Owning and running a wine store presents difficulties that other small businesses don’t: state-mandated alcohol regulations, underage customers, thousands of individual SKUs, and more. That’s why using a wine-specific POS system is so important – it can make a huge difference in your day-to-day and big-picture store management, coming with features from auto invoicing to customer loyalty plans baked in.
1. Local Alcohol Regulations Are Easier to Follow
Selling alcoholic products comes with its own set of complications. Importantly, your wine POS system should be able to accommodate state-specific laws that apply to your business. For example, alcohol taxes differ state by state – as outlined by the United States Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau — and your wine POS system should be able to integrate different tax rates into its system.
Your point of sale system can help your store comply with federal regulations as well. For example, to ensure that your customer is at or over the legal drinking age, you can use your POS’s age verification scanner to scan IDs and driver’s licenses. Avoid fines and penalties by taking the guesswork out of verifying your customer’s age!
2. Wine Inventory Can Be Managed More Effectively
Wine stores have several unique inventory management challenges: large numbers of individual SKUs, case breakage, and tedious invoicing. A good wine POS system can automate several of these processes, saving you time and effort.
For example, wine stores can have thousands of individual SKUs in stock at any given point in time. This can make updating inventory frustrating, difficult, and time-consuming. A wine POS system will include a centralized database of common products – even ranking them by popularity – to ease the process.
A wine POS system can also facilitate automatic invoicing. At many wine stores, invoicing involves manual data entry, which means you spend hours coordinating supplier billing. An effective POS system will automatically import details upon the arrival of new products at your store, making your job simple: Review and finalize.
3. Use Features to Keep Customers Coming Back
It’s extremely important for wine stores to encourage return business, and many small businesses incorporate sales, specials, and fun events to excite their clientele. The right wine POS system is often the missing piece to the customer loyalty puzzle.
Many wine POS systems are programmed to feature customer reward and discount programs, and most are able to easily integrate pre-existing customer loyalty programs. For example, Bottle POS will even allow you to use SMS marketing and Google search marketing via a free integration with Pointy to share your newest bottles and latest deals.
4. Know Which Reds Are Selling and Which Aren’t
As a business owner, it’s critical that you identify your top-selling products – and be able to know which bottles aren’t performing as well. Recognizing which items are popular and which aren’t can allow you to strategize your inventory orders, resulting in less surplus and a larger profit margin. It can even help you create a more targeted marketing strategy to boost products that aren’t selling as well, and highlight your stock that is in high demand.
A modern wine point of sale system like Bottle POS can auto rank your inventory, making analyzing sales simple. Using this in-system intelligence, you’ll always be able to tell which vineyards are big sellers, and which may not be an ideal investment.
5. Easily Reduce and Prevent Wine Shrinkage
Unfortunately, shoplifting and theft, both internal and external, take their toll on every business – and wine stores are no exception. According to the National Retail Federation, retail shrinkage cost businesses an estimated $94.5 billion in losses last year – but a wine POS system could minimize damages to your shop.
POS systems can include loss prevention features such as inventory tracking software and employee management solutions that will note which cash registers your team uses, when transactions were completed, and employee clock-in and out times. They can even provide a great base for easy integration of third party and storefront additions, like security cameras and tags.
The Best Wine POS System for Your Small Business
Once you’ve decided your business needs a wine POS System, the next step is to do your research, identify features that are essential to your success, and choose a POS system that will simplify your life. Our wine point of sale system comes with features that will allow you to manage inventory effectively, consolidate employee management, auto invoice, reduce shrinkage, and so much more.
Schedule a demo of Bottle POS to optimize your wine store operations today!
