Today, soaring rents, high personnel costs, and staff shortages put the traditional retail business model under unprecedented pressure. Furthermore, the market share of eCommerce giants (e.g., Amazon), which have a massive cost advantage over established retailers, continues to grow. Therefore, retailers urgently need to slash their costs to remain competitive.
According to McKinsey, new retail technologies focused on automating manual processes, inventory management, and improving customer experience can double a store’s profitability.
Smartphones are the ideal basis to take advantage of these technologies. They are universal, flexible devices, and have clear efficiency and cost advantages over outdated POS hardware. Retailers can benefit enormously from replacing legacy handheld barcode scanners with modern mobile devices. With them, they can optimize all in-store operations, and easily design future-proof, efficient point-of-sale systems.
The following sections will look at how smartphones can trim retailers’ costs by transforming inventory, shelf management, and customer service.
How smartphones increase the efficiency of retailer’s in-store operations
Receiving of goods
Smartphones can significantly simplify the acceptance and checking of incoming goods. Employees just open the internal app and scan the barcodes on parcels and pallets via their smartphone’s camera. With the scan, the backend system can automatically record the receipt of the goods and update the stock, and so streamlines inventory tracking. Try out expense tracking through receipt scanning with our Document Scanner SDK today!
Stocktaking
Annual stocktaking is a highly time-consuming process for retailers of all types, requiring staff to walk around the storage areas with pen and paper to note down the stock of each item. With Mobile Barcode Scanning, staff can quickly scan the barcode labels of individual items and entire packages. The Scanbot Barcode Scanner SDK can capture multiple barcodes at once, speeding up the inventory process even more.
Reorder & Shelf Management
Retailers always need to keep their shelves stocked to keep product sales as high as possible. Through Mobile Barcode Scanning within an internal app, employees can simply scan the barcode on the shelf to reorder goods directly on the spot. This way, employees don’t have to go to any computer to place the order. Hence, retailers can avoid error-prone manual data transmission and streamline shelf management, improving efficiency significantly.
Clienteling
In retail, customers frequently ask staff questions about the stock of a product. This often results in employees having to go to check-in storage while customers are waiting in the store. With the help of a smartphone, retail employees can directly check the stock of the respective product by just scanning the barcode. Thus, a mobile Barcode Scanning solution saves valuable time and improves customer satisfaction.
By implementing a reliable and user-friendly Mobile Barcode Scanning solution in an internal app, you enable your staff to perform numerous smartphone-based operations, including inventory management, shelf management, and clienteling.
In doing so, employees can save valuable time for critical tasks, retailers can streamline their processes and save a substantial amount of costs, and customers end up more satisfied. Thus, implementing the Scanbot Barcode Scanner SDK into your app can optimize workflows, decrease costs, and lead to a better in-store customer experience.
Benefits of our enterprise-grade online Barcode Reader SDK
To improve your in-store workflows, you need retail Barcode Scanning software that just works – quickly and reliably. That’s why we’ve based our algorithms on machine learning, and keep working on them every day to bring the Scanbot SDK to the next level. The benefits of our solutions at a glance:
- Barcode Scanning within 0.04 seconds
- 98.7% Barcode Scanning accuracy
- Scanning under difficult conditions
- Integration within just one business day
- Fixed price including regular updates & support
- Extensive range of covered barcodes
Feel free to get in touch with one of our solution experts for further information. We are always happy to help you out! Let’s talk.
