and post-holiday sales season can be stressful if not prepared for it. ERPLY has built in some features and reporting which can help you prepare your staff for the oncoming season. Using our 'Comparison Period' reporting feature can be helpful to see recent trends, seasonal trends, and year over year trends to help you forecast your upcoming season. 
First, make sure your staff is ready and you have enough salespeople to serve your customers well. First, get a handle on the volume of sales you're likely to see. A comparison report of your sales by weekday and sales by the hour will let you know when you’re likely to need the most staff on hand.
If you have special holiday sales goals, now is the time to consider a commission, or an incentive plan for all your staff, or maybe just your managers. You can do this on the employee card for each eligible employee Most new clerks will need a few weeks to get ‘up to speed’ in any new retail environment, but ERPLY makes POS simple and easy for them to learn. Don’t forget to check on timeclock reporting, and sales by an employee to see who you want on shift during the critical sales days and most opportune hours. Once your staff is prepared, make sure your inventory is too. Compare sales volumes from last year to see what were your hot sellers, and what was not. Time is short now for ordering new inventory, but better now than later! Consider running promotions or coupons to draw your customers to the items you’d like to get moving. Maybe use some bundles
at attractive prices to get hot sellers moving with some slow staples. An underused feature in ERPLY is our ‘replacement products
’ feature, which will add a pop up for your cashiers when items are added to the cart that can prompt them to ask if the customer would like to get a related item with this purchase. For example, you might consider adding value set gift cards to the ‘replacement item’ menu for your greetings cards, so when someone buys a birthday card, your cashier asks if they would also like a gift certificate with that. Or if someone buys a new dog collar, might they also like a leash? We suggest having ‘replacement products’ stocked on hand near the register to facilitate quick add-on purchases.
For more thoughts on ways to use ERPLY to keep your season moving well, give us a call or email us at support@erply.com