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•White Paper: New Possibilities In Retail Technologies For Small To Midsize Retailers

Consumers are simultaneously empowered and overwhelmed by an unprecedented amount of choice, and most retailers can no longer compete on price alone to reach them. Acquiring and retaining customers means continuously learning what they want and continuously improving your delivery of it in a way they enjoy. Powerful technology can be a means towards that end, and a means for most retailers – now that technology providers are capitalizing on collective retail intelligence – to offer integrated retail solutions for small and mid-size retailers as well as large ones. Solutions built upon Microsoft SQL®, and to the OPOS and ARTS® Data Model standards, fit now and will fit into the future as a retailer grows on its own individual path.

Supermarkets were to retailers of the 1950s as big box stores are to retailers of the present - brutal pressure from market leaders is nothing new. That said, today's rate of change and degree of consumer empowerment truly can be called extreme with technology and globalization having radically transformed our ideas of what commerce can look like. Now there's an oversupply of everything available…except customers. Just a few years ago, companies with the biggest IT budgets were best able to continuously capture information and capitalize on new possibilities. This competitive advantage is eroding as some retail technology providers and The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) act to make solutions more accessible to small and mid-size retailers.

The early 2000s saw most retailers focusing on internal cost-cutting and on meeting existing consumer demand in light of a nervous post-9/11 retail economy. With weakened and unpredictable cash flow, it became crucial for them to maximize their use of older technology before taking steps to upgrade it. Earlier release POS systems were very much a focus, as their rudimentary inventory management capabilities were a helpful piece of controlling costs.

Now into the last half of the 2000s, the retail climate has become a bit healthier, if still fraught with unknowns, and retailers are cautiously looking towards growth again. Growth requires continuous improvement, whether it's offering new capabilities, entering new markets, or some combination of the two. It follows that yesterday's systems no longer support retailers as well as they could, because they just don't have broad enough functionality to support continuous improvement.

Click Here To Download:
•White Paper: New Possibilities In Retail Technologies For Small To Midsize Retailers