategies, only 65% say their pricing and promotion strategy is consistent across all channels.
In a complicated world, keeping things simple can be vital to staying ahead of the competition. And when it comes to pricing, the simpler and faster the better.
Every retailer knows that enticing customers with special offers, promotions and custom pricing is essential to driving revenue. And at a time when inflationary pressures have seen consumers prioritising value for money and many are still looking for ways to make their dollar go further, getting your pricing strategy right is more important than ever.
But targeting and executing those promotions and pricing models can add an onerous layer of complexity to your business, especially if you have an extensive inventory and sell to retail and non-retail customers with different needs and expectations.
What’s more, running multiple pricing tiers and discount offers in tandem can make it hard to assess the impact on profit margin and can create confusion for customers at the point of sale, potentially eating into revenue gains.
Choosing the right technology partner is crucial. They need to deliver a solution that simplifies the creation, maintenance and delivery of complex pricing models, provides flexibility and meets the evolving needs of B2B and B2C customers. More than anything, they need to take the pain out of complex pricing by aligning your technology systems to your sales strategies – not the other way around.
Here, we look at how complex pricing, when done well, can deliver for both you and your customers, and consider what you should look for in a pricing solution.
Always offer the best price
Knowing they are getting the best price is top of mind for cost-conscious buyers, with many shoppers willing to switch brands if they can save money elsewhere. Your complex pricing solution should be smart enough to ensure that you are delivering on this expectation for retail customers, either as part of customer-specific or store-specific promotions, or multi-buys, while also excluding trade or contract customers if separate pricing has been negotiated with them.
Harness the power of volume pricing
Volume pricing delivers compelling value for customers by lowering the price per unit for larger quantities. Your pricing solution should allow you to easily set up tiered pricing that is sensitive to unit quantities when they are added to the sale, so you can appeal to trade customers seeking to purchase large orders at a reduced cost.
Tailor pricing for contracts and projects
Negotiating contract and project pricing for trade customers is a valuable tool in the complex pricing toolkit and can be a great way of offering tradies an even better deal on your products.
So, for example, if a group of builders are working on a new supermarket project, your solution should allow you to identify them and offer them an enhanced, agreed discount over and above standard trade pricing on specified products for the work they do on the project.
Alternatively, you should be able to offer a builder contract pricing on a box of nails, so that they pay $80 per box over a 12-month period instead of the retail price of $90.
Protect your margins
There’s no point running a promotion that will ultimately cost you money. You need to be sure that your margins are protected by preventing your store staff from manually discounting an item below an allowed minimum. At the same time, you need to be able to empower them to offer manual discounts where appropriate while also complying with trading standards.
And when it comes to negotiating contract pricing for trade customers, you need to be sure that the price you offer is financially viable and will maintain profit margins in your business.
Create global and local promotions
In multi-store business, a one-size-fits-all approach to pricing and promotion can limit your ability to react to local trends. Implementing a pricing solution that allows stores to create and run their own promotions, such as a buy-one-get-one-free or a percentage-off deal, can be an effective way to move excess stock and to keep stores engaged with their customers.
Reach across channels
Today, customers expect a “one-brand” experience that lets them shop at any time, using any channel, from any device, at the best price. However, inconsistent pricing and promotion strategies across all channels can leave retailers falling short. While 94% of retail leaders are deploying multi-channel strategies, only 65% say their pricing and promotion strategy is consistent across all channels.
To meet customers’ expectations, complex pricing needs to be part of a holistic unified commerce approach, so you can apply the same price online, in your apps and at self-service kiosks as you do instore, while also giving you the option to run promotions for specific channels, such as web-only specials for click-and-collect shoppers.
Simplify the point of sale experience
When complex pricing is done right, it delivers the best possible experience for customers without compromising performance. And by delivering virtually instant results, it takes the pressure off your store staff by doing the heavy lifting for them, while giving them the information they need to let customers know about pricing promotions and alerting them to upselling opportunities.
What Infinity can offer you
Infinity’s Rules Based Pricing solution delivers on all these essential requirements. Its easy-to-use interface allows you to quickly and easily define and implement multiple pricing attributes, determine the order in which pricing rules apply, and execute standard retail promotions in combination with non-retail pricing. Pre-defined rules take the pain out of designed pricing models, and lower error rates mean less time reconciling pricing between systems. And what’s more, it seamlessly forms part of Infinity’s unified commerce platform, so that pricing is consistent across all channels.
If you’re looking for help to shape your pricing strategy and extend your omnichannel capabilities, get in touch. We’d love to help you develop the solutions you need now and guide you to where you’re headed next.
Unleashing the Power of the Point of Sale
The past few years have brought unique challenges to offline shopping, as the Covid-19 pandemic closed stores and shoppers turned to their screens like never before.
But as the world re-opened, physical stores bounced back, and they will continue to hold their own even in the face of growing demand for online offerings. While global online retail sales are expected to grow to US$6.8 trillion by 2028, offline will still be the dominant channel, accounting for 78% of global sales.
Shoppers, though, don’t see online and in-store as separate channels but as part of a unified buying journey. They might research a product online before buying it in-store, or vice versa. So it makes sense to think about how to best integrate your stores into the overall customer experience. By speeding up delivery, personalising the offering and providing hands-on interaction, you can use your stores to help deliver the cohesive, consistent omnichannel journey customers now expect.
Here, we look at how integrating stores involves considering customer preferences and behaviours, improving employee performance and choosing a POS system that changes as you do and allows you to unleash the power of unified commerce.
Personalised and tactile customer experiences
For customers, shopping in-store brings a range of tangible benefits — instant gratification, personalised assistance, product comparison and social interaction. And meeting customers face-to-face gives retailers the chance to offer a tailored, tactile experience that builds loyalty, drives repeat business and enhances profitability, even when the final purchase happens online.
Elevating these personal encounters so that they give you a competitive advantage can take a variety of forms, from speedy fulfilment of click-and-collect orders, to staff making recommendations based on wish lists and order histories, to providing accurate stock information by store (including out of stock, in stock and on order).
But transforming your stores to be the driver of customer loyalty and retention means that your store retail systems must transform as well. A modern point of sale is now the anchor for a unified commerce platform that unifies online and store data with back-end systems, so that you can offer customers the best possible all-round experience.
Personalising in-store offerings needs a nuanced understanding of shopper profiles and a unified platform that gives you a single source of truth for all inventory, order and customer data. With all your customer details captured and stored in a single unified commerce hub, you can recognise customers consistently, wherever they shop with you.
Empowered employees
After years of underinvestment, many retailers are playing catch-up with their employees. Their stores often lack the tools and systems that enable their people to deliver the relevant and personalised customer interactions that match online shopping’s price, speed and convenience. Some stores find themselves running multiple systems, forcing their teams to juggle between different apps and screens as they serve customers and slowing down the overall sales process.
Armed with the right customer data and tools, your store staff can more easily make decisions, provide personalised upselling advice, sell inventory at any location and serve customers faster, anywhere in the store. Lifting your employees’ performance leads to enhanced customer interactions and increased conversions.
Making tools easy to use and intuitive also enables new employees to quickly get up to speed and begin selling almost right away. By consolidating store technology onto a single POS-based retail system, your teams can do everything in a single view, from sales transactions, customer loyalty, pricing, product and promotions through to virtual appointments and endless aisle access to stock. And by removing the frustrations caused by complex technology, you'll also help lower staff turnover.
Best of all, empowering your people to offer an exceptional customer service allows you to strengthen relationships with happier, more loyal customers.
A scalable and adaptable POS
Today, the store is mission control for a seamless omnichannel customer experience, making the POS the hub for unified commerce. The POS needs to span endless aisle, click and collect, store fulfilment, pricing and promotions, and loyalty, as well as functions that allow customers to search, transact, acquire and consume products across all your channels.
It's also crucial that your POS solution is scalable and adaptable to suit your business’s changing needs. Whether you're expanding into new locations or launching pop-up stores, your POS system must be able to scale quickly and adapt to changes in customer expectations. While it might seem obvious, scalability can easily be overlooked in the excitement of cutting-edge technology.
POS adaptability means having a system that can quickly adjust to evolving customer preferences. It should operate seamlessly across tablets, phones and fixed tills, allowing transactions to flow between devices effortlessly. This flexibility opens possibilities for innovative store layouts and experiences, and allows you to think creatively about how and where to personally interact with customers.
And as you grow, your POS solution must be able to function anywhere your ecommerce platform can. Your growth plans should also account for how your physical stores can complement your online presence — not just to drive online sales but also to strengthen customer loyalty.
Want help to modernise your point of sale?
As you transform your customer experience to deliver the seamless and personalised buying journeys your customers crave, your point of sale system must transform as well. If you’re looking for help to shape your strategy and extend your omnichannel capabilities, get in touch. We’d love to help you develop the solutions you need now and guide you to where you’re headed next.
Navigating Choppy Waters: Tailoring Loyalty for Enhanced Customer Retention
In the face of tough economic headwinds, retailers need to find ways to stand out from the crowd and keep their customers coming back. Given that retaining customers costs less than acquiring new ones and returning customers are more likely to spend than new customers, it makes sense to look for ways to build loyalty.
Conventional wisdom says that the key to this is to reward customers for their spend. But while as many as 97% of consumers belong to some kind of retail loyalty programme, converting members to users can be harder than merely getting them to sign up in the first place.
So how do you build a loyalty programme that cultivates truly engaged customers while still ensuring you deliver value and drive profit margins?
Personalise the experience
Offering a loyalty programme that resonates with customers starts with personalisation. With consumers today also wanting more bespoke experiences, it pays to look for ways to personalise at scale by transitioning from mass-market approaches to strategies that delight consumers with personalised product recommendations and discounts, as well as tailored interactions.
The ability to see each customer’s shopping preferences and purchase history across all channels is critical for building personalised shopping encounters. By using the right unified commerce platform providing a holistic view of your customers, you can better plan your loyalty, pricing and promotion strategies and get the right offer or message to the right customer, at the right time and in the right place.
These personalised messages and offers should supplement mass, at scale touches. By balancing strategies across occasions (such as mass-market events like Click Frenzy and Black Friday) with personalised messages (such as birthdays) you can keep customers engaged. By creating remarkable customer experiences that meet or even exceed their expectations, you can ensure they return, again and again.
Offer instant rewards
Most retailers already provide value to shoppers through pricing strategies, promotional offers and reward schemes. But today, a traditional approach might not be enough to keep them coming back. With 74% of customers preferring smaller, more accessible rewards that allow them to redeem points more frequently, there’s a benefit to offering instantaneous rewards, rather than requiring shoppers to save points before making a purchase.
This shift has coincided with rapid digital acceleration, which has raised customers’ expectations when it comes to online shopping.
However, inconsistent pricing and promotion strategies across all channels can leave retailers falling short of those expectations. While 94% of retail leaders are deploying multi-channel strategies, only 65% say their pricing and promotion strategy is consistent across all channels. And few look at combining their loyalty and pricing tactics to create a unified and differentiated customer experience.
To integrate your loyalty, pricing and promotions, you’ll need a unified commerce platform that combines data from every system and channel across your business.
You can then start increasing your number of loyalty members by offering rewards that meet their needs. Exclusive pricing promotions – such as immediate percentage or cash discounts for loyalty programme members – can satisfy the desire to enjoy rewards straight away rather than saving points for redemption later.
Enhance omnichannel shopping
Today consumers don’t think in terms of channels. They now expect a “one-brand” approach that lets them shop at any time, using any channel, from any device, at the best price. And when it comes to loyalty and digital experience, they are more likely to value convenience over the loyalty programme itself.
When done well, a unified commerce platform elevates and streamlines the shopping journey and offers you a competitive advantage through a more nuanced understanding of your customers and what drives them to keep coming back.
But if you’ve got siloed backend systems and processes that leave your customers dealing with inconsistencies and gaps, you simply cannot offer a seamless experience, and the convenience and personalised customer service that support a robust loyalty offering will be severely compromised.
Implementing a complete omnichannel solution allows you to bridge the gap between customer expectations and the drivers of loyalty and retention.
Modernise your point of sale
Stores remain the dominant sales channel globally, still generating more than 70% of sales and expected to continue to grow at 4% year on year. Stores are also a vital channel for driving loyalty. For customers, in-store shopping offers instant gratification, personalised assistance, product comparison and social interaction, while it gives retailers the chance to deliver a tailored, tactile experience that builds repeat business.
But these interactions need to be supported by a POS solution that can function anywhere your ecommerce platform can, so that your online and offline presence complement each other and offer the seamless, integrated browsing and buying that customers expect. By putting current, detailed customer information at your employees’ fingertips, you empower them to become the frontline of retention.
Want help to enhance your loyalty programme?
As you transform your customer experience to retain loyal customers, increase market share and maximise profits, your retail systems must transform as well. If you’re looking for help to develop your loyalty and personalisation capabilities, get in touch. We’d love to help you develop more meaningful relationships that deliver profitable growth.
