Insights for Surviving (and Maximizing) the Holiday Shopping Season

'Tis the Season for Earnings

For the first time ever, 2019's holiday buying season is predicted to exceed $1 trillion in revenue. If you have ever managed during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, you very well understand the chaos and challenges which begin to surface this time of year.


Luckily, there are a few useful tools available to business operators and their employees to help them navigate a hectic -- yet rewarding -- holiday shopping season. In the next article, a Revel Systems worker with longstanding ties to hospitality management shares some insights from his time at the vacation grind, together with learnings from the product side of this equation.

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Jay Gillespie, Revel's senior product manager, has over twenty years of immersive experience working with point of sale (POS). During his professional career, he has worked alongside some of the biggest restaurant and hotel management companies in the southeast in regions which range from consulting, to establishing new restaurants, as well as creating his own POS system.

Gillespie provides an unparalleled scope into restaurant and retail challenges during the holidays as he breaks down several important strategies to keep you from missing out on a massive stream of revenue this year.

Get a grip on your stock

Using a tight control over your stock as the panic of these vacations sets in will save you from resources and money gone to waste. Drill down to your year-over-year earnings by using data insights so that you can objectively estimate labour and inventory requirements. Using data as opposed to guesswork will save you both time and money.

"It's vital to have the ability to deal with the surges and quantity [of the vacations ] without needing to over-staff or over-prepare," says Gillespie. "It's an issue of making certain you have the ideal technology and systems in place that will provide you the ideal historical data."

Get ahead of vacation labor challenges

Labor controls are particularly tough as companies scramble to hire the ideal seasonal or part-time workers that could pull off the workload requirement of the holiday rush. Do not get swamped and take early action by buckling down on an on-boarding game program.

"You do not have two weeks to train workers anymore," says Gillespie. "With an easy-to-use interface, particularly on a piece of hardware which everyone is familiar with, permits you to provide this system to a person and have it up and running within a day." Use an intuitive system which cuts down on training fees and time and empowers your employees to quickly pick it up and hit the floor running. Time is money, especially during the most lucrative time of the year.

The ideal POS platform will allow you and your employees to get rid of unnecessary, user-centric hiccups, while also developing a lasting and positive client experience.

Get with the program

Nine decades back, Gillespie was brought in to resolve the pub at Starwood Hotels' St. Regis property. As he reflects on his time , he stresses the importance of being up-to-date and integrating a system which could support the time and demands of the market.

At the moment,"satellite pubs" (big, mobile carts with clunky POS systems on them) were in use before mobile order takers came to the marketplace. "From the time you purchase a $17 vodka soda you may need to wait 20 minutes to get it due to the technology," Gillespie explains, highlighting the hurdles he faced handling these devices. "[Servers] could not fulfill your order in a hurried fashion. Using a POS system that might have supported the need for the holiday season could have been a game changer."

If you are a business owner, ensure you deploy the ideal technology and benefit from these innovations available through your POS. Capitalizing on the available resources can help minimize risks and maximize profits during the busiest season of the year.

Related posts:

https://www.connectpos.com/best-pos-hardware/

https://www.connectpos.com/best-b2b-marketing-strategies/

https://www.connectpos.com/top-5-best-cash-drawers-in-2021/

https://www.connectpos.com/top-free-bigcommerce-apps-for-online-stores/

https://www.connectpos.com/top-free-magento-extensions-for-users/

https://www.connectpos.com/best-retail-sales-tips/

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