Here are five ways an automated point-of-sale system can help you succeed:

1. Inventory management. Not knowing what’s in stock, what the top sellers are, and how quickly to replenish specific items is a problem for many jewelry stores. An automated point-of-sale system can provide nearly real-time views of what’s selling, what’s needed, and what opportunities are being missed. Without an automated system, jewelers might not know their inventory well enough to tell vendors if their product has sold.

2. Customer preferences. A POS system not only lets you know which items are out of stock but also helps you understand what to restock based on the price ranges at which customers are most likely to buy. Many POS systems offer well-developed Web-based dashboards that integrate data and help users make smarter purchasing decisions.

3. SKUs. A system that uses stock keeping units let’s you know what the store is actually selling. Too many jewelry stores have electronic cash registers that essentially treat every item as one SKU, but with no way of tracking the transaction by date, days in inventory, discount from initial list price, and gross margin of individual items. SKUs enable data mining and advanced product assortment, and bar code readers make it easy to take inventory more often.
   If you use an automated system, make sure your method for assigning and managing inventory using SKUs is effective. In addition, use the images of all your products, and use the merchandising system to handle relationships between products.

4. Ease of management. It used to be three times as hard to manage two stores as it was to operate one. Today’s POS systems can give you a good digital read on the day’s events in different stores from any remote location in real time. POS reports can be customized to reflect your particular values, style, and preferences. Managers can click through a series of steps to compare and contrast the performance of given products from category to category and store to store.

5. Customer relationship management. A strong customer relationship management program is more than a list of names to market to. It can help jewelry stores target the right customers with the right products through a personalized medium. The information from a POS system—what’s in stock, top sellers, what to restock based on popular price ranges—provides some of the information you need to develop a robust CRM program.