Grocery Habits You Need to Let Go to Save Money

Grocery shopping is a time taking, want-to-skip-but-necessary-to-do kind of task. A lot of your time is spent on it, costing too much too and the task usually tests your patience; the last time I went grocery shopping, I had to wait 20 minutes for the guy in front of me who’s cart was full of snacks and flavoured yoghurts.

Thanks to online grocery store, like howmuch.pk, my problem of wasting a lot of my time at cash counters is solved, yet I suffer from spending way too much money on grocery shopping. And so, I searched up on how to save my money while doing the necessary shopping and the results I found were surprisingly helpful in saving money. It turns out; I had to let go of a few habits. I’ll share them in a bit, but just so you know, even after you let go of these habits, you will be eating healthy, nutritious food, fulfilling all your body’s needs! So, here’s are the habits you need to cut down to save your money magically:

Peer Pressure Shopping:

Have you ever found yourself shopping because one of your friends tells you that there’s a great sale for oil or rice at some store? You think you should buy it too, despite being well stocked with the times at home? Saturdays and Sundays are also the days when people shop because that is the “norm”? Did you know that a lot of stores put up great offers on weekdays because those are the slow days?

With online shopping, you don’t even need to find time to go to a shopping store. Just whip out your phone and order your groceries as you require them and preferably on a weekday, as you’ll likely get a discount! If you prefer traditional shopping, then along with the discount, you will get away from the peak shopping days, saving you a lot of time and hassle!

Shop according to your Meal Plans:

We shop groceries to use the items for breakfast, lunches and dinners, right? So, isn’t it better to decide what you want to have in breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week and buy only those items? I know it sounds really dull, but you’ll end up finding this freeing. Truthfully, your goal is to purchase the ingredients you need for meals and maybe a few snacks. You don’t need to stuff your freezer with every frozen item you come across in a store.

We waste so much of our groceries every month because we don’t have a clear idea of what we need. We buy a lot of items with the intention to use them, but sometimes don’t use them because we already have leftovers from the last day. Slowly and gradually, the unused items pile up, and we end up wasting our money over food that turned bad before you had time to utilize it.

Don’t go shopping More than Once in a Week:

How many times have you gone to a store coming back from work because you just recalled or decided on a whim that you need something? This is how you slowly and gradually run out of your grocery shopping budget! You need to plan what you need weekly and buy all the items in one go.

You also need to match your food budget to your calendar. If you have lunch or dinner plans with friends or a date planned with your significant other, you need to get fewer meal ingredients for the week. Be smart when you shop, and you’ll see how much money you can save!

Evaluation Criteria of POS Systems for Small Businesses

Every business’s main target is to make the maximum profit it can. Small businesses have small capitals, and therefore they need to carefully think about where they should invest their money to get maximum benefits. In today’s world, it is wise to have an e-commerce website for your business, even if it bricks and mortar one.

In today’s world, a lot of people prefer to shop online only. And so, a boost in E-commerce stores has been observed in the past few years, making an Ecommerce POS System a hot commodity. For a small business, though, investing a considerable sum of the system is not ideal. Therefore, a small business would generally look for a cheap POS system to integrate with their E-commerce store. The following is the criteria a small business needs to follow while purchasing a POS system:

Price

As stated above, it would be highly unconventional for a new business to invest thousands of dollars on a POS system. The price against the features offered by the available POS systems should be first evaluated. Then the company should list down and analyze the main features it requires in the POS software to streamline its operations. And then finally the systems that tick all the filters should be enlisted. The one with the most affordable price should be chosen.

Ease of Use

Any good software is one that is easy to understand and use. A business owner who purchases a POS software does so to automate his business processes, easing the workload. Operations conducted by human resources are prone to errors, but ones performed by machines are predictable and accurate.

However, no business owner would like to purchase a system that requires him to give special training to his employees. Time is money and training employees to use a new system wastes a lot of time. So, what a business owner, especially a small business owner, would look in a system is its ease of use. His staff need to be able to shift to the POS system without wasting time in understanding it.

Inventory management

The biggest power of a POS system is that it seamlessly manages your inventory. As soon as a customer purchases an item, it is automatically subtracted from the inventory. Plus, a POS system needs to alert you when you are about to run out of stock or are overstocked. For a grocery store, especially, being overstocked can result in a disaster. Thus, small scale business owners need to consider a POS system that has an accurate and robust inventory management tool.

Fortunately, howmuch POS is a reliable grocery POS system that is popular amongst retail store owners in Pakistan. If you are a Pakistani business owner, howmuch POS system should be your go-to!

Customer Relationship Management

Local businesses thrive on their strong relationships with their customers. And this is a two-way street- a lot of customers like to go to small scale businesses because they want to feel to know how much they mean to the business. However, it is hard to remember each customer’s name, their preferred order and other details, even for a small business.

A POS solves this problem with ease. Your customer database is updated when they make a purchase from you with their purchase and their contact details. This way, you can see what product they purchase the most, the frequency of their purchases from your shop and generate exclusive coupons for them accordingly. Similarly, with their contact information, you can easily send them promotional emails, making sure that your business is always on their mind. With a mobile POS, you can even do this from the ease of your home!

Reasons Why Cloud-Based POS is Superior to Traditional POS Software

POS systems have become the need of time. However, choosing the right kind of POS software is very important too. Opting for a traditional POS software can prove to be a wrong choice as there are several features that you will miss that can help boost your sales, as compared to the user of a POS Retail Cloud-Based System.

For most businesses, buying a POS is a one-time activity. A good Point of Sale system can revolutionize your entire business, automating and streamlining all your operations. By using a POS, you ensure that every process at your business is accurate and timely. The perfect POS system acts as a tool that assists business owners in increasing their sales, getting a better understanding of their customers, tracking and managing their inventory.

The following are some of the reasons you should consider using a cloud-based POS software over the traditional one:

Remote Access:

With a cloud-based system, you can access your data from anywhere, at any time. You can manage multiple store’s data at once too. Plus, you can edit the product details, add new products, update your inventory, manages sales, track customer transactions, purchase orders, set up promotional campaigns all through a cloud-based system. Mobile POS systems even make accessing data remotely more convenient. So, all you need to do is keep your smartphone on you and be connected to the internet to do business while out of site!

Software Updation:

In a traditional POS system, each new update is done by an IT person that the company who’s POS you are using sends. You have to wait for him to arrive, update the system and halt all your work till the system is updating. This takes a lot of time and could make you lose quite a few potential customers.

Cloud-based systems’ software updates the system automatically, without causing any hindrance to the business operations. The updates only need to be downloaded and installed on one system, so there’s no need to install the update on all the connected devices.

Centralized Management

A lot of companies experience the challenges posed by inaccurate inventory and sales records, and thus, automatically the total they calculate is much different from the actual amount spent. To justify the expenditure, a business’s employees spend a lot of time going back to all the recorded records, manually calculating the total sales, etc. This wastes a lot of the company’s time for growth and gathering new customers.

With a cloud-based system, as all your information is present at one place, you don’t need to look from system to system, fetching the data. In fact, with a cloud-based POS system, you can generate accurate sales report.

Fortunately, Howmuch does all this for you! From inventory tracking to updating data in real-time, howmuch’s POS is everything you need. Equipped with the latest technologies, howmuch POS is the best supermarket POS!

Real-time Insights

For a business to grow and earn profits, you need to have accurate data. All the purchases made by customers need to be available for view anytime, anywhere. You also need to have insights about each of your products and track which one of them is proving to be the most profitable and which the least. When you have these insights, you can easily create marketing strategies that are most effective and profitable for your business. Having information about your demographics also proves to be quite fruitful in campaign designing and business growth.

Data Security

When all your data is digital, it is obvious that there is a huge risk of losing all of it. Just one click and all your work can go down the drain. With a POS system, therefore, the risk of losing all your data is high, however, it is considerably reduced while suing cloud-based POS software because all your data is on the cloud, not your device. In case of a theft, device malfunction or device hacking, you still have all your business’s data. You also don’t need to worry about employee theft or virus attacks anymore!