Stores all over America are losing revenues. Fortunately, it’s over something that can be addressed with the right tech. In fashion, affordable luxury, apparel, and sports goods (and any other sector where the pricing and promotion system is complex), calculating the final cart price is non-trivial and takes too much time. A whole host of discounts, various promotions, and stacking these promotions, apply to every cart. Oftentimes, the promotions are store specific. Also, the offers could be personalized and customer-specific. Calculating the final, out-of-the-door (OOD) price is complex. In too many stores the only system that can compute the OOD price is the POS. So, the queues are long and customers sometimes decide they have had enough and walk out. Sometimes, they realize at checkout that the price is beyond their budget. They change the cart, taking out items, which increases face time at the counter. Or, often they realize they could have bought more, given their budget, and want to add items to the cart (but at that point, they are already at the checkout, after 20 minutes of queuing and an hour of shopping). What results from this inefficiency is revenue leakage, a bad customer experience, a reduction in repeat visits and shopping frequency, and reputational damage.
It is a legacy technical architecture issue. The intelligence for working out the OOD price is embedded in the POS terminal. And there are only a few of them in a store. The pricing and promotion logic resides locally and of course, a POS terminal can process only one transaction at a time. If such intelligence were accessible as a service to the customer’s mobile app or the store associate’s app, things would be much better. Fewer store visitors would abandon the cart, average order values would be higher, and the customer experience would be much better.
We at Litmus7 have solved the problem. Our In-Store Cart Price Check solution computes the OOD price, is built on open source platforms, accessible via an API, and deployed on the cloud. It works with all major POS platforms – with built in integrations and ability to parse proprietary file formats. Store-associate apps, kiosks, and the retailer’s customer app can calculate the price. In our experience, conversion can increase 2X, average order value can increase by 15%. The solution has been tested to up to 400 stores with 150k SKU per store.
Get in touch and let us know how we can help.