It is important to understand what long checkout queues do your sales. Also, it is important to find a solution to reducing your sales checkout time, so that customers are satisfied. A good way to do that is to use a good paid or free point of sale software.
Ideal Checkout Wait Time is Four Minutes or Less
Overall, eighty percent of the shoppers are happy with the wait time they face at stores, most of the time, as per a survey done my M/A/R/C Research. But, it is worth noting that about 10 percent shoppers get irritated enough to leave long checkout queues.
The survey was done with about 13000 users, and it was discovered that about 79 percent users are satisfied if the wait time is only up to four minutes. The trend is true for stores like grocery, department, drug, consumer electronics, and office supply stores.
Users are okay waiting for longer than four minutes in case of club stores and mass merchandisers.
It is important to note that 43 percent shoppers said that their shopping decision with a store will get effected if wait time is long—21 percent said they would avoid rush hours, 19 percent said they would limit visits to the store when they need specific items from the store, and three percent say that they will stop going altogether.
Use POS software to Reduce Wait Time
Here are a few ways, you can install and use POS software to move checkout lines faster:
1. Add more registers
When queues in your stores get longer, it is wise to add more checkout registers. Setting up checkout counters can be expensive with the hardware involved, but you can go for advanced hardware-independent POS software that can be installed on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets that cost less.
2. Go mobile
Use tablets and smartphones to process orders remotely, so that your customers don’t necessarily have to line up at the cash register to complete their purchases. You can use cloud-based POS software, so that your sales staff or customers can use mobile POS setups to conveniently and efficiently process sales.
3. Integrate payment methods with POS
If card, cash, mobile wallet, PayPal, and other payment options are integrated with your POS system, then the time spent in processing sales at cash counters is reduced considerably. Your shoppers can also be allowed to use wireless payment options like Mobile wallets, net banking payment and other third-party payment options to speed up payment process.
4. Online checkout
You can allow shoppers to purchase products they prefer through a user POS app. They can even pay for their purchases online, so that when they visit the store, their products are packed and paid for. This eliminates the need to stand in checkout lines, as users can just come in and collect their orders.
The above can be achieved with a POS software like Loyera, that allows you to smoothly process orders to give customers a satisfactory checkout experience. You can use a paid, freemium or free point of sale software with features that help implement the above.