Pop-up Stores: How to Maximize the IT ROI

Pop-up retail shops allow companies to build buzz around their products and increase sales opportunities, making pop-up retailing one of the hottest trends in the industry. However, many pop-up stores are finding the unique challenges of pop-up retailing unmanageable without effective IT systems. That’s why it’s important to know how to implement IT support with a limited budget, how a commerce platform can increase your pop-up store’s ROI and how IT impacts everything from your supply chain to customer interaction. Here is a guide to how IT can transform your pop-up retail store and ultimately increase sales.

Pop-Up Retail Through a Commerce Platform

While pop-up retail shops can exist for a few weeks or more, companies often use pop-up shops to draw hundreds of customers for limited-edition products that can sell out in only hours, helping promote their brand. They then close up that retail space. Many different companies have opened up pop-up shops, all the way from luxury retailers like Chanel and Hermes to huge brand names like Reebok and Gap, underlining how big this trend is.

However, companies that participate in pop-up stores often have inventory mismanagement, disorganization and breakdowns in the supply chain, particularly if they don’t have an IT system to help manage the retail products they’re selling. The whole venture can quickly turn to chaos.

There’s a narrow window for effective implementation of a pop-up store concept, which means you want an effective commerce platform that can help provide product details, build product catalogs, manage pricing functions and introduce products to the market at lightening speed. That way, you can track which items are flying off the shelves and which items are duds, allowing you to shift your plan within days, possibly increasing your bottom line.

A commerce platform needs a clean and easy-to-use design, allowing employees in a store that might only exist for a few hours to gain complete command of the system without extensive training.

Managing Your Sales Traffic in Real Time

Pop-up stores need to sell and analyze merchandise trends fast. They don’t have years to build and promote their physical presence, so they need to sell what’s hot right this moment. That’s why your IT system should help you save time and maximize your ROI.

The right commerce platform helps automate mail and data integration, provides you with real-time updates automatically, and automates shipping when inventory becomes low. For your employees, you want an intuitive and easy-to-use POS (point of sale) system to help handle the high customer volume typically seen at pop-up store locations.

You also will want to monitor your customer traffic and retail sales in any location. An IT system that networks easily with your mobile phone, tablet computers and cloud-based system provides maximum adaptability to changing retail dynamics, no matter where you or your employees are.

IT Helps You Obtain and Process Important Retail Data

Often, pop-up shops test new products, try out new markets and gain new customers. Opening a pop-up retail shop without an effective IT system means you could lose accurate data from your venture. A commerce platform helps increase your long-term ROI by helping you identify weak points in your supply chain and what products were successful. It also helps you enter data from new customers to build mailing lists.

You can use the data you gathered for your next pop-up retail store venture or to improve your current retail product offerings, whether they’re featured online or in your standard retail lineup of stores. Even if you have a limited IT budget for your pop-up store, it’s important to implement a commerce platform anyway, as this IT system can help your business grow long after your pop-up shop is closed.

Managing Your Supply Chain

One of the biggest difficulties pop-up retail stores have is effective management of their supply chain. Because pop-up stores exist for a limited time, it’s important that your store’s operations run as smoothly as possible today—not tomorrow. An IT system can provide alerts about products that are about to sell out, real-time updates on shipments, automatic invoicing, updates on factory production schedules and quick quotes on the products you want to stock.

If you want an IT system that delivers comprehensive inventory support, complete supply chain integration, top-notch analytics and comprehensive customer support, then The Openbravo Commerce Platform has you covered. Try our industry leading commerce platform today, and ensure your pop-up store gets the IT system it deserves.