Labeling your products with current prices is a necessity of retail, but sometimes price updates get lost in the shuffle of the week. It’s easy to understand why: price updating can seem tedious and requires an investment of valuable staff time. But the investment is worth it. Price updates are both a service to your customer and to your bottom line.
Because TransActPOS works so closely with our customers, we’ve seen first-hand the impact pricing has on profits. One of our area hardware store partners began regular price updates and saw an increase in margin and profitability, even when they had slower sales. They recognized the payoff for the investment of time and have since incorporated consistent price updating as a core business practice.
Due to the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the balance between supply and demand is fluctuating. Unsteady supply channels are currently driving a 3-4% inflation rate across the industry. This means regularly updating prices is more important than ever.
There is no hard-and-fast rule about how often prices should be updated. Each store knows it’s customers, stock, and staffing capabilities best — some may even decide to update them daily! Our team recommends creating a weekly routine around price updates for most stores.
Simplifying the process
Thanks to nightly updates from the Electronic Catalog, TransActPOS users always have the latest product information from vendor catalogs. This is just the beginning of the price updating process — and it may seem like the easiest step. A store owner then must decide what items to update and what price seems fair, print new labels, and ensure clerks balance time spent applying the new labels with time spent serving the customers. And of course this has to happen across the whole store, not just items you ordered this week!
Updating prices is time-consuming, laborious, and costly, but there are actions you can take to save time and money.
Here are five tips to simplify this crucial task:
- Use location codes to remove friction from the price updating process. Product numbers are often randomized and not interrelated, so when your sales clerk goes to apply new price labels they waste time sifting through the shelves for the right product. Location codes eliminate this issue — by connecting your stock and shelf plan, your updated price labels print in order for more efficient application. Time spent adopting a location code system pays off immediately.
- eCatalog Price Control gives you the power to protect prices on specific items. This allows you to update and print fewer labels, speeding up the whole process for you and your clerks.
- Investing in Electronic Shelf Labels appears to be a no-brainer for many stores. Because they display new information directly on your shelves at the push of a button, Electronic Shelf Labels ensure your clerks are spending more time with your customers and less on price updates. You can read more about these labels here in our recent blog post.
- Additional utilities like Margin Master offer a more refined price updating procedure. Margin Master automatically controls your retail prices based on your priorities, giving you more control over your margins. This video offers a more in-depth look at this integration.
- When using MOCE and EZ-AD integrations, price changes will be automatically updated on your website. You can now spend less time managing your e-commerce efforts to focus on what really matters — running your business.