Almost every e-commerce retailer has their eyes on holiday shopping season. They aim to empower their online stores with the best deals and huge discounts during such shopping seasons; that’s their way to savor the pie.

During events like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Oracle Xstore Point of Service (PoS) enables retailers to cut through the crowd.

Legacy POS systems like inventory management, deals and promotions management, training of cashiers, increased footfalls, 24/7 business operations and others become an impediment during rushed retail days

Good news is, Oracle Retail Xstore can be the one stop solution for retailers. It comprises a comprehensive, open, and integrated suite of best-of-breed business applications, cloud services, and hardware that are engineered to work together and empower commerce.  Leading retail brands use Oracle solutions to anticipate market changes, simplify operations and inspire authentic brand interactions.

Training Cashiers before holiday season starts

Oracle Xstore point-of-Service comes with an inbuilt training mode. It is used to train cashiers to give them hands-on training about all the functionalities in Xstore POS. The system can easily handle tasks like scanning of items, applying price adjustments, tendering, Send Sale, layaway, printing receipts, processing returns and web orders. The Training Mode is indicated with the information Training Mode on the Operator and the Customer Display.  All created receipts are also marked with training mode.

Campaigns, Promotions and Loyalty Programs for holiday season

Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Services is a suite of integrated cloud services designed to drive incremental revenue and profitability for today’s retail enterprise. The modules in the suite empower the user to: build customer loyalty, increase average spend, and drive repeat purchases. Further, Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Services provides the tools and the strategic insights to focus marketing investments on high potential customer segments and informed decision-making in the critical areas of merchandising and operations.

It also allows to create campaigns and promotions (both generic and segment specific) effortlessly.

Deals and Inventory management

Xstore PoSSuite provides several functions to help maintain store’s inventory. All merchandise items—whether entering the store through receiving and return functions, or leaving the store through sales and shipping functions—are tracked using an inventory process. This inventory tracking performs at the item level, resulting in an audit trail from the time the item enters the store and continuing until the item leaves the store.

Xstore allows a store to sell an item that is not in stock and to direct another location to fulfill and ship the customer’s order to a specified location using Oracle Locate.

Xstore to SIM (store inventory management) inventory syncing provides the sales and inventory data that are updated in SIM.

With features like Shipping, Receiving, Inventory replenishment, Stock count, Location Based Inventory, Reports, Xstore suite provides a complete solution for inventory management.

A huge part of preparation for holiday season is the deals. Numerous deals are offered on products. These deals are imported in to Xstore Point of Service. Each item might be eligible for multiple deals, Xstore calculates the best deal applicable for each item.

Apart from deals, Xstore allows a range of manual discounts that can be applied like, Employee Discount, Group Discount, Item discount, Transaction discount.

Store Goals

Store Goals can be created in Xstore Point-of-Service. The goals tab shows the currently active goals for the store.

It shows the goal description, effective and ending dates, the goal, and the percent completed toward the goal.

This is an effective way to increase sales by keeping an eye on the store goals and making an effort to perform more sales.

24/7 Business Mode

Usually during Thanksgiving and Black Friday, stores need to function round the clock and cashiers do not get the time to reconcile registers and close the store, the next day.

Xstore provides a 24/7 store functionality achievable through configuration, which automatically reconciles and closes the store at midnight, so transactions occurring after midnight are done in the new business date and not the previous day business date.

Handles increased footfalls in stores

Xstore seamlessly handles the increased footfall in stores during special events like Black Friday. Xstore transactions are fast and secure and allow cashiers to perform transactions rapidly. With its features like inventory management, Send Sale, Layaway, Work Orders, Locate order, Xstore offers a wide range of functionalities to perform sales.

Automated Testing

Xstore Point of Service comes integrated with Xunit. It can record user actions and create test cases from those recorded actions. With increased inventory and multiple deals and promotions, XUNIT is handy to test automate all the scenarios before the holiday season.

Automated software testing can provide the following benefits to the customer during holiday season:

  • Efficiency – Xunit can execute in a matter of seconds a regression suite that would take hours to key in manually. Quality assurance (QA) analysts spend more time analyzing results and less time typing in data.
  • Accuracy – Actions and data assertions performed by an automation engine reduce the possibility of human error when testing the application.
  • Consistency – Automated suites help ensure that identical test scenarios are executed from one release to the next, regardless of the QA analyst testing the system. Automation can assist in reproducing issues between separate lab environments.

Oracle Retail Xstore Suite delivers a substantially improved experience for both customers and colleagues and is the foundation of an integrated Omni channel platform Store operations. It is a versatile, flexible and an efficient system that can be easily customized for every retailer and can easily integrate with third party systems and is a good buy for retailers. It helps eliminate most of the issues that retailers face with other Point-Of-Service systems.

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