Case Study of a Retail Convenience Shop
- Quick service retail shop in Downtown San Diego, California.
- 4–5 employees.
- Open for 15 years.
- Average of 75–125 transactions daily.*
- Implementation in 2023.
- 1 terminal.
- Label printing, barcode scanning.
- Yelp Listing
“
This mini store in the Gaslamp area of Downtown San Diego is a convenient hole-in-the-wall spot to grab a quick soda, smoke, or other items. The store owner always has a smile for your quick purchase. So don’t be alarmed when you see ‘The Emergency Room’ on your statement—you just grabbed something quick as you passed through downtown.
”
Assessment
A Downtown San Diego retail shop serving alcohol, snacks, foods, and a variety of retail items to tourists and locals.
- Maintains several thousand items in inventory. Needs to re-order based on sales, trends, and time of year. Must track changing item costs.
- Offers special pricing for locals versus tourists.
- Automated discounts for certain grouped items, such as cigarettes and coffee.
- Uses a desktop application accessible via remote apps.
Goals
The following list outlines the solutions they implemented.
Purchase Orders and Shopping List
- Easy purchase orders: re-order lists, price/cost lookups, and adjustments.
- Case pricing.
- Shopping list generator: allows creation of purchasing lists for Costco and other vendor locations, viewable on a phone.
- Sales history used to confirm what to re-order based on recent sales.
- Find out more on our YouTube channel: youtube.com/@pointlesspos
Customer Pricing
- Easy local/vs tourist (non-local pricing option)
- Grouped item Pricing
- Rewards & Customer Points
Pricing for Locals & Tourists
This business relies on both locals and tourism. To maximize sales, they use a variety of specials and price levels.
The following two videos demonstrate how they apply pricing strategies that benefit frequent shoppers and locals, and how they encourage impulse purchases like shirts, keychains, and more.
Locals Pricing – Industry Pricing
Using price levels is a great way to provide discounts without busting up your margins.
Current Processor – Payment Club
- Did not support discount on Debit
- High Fees for Credit Card processing
- Not integrated with Point of Sale
- 3.5 percent rate charged on top of sale, increase price of all items by 3.5 percent.
- Improperly accounts for sales tax.
Merchant Processing
- Wants dual Pricing (credit vs cash), this reduces their overall credit card expense by offloading it on the customer.
- Integrated with the POS to ensure proper sales tax is collected.
- https://pointlesspos.com/payment-processing/
Shopping List – Inventory Stocking Feature
The Emergency Room’s limited inventory and seasonal traffic make ordering more complex than simply setting a re-order level and amount. The store determines purchase quantities based on several factors, including sales trends and seasonal demand.
The Emergency Room sources products from multiple locations, such as Costco and other vendors. To manage this, staff use shopping lists to keep track of items that need to be purchased across these sources.
Print queue – Any time a price is updated from the catalog, the label queue is triggered so staff can print updated labels. This is especially useful if an admin is updating prices remotely and needs local staff to handle label printing later.
Oversight
Pointless can import product lists from CSV files or pull data directly from a database.
- Supports everything from basic inventory to barcoded items and menu buttons.
- Handles both automated and manual discounts.
- Includes security features such as receipt printing logs, cash drawer notifications, item delete alerts, void alerts, and price override alerts — typically emailed to admins.
- A daily log of events is emailed with sales reports, helping management stay informed.
End-of-day emails include a journal of exceptions, detailing online order activity, item deletions, voids, and other notable events from the day.
Stability
- By providing an on site solution, that can be buttressed by an online source as well; we can provide a secure and stable solution that can not be interrupted by the internet or outside sources.
Implementation:
Equipment : Customer provided their own equipment.
Merchant Credit Card Processing
Pax Credit Terminals : Pax A30 Credit Card Terminal.
PointlessPOS uses Pax & Devices that support DC Direct.
Moving Forward with PointlessPOS
Pointless POS is provided as SASS solution which is onsite, and buttressed by online support. This allows for it to run offline if there is an internet outage.
Online access to custom domain. Management no longer needs remote connection software.
Oversight and awareness of behaviors. Behavioral notifications now alert management for:
- Price Changes
- Purchase orders
- Cash drawer opens
- Processing errors that are unexpected.
Enhancements Price Savings
PIN Debit has been implemented. This saves them cost over Price Club where all of these transactions were charged at the credit card rate.
Cost / Support & Ongoing
Price Lock – No Increase in fees over time.
A stable no change in fee structure. Because of the implementation & architectural decisions of Pointless; it can maintain a virtually static price model. There are no upgrade fees, price increases and modules that are add ons. Yes, other third parties may have their expenses, but based on the Pointless POS model, the ongoing cost of the solution can remain in effect for another 10 years, like it had for them the previous ten years.
