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Point of Sale - POS Helps Sell Home Plans


When you're a home designer, you're going to have clients coming to you, talking to you face-to-face. And while most of your customers are going to want the personal service and attention to detail you bring, some of your clients may simply want to see a catalog of contemporary house plans and choose the one they like best. Custom is certainly not for everyone, nor should it be. For those customers, have you thought of installing a point-of-sale (POS) system?

If you have customers coming into your office, you have a perfect chance to create an environment to cross-sell, upsell, or encourage impulse buying. You can offer basic bungalow house plans or ranch house plans for your customers to choose from, or you can give them the option to take one of the basic plans as a starting point and customize from there. Either way, a POS system can help. A terminal and keyboard coupled with a barcode scanner and magnetic stripe reader can allow you the flexibility to accept credit card payments and attach barcodes to all your merchandise. You then have the ability to offer all sorts of other products like books on home improvements and decorating or plans for other structures around the yard like decks, sheds, or playhouses. The options are limitless.

And while you'd love all of your customers to be interested in your big ticket items like luxury home plans, the reality is many of your clients will be on a budget. With POS, stocking and inventorying basic house plans is easy. With the proper software, you'll be able to scan each item into stock, then scan it out of stock when it's purchased. You'll always know how many you have of a particular item, and know precisely when is a good time to get more plans printed.

Some will tell you that in today's internet age you don't need to even have to offer a physical office to your customers. However, that view can be a little shortsighted. Sure, for huge retailers that deal in consumer goods, their online store may be all they need. After all, they are just acting as the middleman between the product and the consumer. In the home plans business, however, there is more of a personal touch that exists. Even those that want basic ranch style house plans will probably admit that they feel more comfortable buying from someone they can actually shake hands with. Also, you'll be dealing with local business for the most part, and your customers will be within driving distance of your office. Those are exactly the sort of customers that will be more likely to visit an office or store-and exactly the sort of customers you want to attract.

So set yourself up with a POS system, inventory your product, and start selling. Your customers will thank you for the convenience, and when you see your profits rising, you'll wonder how you ever got by without POS.

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