Why Loss Prevention Is Key To Your Mobile Strategy

By Brad Fick, president, Direct Source and Jennifer Hartle, senior account executive, Direct Source

Mobility has emerged as an important technology across many areas of the retail environment, beyond mobile POS. Despite this knowledge, retailers tend to focus on mobile POS alone, and disregard other areas of the enterprise that can greatly benefit from an overarching mobile strategy — such as inventory management, crosschannel promotions and loyalty programs, in-store product lookup, order placement, or customer feedback.

As an integrator, one other major application we see being overlooked during mobile strategizing is loss prevention. For retailers considering mobile POS, loss prevention should be a natural extension of the mobile POS strategy, and be part of the initial technology discussion. Doing so can eliminate major technology headaches later in the implementation process — when you realize that you’ve increased the potential for loss with mobile POS but not increased the prevention or data analysis to match.