Clothing is one of those things the market always wants, however many shops there are selling it — t-shirts, womenswear, children's clothes and every other kind besides. Because each type of clothing has its own set of customers, the market is enormously wide and the opportunities keep coming. And these days a clothes shop does not even need a shopfront or rented floor space; you can open online instead, which means you can run a clothes shop in whatever form suits you.
Plenty of people, then, want to open a clothes shop of their own. You certainly do not have to design or sew anything yourself, because there are any number of wholesalers, and you can become a distributor for other brands. There are lots of routes to opening the shop you have in mind.
But whether you design the clothes yourself or buy them in to resell, one thing is equally hard: running the shop. Managing a clothes shop is no simple matter, and there is a great deal to look after.
Here is what running a clothes shop means looking after.
1. Managing your costs
The first and most important thing about opening a shop is cost. And cost does not only mean buying the stock you sell; it also means everything else — the premises, the equipment, advertising and all the other expenses that come with your shop.
So think carefully before you spend money on anything. Above all, do not look only at the price and lose sight of how well something works or how good it is. Something may cost a lot, but if it genuinely works and genuinely helps you, it is more worth the investment than the cheap alternative.
And do not forget to keep good records of what you spend, so you can check them at any time, work out the shop's profit and loss, and judge where you should be spending more or less to make the business succeed.
2. Ringing up sales and taking payment
Money is the other thing that matters when you run a clothes shop, and it is where mistakes most often happen, because clothes shops carry a lot of stock in a lot of variations of size and colour, and customers often buy several things at once or come in all together. So you ring something up wrong, take the wrong amount, or end up unsure whether you charged correctly. When that happens you lose profit and give yourself stress you did not need.
There are several ways to ring up a sale and take payment, too — by hand, on a computer, or on a POS terminal — and each helps in a different way. What matters most, though, is that the tool is dependable and accurate, so nothing goes wrong where money is concerned.
3. Looking after stock
Stock management matters enormously, of course. Good stock management makes a clothes shop far easier to run, because you can see clearly what you have and what you are short of.
And looking at your stock alongside daily sales reports makes running the shop easier still. Reading the two together tells you which clothes sell well, what you should be buying in to restock, and what your customers like — all of which keeps the business in good health.
4. Looking after your customers
Looking after customers does not only mean serving them during a sale; it means after-sales service too. Make a good impression and there is every chance they will become regulars, which does your shop no end of good.
One thing that helps make that impression is building a customer database and having customers sign up as members. With a tool that records what customers have bought, you know what each of them likes. And since getting in touch with customers is so much easier these days, you can reach out with new products that will genuinely appeal to them or with a special promotion — which makes customers easier to keep and lifts sales as well.
5. Promoting the shop
Open a shop and you simply cannot skip the promotion. Advertising a clothes shop means paying particular attention to photography — finding models, shooting on location — which is a fuss and takes a great deal of time. With money and a team behind you it is comfortable enough, but with limited money or people it becomes quite a business, because there is so much else you have to handle. In the early days especially you may have to oversee and do everything yourself to get the shop promoted the way you want.
So it would be far better to have some time free from running the shop to spend thinking about advertising and promotion — because take it from us, creativity and good ideas never turn up while you are frantic or stressed about something else.
All of that is an example of what running a clothes shop means handling. And if you are running one on your own, or with only a couple of people at the start, it is certainly going to be hard work. Having just opened, you may not have the budget to hire permanent staff or to have someone on hand to manage every side of the business all the time.
Which is why running the shop on a POS system is worth considering: it is an investment and a foundation that makes managing the shop easier. Believe us, POS hardware and software will make running a clothes shop easier than you would expect.
And here is why a shop management POS makes running a clothes shop easier.
1. Selling and taking payment become easier
With a shop management POS, everything becomes more systematic, because as well as helping you sell, it rings up and takes payment too. Every transaction can be handled through a single system, and the POS records the details for you.
2. Look after your regulars and build a membership scheme
A shop management POS makes it easy to record who your customers are. Enter their name and phone number in the system, and the next time they buy, you can record that purchase. You can also run promotions — a points scheme, for instance — or look back at what a customer has bought before.
3. Retail or wholesale, no problem, and no confusion over stock
A POS usually comes with stock or inventory management built in, which suits a clothes shop particularly well, because clothes shops often sell both retail and wholesale and carry a wide range of stock. Running your shop on a POS that counts stock accurately is much the better arrangement.
And a POS like Qashier records product details finely — which colours and which sizes you have in stock — which helps enormously. It also cuts down the time you lose fussing over stock management.
4. It produces quotations
Quotations may feel like somebody else's problem, but if the day comes when you really do need one (as we said, the market always wants clothes — and that includes corporate customers), a POS like Qashier produces them easily. You can be confident the quotation is accurate, and send it straight to the customer by email. It issues tax invoices too.
5. It produces reports and daily sales summaries
The daily routine of closing off the day's sales becomes easier, because Qashier's POS system handles it simply and lets you look at any period in detail, so you can see exactly how your sales and your business are doing — and have far more time free for everything else.
Running a clothes shop, then, need not be a fuss or a drain on your time and energy, because with a shop management POS everything gets quicker and easier.
If you would like Qashier to be the assistant your shop needs, get in touch for more information. Qashier is ready to support shops and restaurants alike, with both retail POS hardware and a capable POS system, and support from our team seven days a week.
For more details, reach us on Line Official: @qashier.th or call 02 544 0267