Editorial Team
5 min read
A retail point of sale (POS) system can give you the power to manage your entire business on a single, smart platform–online and in a brick-and-mortar store. With the right POS system, retail business owners can stay on top of inventory, scheduling staff, managing payroll, building a loyal customer base, and tracking sales trends.
In this first of a four-post series exploring how Clover POS helps local retailers manage their businesses, we highlight how businesses have streamlined inventory management—including eCommerce integrations and customizable product variants and modifiers—using solutions from Clover that are simple for retail teams to learn and use.
Keep inventory updated–online and in brick-and-mortar store
When the pandemic shuttered the doors of most local retailers, many pivoted–selling their wares online, if they weren’t already. But, with so many providers in the marketplace, choosing the right web hosting platform and eCommerce provider proved tough.
Enter Clover. With its robust third-party app market—accessible on any Clover POS device—Clover offers simple integrations with major eCommerce platforms. In just a few clicks, businesses can link their retail point-of-sale systems to their websites–and manage inventory.
When Jennifer Oosterhoff took ownership of the beloved, local business, 3B’s Flowers, in Stony Plain, Alberta in 2020, she didn’t want to rock the boat too much. She did, however, need to find a POS system that could unite her brick-and-mortar operations with her quickly expanding online business.
Oosterhoff was happy with her eCommerce provider, Ecwid, so Clover POS was a natural choice because of its integration with the eCommerce platform. Her first order of business was to download Sell Online by Ecwid—available on the Clover App Market—to her POS to help her bring everything together on one dashboard.
“Having the integration between Clover and our website is huge,” Oosterhoof shares. ”I really wanted something that would sync with our existing eCommerce provider that would be streamlined and easy to update. My staff ranges in age from younger than me to close to retired, so I really wanted something that would be easy for everyone to learn.”
Beyond simply wanting to reduce the learning curve for her employees, Oosterhoff also wanted to have a clear picture of her inventory to ensure she wouldn’t oversell goods.
“If someone buys something online, it takes it out of our inventory right away so that we’re not overselling any products that we have,” explains Oosterhoff. “So if someone’s ordering a plant online, we know for sure we have it in store and vice versa.”
Whitney and Phil Mayhew, co-owners of Broken Spoke Boutique in Valentine, NE, were in a similar position before they started processing payments through Clover.
“Our old POS system would not connect to our website. We had to manually take everything off that sold in-store and online, and it was a pain,” Phil illustrates. “So we needed a system that could do that for us.”
SKU IQ—available on Clover’s app market—allows you to connect and integrate your Clover POS with industry leading eCommerce platforms. Together, Clover and SKU IQ help you keep tabs on orders, track inventory, set up stock alerts, and more.
“The SKU IQ app is what we use to connect Clover to our WooCommerce page,” Whitney shares. “We just go into the SKU IQ app to add new inventory, adjust totals, and set prices. Once we hit ‘save,’ it automatically updates our website and our Clover inventory page on the dashboard.”
“Before this,” Phil adds, “every time we sold something, we would have to go online and take it out of inventory. It was a nightmare. This makes everything so much simpler.”
Like the Mayhews, Tami Cox, owner of Country Friends of Ohio in West Liberty, OH, came to understand that a single source of truth for all your inventory data is indispensable.
“I used to track inventory the old-fashioned way through a spreadsheet and a lot of backend work every day on sales,” Cox shares. “Once I delved more into the Clover system and found out that I can do it all through Clover, it was life saving for me.”
Cox connected her eCommerce business—run by Shopventory—with her Clover POS using the Thrive Inventory app, which helps her manage inventory quickly and easily.
“I’m using Shopventory where, for every new product that comes in, I put it into Shopventory, and it talks to both my website and my Clover system,” Cox outlines. “Everything’s in real time now, so I don’t have to go back into the website and update things. I don’t have to go back into my Clover and update things. It has streamlined everything for me, which is exactly what I needed.”
Sort your inventory with modifiers and variants
For a business like Your Toy Link in Meridian, ID, maintaining inventory accuracy isn’t so straightforward. Owner, Ben Gloria, struggled to label action figures and trading cards accurately with variants with his previous POS provider.
“[Our previous provider] wasn’t working just because of the complexity our items can get sometimes,” Gloria explains. “It was only working for like, Item A = $5, Item B = $3, etc. With Clover, we can put A, B, C, and D into the same barcode, but you can see their different prices. Then when I scan the barcode at checkout I can say, Oh yeah, this is the one that we sell for $24, not the one for $15.”
Sounds straightforward enough for the store owner to navigate, but how about for his staff?
“Yeah, our employees like it, too. It’s super easy for them to use. A lot of them have restaurant backgrounds, and they’ve worked with similar Clovers in the restaurant business,” says Gloria. “But instead of creating modifiers for a menu, we’re converting inventory into product items with variants.”
To learn how Clover can help your small business manage inventory easier, contact a Clover Business Consultant today.
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