Are modern Point of Sale (POS) terminals, also known as smart POS terminals, solely for gaining a competitive advantage over peers? Nothing could be further from the truth than this assumption. With faster-than-ever adoption of POS terminals across sectors, the retail management solution has become a must-have for businesses to stay profitable.
Pharmacy owners today are not just in a race against other stores to secure a market share in a given locality. Over the years, several feature-rich e-commerce platforms have given them a run for their money by offering countless substitutes (medicines with the same composition and quality) across brands and price ranges.
The Case for Point of Sale Terminals in Medical Stores
To begin with, it is worth asking: as e-commerce platforms have made it affordable to get medicine delivered to one’s doorstep, what is the relevance of a medical store? While it is true that it is more convenient to order medicine online, the importance of pharmacies persists due to the following reasons:
- Time Gap Between Order Placement and Delivery: Unless someone has managed to secure the drug they need in a last-mile delivery platform, it is unlikely that e-commerce sites can meet urgent requirements.
- Compliance Issues: Most prescription-only drugs, particularly sedatives, medicines which may lead to substance abuse, and compositions with major side effects, may not be permitted to be sold online. Such regulations make in-store purchases of these medicines (under the scrutiny of a pharmacist) the only option for patients.
- Consumer Trust: As the sale of medicines revolves around the health of buyers or their loved ones, many people might not be comfortable letting go of the human touch involved in dealing with a pharmacist. Therefore, a segment of consumers may remain dependent on medical stores.
To help medical store owners make informed decisions about the kind of POS system they must invest in to get the maximum returns, in the blog we will explore the following:
- Key features of high-performing POS terminals
- How these features can streamline the operations of a medical store
- Why billing terminals by Posiflex can transform the retail management bandwidth of pharmacy owners
Key Considerations Before Selecting Point of Sale Terminals for Medical Stores
Here are some top priorities of pharmacies that POS terminals help address:
- Customer Journey
A few major factors influencing a customer’s in-store experience are queue wait time and loyalty programs, which help buyers enjoy attractive discounts and accurate bills. These factors are common in FMCG or clothing retail stores as they are in a medicine store. However, the customer journey and the purpose of visiting a pharmacy differs vastly from the look, feel, and necessity of a grocery store or clothing outlet.
For example, most pharmacies in India are not set up like supermarkets where the customer picks up the items from the shelves and can potentially self-checkout. At a typical Indian pharmacy, customers usually place the order and pay for it at the same counter where the staff packs the items and generates the bill, making the checkout process lengthy.
A robust all-in-one POS terminal or POS system with a comprehensive set of peripherals, including printers and barcode scanners, can speed up the billing process by:
- Swiftly scanning and uploading the prescription to the cloud, thus ensuring that owners remain compliant with every sale of prescription-only drugs accurately recorded
- Offering visibility to the store staff about the location of the drugs, thereby curtailing the time taken to fetch inventory
- Enabling accurate data entry of medicines with the help of barcode scanners
- Automating billing amount calculation, thus fast-tracking the billing process while also making it error-free
- Alerting the cashier about the scope for adjusting the payable amount against loyalty points and discounts
- Inventory Control and Analytics & Reporting
A well-stocked inventory ensures that when customers visit the store to buy medicine urgently or to purchase the drugs they need regularly, the buyers may begin to think that they can count on the store to meet their needs. As a result, people are likely to visit the store frequently and recommend the outlet to others, thereby boosting the popularity and profitability of the business.
However, inventory control in pharmacies is as much about upholding the quality of service as it is about shrinkage reduction and compliance. For instance, expired medicine in the stock implies loss. At the same time, if an expired batch of medicine is sold unintentionally, it can be lethal for the consumer and hence, trigger legal action against the business.
The inventory control modules of POS terminals can help businesses:
- Gain real-time visibility into the inventory levels, thereby mitigating stockouts and shrinkage caused by overstocking when the demand for certain drugs at a given time is proportionately lesser than what is available in the inventory
- Improve stock planning and reorganise replenishment cycles using analytics and reporting capabilities of the inventory control module that allow medical stores to track the best-selling medicines and identify the pattern of consumption of every item in the inventory
- Drive customer satisfaction by stocking the key items which, according to the POS terminal analytics, attract customers to their stores
- Third-party Integrations
As discussed earlier in the blog, e-commerce platforms may be strong competitors of medical stores, but stores continue to be relevant. Therefore, integrating one’s operations with e-commerce sites may open an extra revenue stream for pharmacies seeking to expand their customer base.
Additionally, keeping track of repeat orders can help the medical stores foster loyalty amongst customers by catering to their needs regularly. However, keeping a tab on repeat orders manually is challenging. This is why, CRM integration into one’s retail management system is crucial.
The importance of e-commerce and CRM integrations, amongst other integrations such as that of the CCTV feed into the retail management system of medical stores makes a strong case for a modern POS terminal. This is because the device seamlessly connects these third-party platforms to a single source of truth.
- Scalability & Security Management
With cloud-native retail management, business owner(s) can remotely track factors such as:
- Revenue per store
- Items trending in each location
- Consumer Behaviour
However, perhaps the most important usefulness of a cloud-based retail management tool, particularly a cloud-based POS terminal, is scalability. Any business aiming to expand its presence across multiple locations should opt for a cloud POS. This is because cloud POS can centralise data without any manual intervention while also providing a more secure environment than on-premises systems.
The remote access of the POS system allows medical store owners to look at the CCTV camera and identify theft or misdealing. At the same time, to reduce the number of money or inventory mismanagement, the owners or managers can restrict access to certain modules and fields of the POS terminals. The billing machine also can protect sensitive customer information, encrypt transactions, and offer security-enhancing login protocols.
In terms of scalability, if the market best practices change, pharmacists can easily adapt to them with the help of cloud POS as the billing terminal enables regular software updates while keeping the business data safe.
- Employee Management
By leveraging a robust modern POS terminal, pharmacists can in a single touchpoint:
- Keep a tab on the work hours of their employees,
- Monitor how much sales each employee is making,
- Automate schedule creation of the employees, thus ensuring staff availability during peak hours, and
- Calculate payroll.
Medical stores looking for an efficient POS terminal should note that Posiflex has a long-standing legacy of boosting retail success with the help of its world-class retail management tools, especially POS terminals. Our POS systems and peripheral devices come in a wide range of configurations and prices.
Want to know in-depth about the capabilities of our Point of Sales terminals?
Contact our team of experts today!
Published on 20th February 2025
