Square and Shopify POS are fine tools. They’re built for everyone, which means they’re built for no one in particular. That matters more in a gift shop than in most retail businesses.
A gift shop is not a cafe. It’s not a clothing store either.
You carry many items, sometimes thousands of items, often only one or two of each.
You buy from dozens of suppliers, some of them small and quirky. Your trade swings hard with the seasons: Mother’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day. A generic point of sale system doesn’t understand any of that, because it wasn’t built for it.
Here’s where software made for gift shops earns its keep.
Supplier invoices load electronically. When a delivery arrives with 200 new lines, you don’t type them in. The invoice imports, items are created or updated, and you’re back on the shop floor. Retailers tell us this saves hours every week.
Loyalty built for occasional shoppers. Points programs suit businesses people visit daily – that’s their function, to get people in more often, which is easier in a cafe or supermarket. Gift shop customers might visit a few times a year. Our loyalty prints a dollar voucher on the receipt, something shoppers can see and spend. Retailers using it report customers returning sooner and spending more per visit. Now, if you want a points based system, it’s there, included.
LayBy done properly. Not a workaround, not a plug-in. LayBy is part of how plenty of people shop for gifts, and the software handles it natively, including payments, reminders and reporting.
Reordering based on evidence. The software shows what’s selling, by item, category and supplier, so you reorder winners and quit losers. In a shop where margin is made through buying decisions, this is gold.
Reporting that shows where you make money. Which suppliers perform. Which categories carry the shop. Which don’t. You can’t get that from a system that treats every retail business the same.
Developed locally. Your type of retail is local. Software developed locally is more likely to serve that local focus you have.
There’s one more difference worth naming. Square makes its money clipping the ticket on every sale you make. We’re a software company. We’ve served local Australian retailers since 1981, and when you call for help, a real person answers, here in Australia.
If your software was made for everyone, it wasn’t made for you. That’s the case for POS software made specifically for gift shops.
We are Tower Systems. sales@towersystems.com.au
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