Setting retail sales prices in EPOS software

Running a retail business would be so much easier if suppliers never changed their prices. Retailers have to spend a great deal of time setting sales prices accurately, especially in the ecommerce arena where the customer has much great visibility of competitors prices. Your EPOS software system needs to have great tools for helping you set your sales prices quickly and accurately.

The urgency of setting sales prices varies from sector to sector. In some retail markets prices are relatively static, but most sectors have frequent prices changes from suppliers. The smaller your margin on products, the faster you need to respond to changes in cost price from suppliers and change your sell prices. It is entirely possible that a sudden supplier price change can leave you selling items to customers at a loss because of a very narrow margin.

You need to know what supplier costs have changed

The first thing your EPOS software needs to do is tell you when a cost price has changed. Cost prices can be changed by amending the product file, importing a supplier price list or changing the cost on goods in or when entering a purchase invoice. Your EPOS software should have a function that shows you all the products whose price has changed in a certain period of time, or just those cost prices which have changed, but you have not yet revised the sell price.

Your final sell price for a stock item is made up of many factors, including the margin you hope to achieve, expected settlement or other retro discounts from the supplier and any landed costs you expect to be billed for later. It is only by having all this information presented to you on one screen are you able to understand the correct sales price.

The EPOS system should then suggest the ideal sell prices using a 2 phase rule. First an exact price is calculated according to the required margin and then a rounding must be applied. Items are rarely sold for 98p, we expect the EPOS system to round the prices up to a nearest marketable price. You should then have the ability to apply these sales prices to the system, or hold them and apply them at a certain point, e.g. monday morning.

You need to print tickets as well

The EPOS system should of course them offer to print revised price tickets for the items where the price has changed. If you are setting your branch sales prices from head office, you need to be able to get the branch to receive an automated report telling them which prices have changed and let them print out the new price labels.

An advanced feature is only changing the prices on stock which has been purchased at the higher price. This is quite difficult to achieve, requiring some clever batch tracing, and generally isn't worth the effort. In ecommerce it is important to know your competitors prices when setting your own prices. Various services on the internet try to help with this, but I find that it is quite handy just to be able to store the URLs of your key stock items on rivals websites, so you can just click on them and see what price they are using today. Some clever software will actually be able to scrape this price of the competitor website and import it into your system, and show it to you on the screen you use to set your sell prices - how cool is that!?!