How Does Online Delivery Work? Do I Have The POS System To Support It?

Offering delivery is a great way to promote your brand. It allows customers to engage with your products from the comfort of their home or office, promoting your business through convenient and controllable ways. But before you begin, you must first understand how online delivery works, not just for your business but within your industry as a whole. From here, you can build a better POS system to fully support the delivery options you choose to offer.

What Is the Best Way to Obtain Customer Orders?

The very first step in determining whether or not online delivery can work for your business is to look at how customer orders are being received. As the name suggests, online delivery will require some form of online presence for your business and the order details and information must be fully integrated into your POS system. There are two other key components that a delivery supportive POS system should also provide.

Presenting customers with a web-driven way to place orders has almost become a standard practice among small business owners. Having this website be built from a template provided by a POS solutions provider gives an online ordering platform more power from a management and delivery perspective. But this is only one of the other key components necessary to complete the online ordering process prior to it going out for delivery.

How Do I Ensure That a Customer Pays for Their Order?

Before an online generated order can be completed and filled for delivery, there is the matter of customer payment. Prior to promoting online delivery services, you need to build user-friendly payment portals that are easy to use. The most common forms of payment types being used in conjunction with today’s POS software solutions are web-based invoicing software tools and virtual terminals, both of which are integrated within your POS software of choice.

POS-integrated invoicing software that is cloud-based provides a quick response for soliciting payment from customers. Invoices can be sent to a customer via email, and both parties will have the ability to track status. Virtual terminals add another important touch to the ordering process by allowing customers to pay immediately using a wider variety of payment types. Digital wallets, in addition to traditional credit or debit card payments, help to quicken the completion of a majority of online orders.

Is It Possible to Use Third-Party Delivery Services?

Getting orders out of your business and into the hands of customers becomes the next priority once the order has been processed. So instead of having your staff running around town in their cars, and worrying yourself about insurance liabilities or mileage reimbursements, turn instead to third-party delivery services. The use of third-party delivery services to support an online delivery strategy can be the one element that makes your delivery initiatives successful.

Using third-party delivery services will shorten the time between order and delivery through their ability to tap into a wider network of delivery methods and vehicles. The online capabilities for accepting orders and payments will lend a great deal of efficiency to the coordination and management of deliveries via third parties. This will be due to the almost instantaneous nature of cloud-based data transfers, which, when included in a cloud-based POS system, can be game-changing.

Are There Any Tips for Aligning My POS System to an Online Delivery Model?

When incorporating online delivery into your business model, consider the following:

Introducing the required web-based tools as mentioned above will also deliver the power of the cloud directly to your business. Stretching the reach of your POS system outwards into the cloud is a powerful aid in aligning the sales information stored in your POS software into the appropriate applications and coordination tools used by third-party delivery services. But just using cloud-based POS tools will not be enough to fully support an online delivery model.Ensuring that ordering information is moved to and updated in the most appropriate places is a necessity. The proper management of data, even when housed in the cloud, requires the right POS functionalities to be in place without the need to add third-party pieces of software. 

With all this in place, you can better ensure that the data being sent to manage orders, inventory, or staff is highly accurate and fully compatible regardless of its source or the reports in which it appears.

How Does Online Delivery Work in Your Industry?

It is well known that the decision to add online delivery to your business will open you up to new channels of commerce. But what is lesser known are the ins and outs of obtaining and configuring POS technology to work in multiple spaces, while becoming an invaluable tool to be used in working with delivery partners. This is why working with a proven POS industry leader will help you to achieve great results without breaking the bank.

The business and technology consultants that talech brings to every engagement enjoy working with small businesses as partners. We place a vested interest in your long-term success, and craft POS solutions that fit your business retail technology needs perfectly. Reach out to us today to sign up for a demo and to learn more about how talech can be your valued POS partner.