We’ve all been there: a customer finds a product they want on your menu only to show up in-store and find it out of stock. Keeping inventory up-to-date is one of the most important things you can do to ensure your business stays ahead of the competition.
Industry-leading dispensary software updates inventory in real-time to prevent a run on products. Reliable data gives your team visibility into sales trends, consumer behaviors, and regulatory shifts.
Streamline Inventory Management
A dispensary can minimize inventory loss and improve operational efficiency by adopting a first-in, first-out (FIFO) inventory system. This approach ensures that the oldest products are sold first and prevents expired products from reaching your customers. This method is also cost-efficient because it reduces purchasing and holding inventory spending.
A solid inventory management strategy is essential for success in the cannabis industry. The cost of carrying inventory is high and can quickly eat away at your profits if you don’t streamline your supply chain. Using a product inventory control system that provides valuable insights into customer demand patterns and purchase habits helps optimize your supply chain. Streamlining your inventory is vital for compliance with regulators’ seed-to-sale tracking systems. Choosing a robust POS system to push sales data into these programs automatically eliminates backlogs. It reduces the risk of human error, which can result in fines and license revocation.
Offer a Diverse Product Range
A wide selection of cannabis products can make your dispensary a consumer destination. Strategically evaluating the demand for each product can help you determine what products should be ordered and when. By analyzing sales data, you can set inventory levels that align with store vision, avoid redundancies, and optimize prices.
Whether your goal is to create a fast-paced experience for in-and-out customers or provide an educational focus, your store’s layout and floor plan will impact how customers move through the shop. Optimizing traffic flow through your store will help keep customer wait times to a minimum and reduce the number of customers leaving without purchasing. Retailers can gain insights into consumer purchase intent, preferences, and motivations using POS and CRM software. The data helps you identify and understand profitable markets and how to tailor your marketing strategies best. A CRM system can also help you build customer loyalty and foster stronger relationships, but a full-scale CRM may be optional, depending on your business goals.
Boost Customer Loyalty
Boosting customer loyalty can help you maximize profitability. The more loyal your customers are, the less often you’ll need to promote your products — and it typically costs less to sell to an existing customer than to attract a new one.
Dispensaries can develop loyalty programs by rewarding repeat customers with discounts, free products, exclusive access to limited distribution products, and points easily exchanged for premium products. Communicating the program details clearly and consistently is important to maintaining customer engagement.
Other ways to cultivate loyalty include personalized discounting (on birthdays) and recognizing milestones such as a customer’s 10th or 50th purchase. These little touches can help a customer feel valued as an individual and create a deeper connection with your brand. In addition, utilizing the JIT inventory management method can increase sales and profitability by ordering inventory from suppliers only when needed. This strategy requires a disciplined approach to stockouts, but it can reduce your inventory holding costs and minimize the amount of money you need to invest in promotional activities.
Automate Promotions
Streamlined ordering, promotions, and loyalty programs give customers a smoother experience and more incentive to return. Online ordering also helps dispensaries gather valuable customer data, which can be used to inform inventory and marketing decisions.
A good dispensary management system updates in real-time so staff can check product availability without re-entering orders. This can help you implement a JIT or just-in-time strategy to reduce inventory holding costs and avoid stockouts.
Dispensary software such as GoToke.io enables you to set up automated email sequences, like an abandoned cart or repeat purchase reminder, that can help drive customer engagement and retention. You can use these tools to directly target your customers’ promotions using their unique POS and CRM profiles. Enhanced analytics from martech tools enable you to make better-informed inventory management and business decisions by monitoring trends and performance, predicting sales patterns, analyzing marketing attribution, and more. These insights can help you streamline operations and maximize efficiency and profits.
Increase Customer Service
Providing customers with a seamless, hassle-free shopping experience is key to growing loyal, repeat dispensary shoppers. With the right cannabis tech stack, this can be accomplished by offering online ordering and delivery services.
Ecommerce software enables customers to browse products and place orders online for in-store pickup, which reduces wait times for in-store shoppers and increases customer satisfaction. This software also provides dispensary owners with valuable data, such as product sales and customer preferences, that can inform future marketing efforts. Loyalty programs boost dispensary customer retention rates and help businesses stay competitive. Investing in the right dispensary technology can dramatically improve your store’s efficiency and profits.
