Square has launched its Square for Retail POS system, which is designed to help retailers better run their businesses and simplify their ability to sell anywhere and manage inventory while they work towards digitization through the pandemic.
“Many retailers have rushed online with in-store selling restrictions,” says Alyssa Henry, Seller Lead at Square. “The real difficulty in selling online for any retail business owner is not just being able to accept an order, it’s that sellers must digitize their entire operations to do so.”
The idea behind Square for Retail is to give business owners an easier way to digitize their retail operations so they have “a firm handle on their inventory and are ready to reach their customers online or in-store amid COVID-19 and long after,” adds Henry.
Square highlights one customer, Ginette Matthews, owner of The Local Refillery in Vancouver. Matthews opened the zero-waste grocery store and cafe in February 2020, just six weeks before COVID-19 forced the store to temporarily close. Since much of her inventory was made up of bulk goods, she needed an inventory management solution that could accommodate individual items while also tracking bulk items by weight. Square for Retail helped her face these challenges.
“Square is very key to our business, particularly when it comes to inventory management, because we sell many bulk items, and therefore need to be able to track these by weight rather than by unit,” Matthews explains. “The integration with our online store has also been invaluable. At the start of COVID, we were taking orders by e-mail, but the online system has enabled us to be able to turn around orders within two hours. This never would have been possible without Square.”
Square for Retail’s seamless integration with Square Online lets retailers sell online, in-store, and on social, while the inventory management tool lets them print barcode labels, track inventory across locations, create reports, and manage purchase orders. The all-in-one POS also provides real-time insights into inventory performance, tracks costs, and monitors profits. Retailers can get started with Square for Retail free.