Articles
The Effects Of POS Implementation And Retail Technology On Sales And Profitability
April 3, 2005
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It has been over 20 years since the introduction of the Personal Computer (PC). Roughly five years after its invention in 1980, retail stores began to put the PC to use in their stores and head offices. Prior to this development small and mid-sized retailers mainly relied on either electronic cash registers that simply gave a sales total for the day or more sophisticated registers that provided sales by department reporting via a cash register tape at the end of the day. Far too expensive for small retailers, there were also the more sophisticated registers used by larger retailers that were connected to mini or main frame computers to track individual sales by product number.
With the growing popularity of the PC, programmers started to write Point of Sale, Financial and Inventory programs for smaller retailers. The first of these systems started appearing in 1983 but were very primitive and did not provide extensive integration or functionality. Over the past fifteen years systems have improved dramatically and have become almost as sophisticated as large store systems. Many of the programs now available were originally written in DOS but have been converted to the Windows operating system. There is not much functionality that large stores have that is also not available today to small-to-mid-sized stores.
The purpose of this white paper is to explore the impact of the deployment of technology in a retail business. More specifically, this paper looks at the effects on sales, profitability, and productivity of the use of point of sale, inventory control, and customer profiling software in small to midsize retail stores.
