The fun never stops at Woodlands Local as we search for extra sales and extra tools to improve our business, with a new EPoS system the latest development.
by Antony Begley
With Christmas now a fast-fading memory and Easter just around the corner, it’s another busy period at Woodlands Local as we prepare for what we hope will be a productive and constructive year.
The Christmas sales period was solid if unspectactular at best, despite the huge amount of effort we put into our Christmas Crackers campaign, though we did add a new raft of Woodlands Rewards Club members, so the activity wasn’t entirely futile.
It seems increasingly clear that making money from traditional Christmas lines is a real challenge these days, with the supermarkets and discounters producing deals on advent calendars, selection boxes, alcohol, party food and so on that we can’t even begin to compete with on a price basis.
New EPoS
The most significant change taking place at the moment is a switch of EPoS system, which was happening just as SLR went to press. We are moving to RDP’s ShopMate system as part of a drive to increase efficiency and reduce the amount of time we spend on basic practices like signing-in stock, managing our inventory, ordering and promotions management.
Our previous RS system was – and remains – a great EPoS system, but because of our unusual position in the market, receiving deliveries from multiple wholesalers and thus having to cope with multiple wholesaler price files, the system simply wasn’t coping.
We were manually carrying out many tasks that could easily be automated and were losing literally dozens of hours a week to manually inputting price file updates, promotional campaigns and new product data.
The ShopMate system is also more efficient for our purposes when it comes to operating our Rewards Club, principally because it removes the need for buttons on the till which staff were required to press in order to action discounts and capture valuable data. The new system automatically applies all relevant discounts and ensures that our customers can’t gain access to Rewards Club deals without having their key fob scanned.
There remain one or two teething problems of course, particularly around getting information from our EPoS system into our vital Darius for Retail ‘brain’, the software that runs the Rewards Club – but we’re working on those right now and hope to have a solution in place over the next few weeks.
The ShopMate system also requires us to issue all existing members with a new key fob, which isn’t ideal, but we’re planning to use this to our advantage. When customers come in to get their new card we will seek to verify their details and potentially add new data – like phone numbers for those we don’t have on file and missing date of birth info.
Food for thought
2017 will also see us renew our focus on the food to go element of the store. We’ve always known that food to go is one of the biggest footfall (and margin) drivers at the store and have made many improvements to the food to go section. The latest plan however is to focus more on the food itself by looking to bring in an expanded range of products, particularly higher end, home-made and healthier lines.
We know our customers like the food we provide, so we’re going to work harder on giving them more options and on encouraging them trade up and to pick another impulse item while they’re at it.
We have bought a new range of high end signage kit too which will allow us to create a far more impressive and eye-catching menu board as well as a range of professionally-presented regular offers, meal deals and promotions.
E is for extra profit
E-cigarettes will be another key focus over the next couple of months as we attempt to improve our range and pricing, and try to drive more penetration through existing shoppers and – hopefully – new ones. We are talking to our tobacco gantry supplier JTI to scope out the options for an improved gantry with a better vaping display and we’re also looking at some more radical options to allow us to broaden our range into a much wider selection of liquids and, possibly, a range of higher end tanks and accessories.
