Most retailers are feeling the pressure to add new physical, online and mobile channels to keep pace with new technologies and changing consumer demands. But if you’re only adding and not actually integrating these channels with the rest of your organisation, you can end up with silos that frustrate your internal teams and customers.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
Extend control over store-specific data
You can now prevent a range of Infinity data from linking down from the Head Office to branches, including customer records, print layouts, POS buttons and drilldowns. This feature gives your stores greater control over the data that is specific to them and ensures that it won’t be accidently overwritten by Head Office staff.
More control over nominated suppliers
You can now restrict your staff from manually ordering from nominated suppliers, thereby preventing purchase orders from being created against internal suppliers or staff inadvertently ordering from nominated external suppliers.
Increase efficiency with automated stock replenishment requests
Replenishment requests can now be automated centrally at the Head Office for stores based on minimum levels set for stock items. When stock is running low, it is ordered automatically, thereby reducing the store overhead involved in manually monitoring stock levels and requesting additional goods.
Increase visibility of non-freight item costs
The Freight field that is used when receipting and invoice matching has been re-labelled FRT/Extra, making for a more intuitive experience when matching non-freight item costs, such as customs fees, to purchase orders.
Better visibility of quotes and order data
Quotes and orders layouts have been enhanced in several ways:
Branches’ GST details are now included on orders and quotes.
The GST number on the quote removes human error from the process and maintains accurate information through the sale conversion process from quote, order and to sale.
The addition of customer emails to quotes helps store staff follow up with customers when seeking to convert quotes into orders.
Discount breakdowns allow customers to see discounts clearly compared to base price on quotes, while the subtotal breakdown allows B2B customers to easily see the tax component and tax exclusive total of a quote or order.
Give customers more visibility of loyalty discounts
Fuel retail customers can now see their cent-per-litre loyalty discount total broken down as line items. For example, they will be able to see their SuperGold discount calculated as part of the total discount, giving them confidence they have maximised their fuel savings.
Easier access to current store promotions and prices
A new report allows you to view products, the rules-based pricing promotions that are in play, and the prices before and after tax. This can be useful when you need to verify that current signage matches the price loaded in Infinity or if you want to generate a list of current prices for ad hoc price checks.
Improve analysis of waived payments
The Product Sales Summary Report now includes $0 transactions, meaning you can see transactions where no payment was taken from the customer. This is useful in cases where an item has been processed but a fee, or other associated payment, has been waived.
Better visibility of cash adjustments
The Safe Balance Adjustment Report now show the reasons for safe adjustments that have been made, allowing you to review activities related to cash-up, bank reconciliation and accounting.
Help store teams deliver more personalised CX
You can now add customised information relevant to your business to the Customer Details screen at the Point of Sale, such as external loyalty memberships, favourite store, or product preferences. Your store staff can then use this information to upsell or otherwise personalise the customer experience.
Increase visibility of planned stock orders
You can now give your store staff visibility of draft purchase orders, allowing them to see the quantities of stock that are contained in draft orders. Note that this should be used carefully where drafts are still under review and are subject to change.
Integrate Hikvision’s video security system
Infinity can now be integrated with Hikvision for recording POS activity in real time. Data input from a range of functions performed by your store staff is merged with video footage, giving you oversight of sensitive transactions. Customers wanting to take advantage of this integration should be aware that some support from Hikvision will be required to make it fully functional.
Automate trading day reports at unmanned fuel sites
Fuel retailers who run unmanned sites with outdoor payment terminals can now automatically create and complete trading days once all the terminals have settled. This frees site managers from manually creating the trading day to see Infinity reporting on site performance.
Increase control over staff passwords
You can now limit the ability to force password changes to staff members with the same or lower access levels. This is useful if you want to limit password changes to supervisors and their direct reports.
Stay current with latest Microsoft technologies
Infinity is now certified to work with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
This post was originally published on 3 March 2020 and updated on 2 February 2023
Many retailers have had to take a ‘just get something done’ approach to creating seamless customer experiences that span channels. Now they’re struggling with omnichannel set-ups that simply link digital and physical systems together, and they don’t have the ability to keep pace with changing consumer behaviours.
But omnichannel should not be the end goal. It’s just one approach to getting a single view of your customers that will help you deliver unified experiences.
Instead, a unified commerce platform will break down your channel silos and move your retail business toward the holy grail of holistic, real-time, personalised customer experiences spanning in-store, online and everywhere in between.
To keep pace with new technologies and changing consumer demands, retailers are giving customers access to new mobile and online channels. Each touchpoint and channel operates independently, with separate people, processes and technologies existing in functional silos.
But when you only add and don’t actually integrate new channels with the rest of your organisation, you create bad service experiences that frustrate internal teams and customers.
Silos mean that your customers have to deal with inconsistencies and gaps, such as incomplete sales histories, different tones of voice or having to start conversations afresh in each channel. These silos inevitably lead to disappointment and frustration, a lack of trust and even a sense that your organisation is incompetent.
With an omnichannel approach, you’re connecting numerous backend systems so that customers can seamlessly interact with your brand. However, your channels are still operating in functional silos.
That means most attempts to offer unified experiences fall short.
You’re likely to be struggling with legacy technologies that have been customised and are infrequently updated, and then you bolt-on new solutions that don’t easily integrate. These omnichannel systems are fragile, inefficient and costly to maintain.
And things can easily unravel. Adding new channels and tools requires additional custom integrations that are complex and slow, adding significant costs and curbing the agility and scalability you require.
With a unified commerce approach, you can achieve retail nirvana by creating immersive and frictionless experiences for customers across all channels, touchpoints and locations. Rather than building custom integrations to unify different systems, you can easily use all the tools and services within a single unified platform.
It gives you a single source of truth for inventory, order and customer data. With this one view of the customer, and all channels and engagement points connected in real-time, you can deliver a personalised and consistent customer experience.
You can also quickly respond to changing customer expectations and new technologies by using microservices and APIs to expose data and connect third-party services.
Unified commerce has been a game changer for our clients.
It eliminates the customer journey pain points and amplifies the ‘wow’ moments. Now you can treat each customer as an individual, all the time – one person with one account, interacting with one brand.
Unified commerce can benefit your business in many ways:
It provides a stable backbone by acting as the hub for all your channels, reducing integration and operating costs, while increasing efficiency and accuracy.
It’s also your platform for innovating – a springboard for adding new channels and services, giving you the ability to take advantage of new capabilities and deliver results at a speed and scale that unachievable within a traditional omnichannel model.
It gives you total control over all your inventory and lets you create seamless and personalised purchasing, payment and fulfilment options across ‘endless aisle’ shopping, fast (eg 30-minute) click-and-collect, kerbside pickup, store-to-door, shoppable screens, kiosks and hyper-personalised loyalty offers.
You can deliver frictionless experiences and let customers access your entire product range from any location, including stores, online, mobile, shoppable screens, pop-ups, stores within stores, virtual showrooms, social channels, call centres and more.
And our savviest clients are now investing in new customer-facing technologies, like chatbots, mobile apps and AI. Some are pioneering contextual commerce – the ability to seamlessly implement purchase opportunities into everyday activities (such as Shoppable Instagram and Facebook).
The end result is the ability to deliver the personal, ubiquitous and unified experiences your customers expect, fostering loyalty, driving growth and improving profitability.
We can help you define your goals, develop a business case and create your roadmap to deliver the unified experiences that are best for customers, and most profitable for you. Get in touch.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
Extend access to New Zealand addresses
Infinity’s integration with the Addressify address validation service now supports New Zealand addresses. Using Addressify prevents customers from providing inaccurate or incomplete address details, giving you the confidence that loyalty customers and online and store orders are linked to the correct customer address. To use this feature, you’ll need a service agreement with Addressify (details of their New Zealand service are launching soon).
Faster access to product profitability data
Searching for stock items has been enhanced by allowing you to filter by gross profit percentage. Using this filter, you can quickly identify items that are falling below target and adjust prices accordingly.
Expand your collection of customer data
Your store and head office staff can now add a small piece of customised free text to each loyalty customer’s account, allowing you to capture customer data that fits your business needs and giving you greater control over the information you collect. For example, if a customer is a registered company, you can use this field to store the company’s ABN/GST number.
Give customers more visibility of manual discounts
Customers can now see the details of manual fuel related discounts that have been applied to transactions on the printed receipt. This removes confusion about the type and amount of the discount that the customer has received.
Launch new fuel promotions for non-loyalty members
Fuel retailers can now offer dollar-off fuel coupons for non-loyalty customers (in addition to existing cents-per-litre coupons). This gives marketers another tool to incentivise customers to shop with them, increasing customer retention and boosting sales. This feature uses the Infinity API.
Easier access to epay and Flybuys refund data
Infinity has been enhanced to report on refunds of epay items and Flybuys sales, helping you to identify these transactions more easily to mitigate potential fraud.
Improve cash adjustment reporting
Your POS users with the required permissions can now record meaningful reasons against safe balance adjustments, allowing for more efficient reporting and decreasing the time needed to investigate cash discrepancies.
Stay current with latest Microsoft database
Fresh installs of Infinity now ship with SQL 2019, giving you the latest database engine available from Microsoft by default. Upgrades are not impacted. Note that if you are using a 32-bit version of Windows, SQL 2019 cannot be installed. You will need to use SQL 2014 which has been previously shipped with Infinity.
Improve SQL Server performance
Customers who have a suitably configured and licensed read-only SQL node in an Availability Group can now direct reports to a read-only node to distribute SQL workloads and deliver faster reporting.
Faster Infinity installs
Unattended installations of Infinity can now be completed more quickly, following the implementation of a bulk copy function when setting up new Infinity workstations.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
Extend access to inventory data
Infinity APIs now have near real-time support for additional inventory-related transactions for integration with third-party systems, such as ERP, warehousing and order management software. This allows you to perform a range of vital inventory business processes, including stock adjustments and allocations, receipting stock from purchase orders and receipting stock from a transfer. Stock transfers can also be posted to Infinity from third-party systems, such as warehousing systems.
Easier status changes for bulk PO imports
You can now bulk import purchase orders into Infinity with their status set to ‘complete’ using Infinity ETL. Completed purchase orders retain their external references if the references are included in the import, so that they can be used during receipting. This feature saves time and reduces operational complexity, particularly for businesses that sell high volumes of products.
Launch new fuel promotions for non-loyalty members
Infinity Loyalty now gives you the ability to create promotional fuel discount coupons which can be offered to non-loyalty customers. This allows fuel retailers to incentivise new customer segments to shop with them, helping to boost repeat customers and increase sales.
Faster collection of loyalty points
Infinity gives retailers the ability to issue loyalty points on spend without the need for double entry into an external secondary system. The loyalty card number is captured and discounts are redeemed using a barcode identified at the point of sale. Previously, this service was limited to customers who held Goody cards, but it has now been extended to other secondary loyalty providers as well.
Give stores better product performance data
The Customer Performance, Supplier Performance, Product Performance and Employee Performance reports can now be filtered by custom fields that have been added to an item record. A store manager can use this feature to focus on the performance of products according to criteria stored in these fields relevant to their business. For example, stores can search product environmental star ratings and report on star ratings 3, 4 or 5, while filtering out results for ratings 1 and 2.
Better readability of data exported into Excel
Data exported out of Infinity into a spreadsheet is now easier to read and use in your business with the inclusion of column headers. This enhancement applies to all exportable data, including items.
Seamless integration with Latitude financing to boost sales
Your customers can now take advantage of Latitude’s interest free financing at the point of sale without the need to fill in paper forms or go through an online portal. Infinity’s new integration allows you to seamlessly offer financing to Latitude account holders, broadening customers’ purchasing options and reducing the friction that can come with financing transactions. This new integration extends to Latitude’s Gem Finance operation in New Zealand.
Stay current with .NET 6.0
Infinity APIs and supporting components now use .NET 6.0, the latest general release of the .NET framework from Microsoft. This follows the end of Microsoft’s long-term support for .NET core 3.1 on 13 December this year. Triquestra is committed to ensuring the APIs run on supported .NET platforms, with 6.0 long-term support due to run until the 12 November 2024.
Customers do not have to update all APIs at once to .NET 6.0 versions, as we will still support current versions and mixed operation of both .NET 3.1 and .NET 6.0 APIs. However, APIs which deliver new features or fixes as part of your standard API release will require .NET 6.0 to function.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
Access real-time fuel inventory
Fuel retailers can now get a near real-time view of fuel inventory levels at branches, helping to simplify their stock management. Fuel tank dip values and inventory levels can now be regularly posted as an event notification for processing by external downstream systems, such as fuel delivery management software.
Easier updates to item costs
If your business uses Infinity’s inventory review function to manage price updates at branches, you can now update an item’s recommended cost at the branch when that item’s unit cost is updated at head office, saving you the time and effort of changing the cost manually. If you use Infinity ETL to bulk update item data, you also now have the option to update the recommended cost of an item for a specific branch or for all branches.
Launch new fuel promotions
Fuel retailers can now offer dollar-off fuel coupons with each fuel transaction, giving marketers another tool to incentivise customers to shop with them, and helping to increase customer retention and boost sales. It allows them to reach a different customer segment, with different purchase motivators.
Give stores access to sales data at-a-glance
You can now give your stores easy access to stripped-down sales information using the new Product Sales Summary Report. This report includes the number of individual items sold and total value, minus information you might want to exclude (such as costs or margins).
Better cash management reporting for branch managers
The Banking Transaction Report is now available at the Back Office, allowing branch managers to view the movement of money into and out of the trading location.
By viewing their banking deposits and receipt transactions, they can more easily reconcile bank statements or review cashflow within their store.
Faster item data updates via Wedderburn scales integration
Infinity is now fully integrated with Wedderburn scales. This means that changes to item data in Infinity, such as price per kg, can be pushed directly to Wedderburn, rather than users having to update the prices again independently on the scales.
SQL Server Always On Availability Group
If your Head Office database is set up in an Always On Availability Group (AOAG) with appropriate read-only access, you can offload some Linker load to the read-only node to distribute the SQL activity for the Linker, thereby reducing the load on the primary SQL node. Note: At present, only one high-use query uses this feature.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
Access real-time order data
Order information is now available in real-time to streamline fulfilment execution. Infinity now allows services to subscribe to changes in order status, such as dispatch or voiding. The updates can be used to integrate order data with other systems, such as ecommerce sites to provide dispatch or cancellation email updates to customers, ERP systems and buy-now-pay-later financing schemes.
Increase accuracy of data capture during complex sales
Infinity now gives you the ability to capture extra information for highly complex sales transactions, with validation during the process to ensure data accuracy. Businesses with complex item data requirements can configure rules and validations to capture specific information before a product can be added to the sale. Extended rules can also be configured for payment processing, receipt printing and exclusive selling rules.
Using this new functionality, a business might decide to take payment on behalf of other businesses (such as power companies and local authorities), requiring highly accurate information to be captured at the time of payment. By configuring the rules required by those other businesses, you can be confident that all information is being captured and all necessary business processes are being followed.
Faster adjustments of non-stock products
Head Office and branch users can now easily find non-stock products with negative stock on hand and correct the stock automatically to zero. Instead of having to identify items manually and create a stock adjustment for each one, users can now save time by finding all non-stock products with negative inventory and set them all to zero at once.
Give branches more local purchasing flexibility
If your stores have multiple regional supplier contacts, your staff can now directly email their local sales rep rather than having to go through a centralised contact for all stores. Branches can also now create customised supplier email addresses for sending purchase orders, giving them even greater control over the local purchasing process.
Increase accuracy of cost updates
Branch users can now update the cost of an item on the master data automatically during the invoice matching process, allowing them to avoid the pitfalls that come with manually inputting cost updates and ensure data integrity.
Automate store notifications when branches re-assign orders
Infinity will now prompt your store staff when an order line has been re-assigned to them from another branch and is awaiting processing (for customer collection in store or ship-from-store), ensuring that all parts of a customer order are processed and fulfilled in a timely way.
Assess profitability of promotions
When you create a pricing promotion using Infinity’s pricing wizard, you can now see the worst-case scenario for gross profit percentage. This allows you to easily gauge whether promotions are financially viable and gives you greater control over profit margins in your business.
Give store staff more returns visibility
You can now provide your branches with more information on returns. If goods are returned to your store but originally sold at another store, store staff can now see details of the return transaction, and not the details of the original sale transaction.
If the goods were both sold and returned at the store, they will see a range of details about the transaction, such as the date the goods were sold and returned, the return price and quantity, the reason for the return, the store operator who processed the sale and the return, and the receipt number.
Increase stock visibility during sales process
Infinity’s Advanced Item Search now allows you to see stock levels and pricing at nearby branches. This gives better visibility during the sales process to businesses who source inventory from other branches. For those businesses that capture sales orders through a call centre, the inventory and pricing will default to the branch that the current customer belongs to.
Easily adjust your returns policy
If your business uses Infinity’s extended returns function, you now have greater flexibility over your return policy. You can choose to allow goods to be returned to any store. Alternatively, you can simplify the return process by only allowing customers to return goods at the store they made the original purchase.
Increase email security
Infinity now supports the use of TLS 1.2 and a wide number of common SMTP ports to send emails. TLS 1.2 allows for better encryption and, in turn, improved security when sending emails via Infinity.
Support for Microsoft Edge browser
Infinity now supports using the Microsoft Edge browser engine technology to display external websites where support for Internet Explorer 11 has been removed.
If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
This post was originally published on 3 March 2020 and updated on 21 July 2020
Now they’re struggling with omnichannel set-ups that simply link digital and physical systems together, and they don’t have the ability to keep pace with changing consumer behaviours.
But omnichannel should not be the end goal. It’s just one approach to getting a single view of your customers that will help you deliver unified experiences.
Instead, a unified commerce platform will break down your channel silos and move your retail business toward the holy grail of holistic, real-time, personalised customer experiences spanning in-store, online and everywhere in between.
To help explain why unified commerce is the nirvana of omnichannel, here’s a look at where we are now and where we’re going.
To meet customer expectations for safety and convenience, retailers are giving customers access to new mobile and online channels. Each touchpoint and channel operates independently, with separate people, processes and technologies existing in functional silos.
But when you only add and don’t actually integrate new channels with the rest of your organisation, you create bad service experiences that frustrate internal teams and customers.
Silos mean that your customers have to deal with inconsistencies and gaps, such as incomplete sales histories, different tones of voice or having to start conversations afresh in each channel. These silos inevitably lead to disappointment and frustration, a lack of trust and even a sense that your organisation is incompetent.
With an omnichannel approach, customers can access different channels to interact with your brand, and you finally have a single view of the customer, however, your channels are still operating in functional silos.
That means most attempts to offer unified experiences fall short.
You could be struggling with legacy technologies that have been customised and are infrequently updated, and then you try to bolt-on new digital solutions that don’t easily integrate. These omnichannel systems are fragile, inefficient and costly to maintain.
And things can easily unravel. Adding new channels, faster fulfilment and new payment options can lead to a torrent of inconsistent and inaccurate data which cannot be shared without significant investments in data integration.
With a unified commerce retail management system (RMS), you can achieve retail nirvana by creating immersive and frictionless experiences for customers across all channels.
A unified commerce platform gives you a single source of truth for inventory and customer data. With this one view of the customer, and all customer channels and engagement points connected in real-time, you can deliver a personalised and consistent customer experience.
This capability has been a game changer for our clients.
It eliminates the customer journey pain points and amplifies the ‘wow’ moments. Now you can treat each customer as an individual, all the time – one person with one account, interacting with one brand.
Unified commerce can benefit your business in many ways:
It provides a stable backbone by acting as the hub for all your channels, reducing integration and operating costs, while increasing efficiency and accuracy.
It’s also your platform for innovating – a springboard for adding new channels and services, giving you the ability to take advantage of new capabilities and deliver results at a speed and scale that unachievable within a traditional omnichannel model.
It gives you total control over all your inventory and lets you create seamless and personalised purchasing, payment and fulfilment options across ‘endless aisle’ shopping, fast (eg 30-minute) click-and-collect, kerbside pickup, store-to-door, shoppable screens, kiosks and hyper-personalised loyalty offers.
You can deliver frictionless experiences and let customers access your entire product range from any location, including stores, online, mobile, shoppable screens, pop-ups, stores within stores, virtual showrooms, social channels, call centres and more.
And our savviest clients are now investing in new customer-facing technologies, like chatbots, mobile apps and AI. Some are pioneering contextual commerce – the ability to seamlessly implement purchase opportunities into everyday activities (such as Shoppable Instagram and Facebook).
The end result is the ability to deliver the personal, ubiquitous and unified experiences your customers expect, fostering loyalty, driving growth and improving profitability.
We’d love to support your journey to unified commerce nirvana. Get in touch and let’s chat about your retail future.
For more on unified commerce and why it’s the future of retail, download this free guide to unified commerce.
Most retailers are feeling the pressure to add new physical, online and mobile channels to keep pace with new technologies and changing consumer demands. But if you’re only adding and not actually integrating these channels with the rest of your organisation, you can end up with silos that frustrate your internal teams and customers.
Unified commerce is the term used for a retail software system which connects all your inventory and customer data to all your online, in-store and mobile sales channels.
Use our extensive resources to learn more.
