R e t a i l  T e c h  T a l k

December 2024

A Few Articles from In and Around the Retail Industry

Is Your POS Ready for Boxing Day?

Mitigate Risk by Being PROACTIVE Instead of REACTIVE

Being in the industry for more than 30 years, we’ve been around for a few holiday shopping seasons and with that much experience comes incredible insight on the things that CAN go wrong (and often will at the worst possible moment, as things tend to go). With that knowledge, one of the biggest issues we’ve seen that can cause a massive impact to a merchants ability to perform sales transactions is failing hardware.

Imagine it’s boxing day and you have 5 people in line at your POS station, each with a few items in their hands to take advantage of your boxing day sales. Out of no where, your barcode scanner decides it’s no longer going to scan a barcode label and you can’t get it to work. Now you’re stuck manually entering each item for each sale, taking extra time to checkout a single customer. The rest of the customers in line are getting impatient, and one may even leave without buying what they wanted, risking the customer experience for your store.

Another scenario – your receipt printer stops printing or won’t connect to your POS system in the middle of a transaction. You have the ability to to email or text a receipt, but someone in line really doesn’t want to give you that information and prefers a printed receipt. There’s nothing you can do, so your customer ends up leaving less than satisfied with their experience because they were forced to provide their email or phone number when they should’ve been able to get a printed receipt.

As human beings, we tend to learn from experience but in the competitive world of retail, it’s always better to be prepared for the potential worst-case scenario. As a busy retailer, you have enough on your plate throughout your day-to-day, especially during holiday sales, and the last thing you want to worry about is losing valuable sales dollars due to failing hardware affecting the overall customer experience.

Get in touch with our team today to get some spare peripherals in stock at your store in time for boxing day!

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Physical Inventory Season is Right Around the Corner

Our Team Can Assist You Along the Way – Here’s How

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – for retailers, especially. With the upcoming holidays, we’re in for our busiest shopping season of the year! While this time of the year is awesome for boosting sales, it’s also the time of year where retailers perform their physical inventory counts prior to year-end. As retailers ourselves, we fully understand the tediousness of the task, not to mention the time and resources it takes to ensure accuracy and efficiency.

For some retailers, especially independent retailers, the technical side of the task may seem more daunting than the task itself. For other retailers, it might be a piece of cake. No matter what your technical ability or skill level is, our team can assist in several different ways, as you need it!

BEFORE Your Inventory Count

Gone are the days of manually counting and recording stock. Living in the digital age gives us the advantage of time saving technology – barcode scanners. If you don’t have the hardware you need, we can help you source the best product for your retail business. Our team will also provision, support and warranty any hardware purchased through CRS, giving you peace of mind that your tech investment is covered.

Our team can also provide RFID solutions for the simplest and quickest inventory management solution on the market!

While every retailer’s needs vary, prior to performing your counts, you can book some time with our team to do some pro-active maintenance, ensuring a smooth and efficient execution with minimal hiccups (if any at all). For instance:

1. We re-initialize scanners purchased through CRS to ensure they are in working order, and any previous memory has been cleared on the devices that store it

2. We ensure connections to wireless hardware are functioning correctly

3. We go through the count and upload process to verify everything is uploading correctly, and you’re clear on what to do

DURING Your Inventory Count

Our team is always on standby to help our retailers with their tech needs. This includes during your inventory count. While we can hope we’ve worked out all the bugs BEFORE you started your inventory count, if anything goes awry, our team has your back! A misconnection, an error code on the scanner, a data import fail – whatever may happen, you can call our support line for assistance.

AFTER Your Inventory Count

Reconciliation and discrepancy identification are crucial to the effectiveness of your personal inventory. After you’ve completed your count, you can reach out to our team to assist in a variety of ways, such as:

1. We review your discrepancies with you and discuss resolutions

2. We make copies of the count and apply them to your system

3. We verify that the new quantities in your system match the new count

4. We take data from all kinds of formats to shape it and match the importing map

5. We assist in importing data into your system

These are just some of the common ways our technical support team assist retailers during this busy time of year. No matter what assistance you may need, we can help! Give us a shout today to learn more!

Merchants must be on a CRS support plan or have pre-paid tech hours on file in order for our support team to assist with physical inventory needs.

Retailers Facing Growing Cybersecurity Threats

Article and Video Curated from Retail Insider, Dec 4, 2024

In today’s fast-paced retail landscape, cybersecurity has become a critical concern for businesses of all sizes. 

Anastasia Lou Regen, Partner in Cybersecurity at EY Canada provided valuable insights into the evolving threat landscape and what retailers can do to protect themselves and their customers.

Retailers are disproportionately targeted by cybercriminals, with about 24% of cyberattacks globally aimed at this sector, she says. 

“And within that, what we’re seeing is 30% of those attacks are typically phishing, so that would be the common techniques that you would see, such as emails being the most common one, but more and more we’re seeing phone phishing as well as text phishing as part of newer trends,” says Regen.

“The second one would be malware. The third one would be ransomware with approximately 13% of attack and malware being approximately 20%.  And then the remaining percentage are spread between 10% denial of service attack and the last one are all other types of threats that we’re seeing in the market.”

She said phishing is essentially a social engineering technique that aims for someone to be able to have you create an action that in turn will help them either gain access to your personal information or access to your device such as your computer. 

“The most common way that we’ve seen it over the past 10 years is you would receive an email with some sort of a call to action, a sense of urgency is usually the key technique that they use that would request of you to take a specific action.

“The two most common types of action would be for you to click on a link and typically what happens next is they want to harvest your credential. So they want you to log into a website that is meant to look legitimate, for example, but isn’t in a way to capture your username and password.”

Another one that is being seen is people wanting you to download a file, which is a malicious file that once downloaded into your computer, for example, would enable them to take various actions. Some of the actions that we’re seeing is they will monitor what you’re typing on your keyboard.

So then and there they can get your credentials, your passwords, and so on and so forth.

And then depending on whether it’s your personal laptop or your work laptop, it may actually allow them to maneuver within the infrastructure of the organization, escalate the privileges, and then do a lot more damage when that happens.

“Retailers actually have access to customers. So the impact that they can have by targeting a retailer in gaining access to personal information can be quite significant,” said Regen.

“Essentially, the more the trend that we’re seeing in the retail industry right now is to gather a lot of data around customers. And that amount of data is very beneficial for trends such as targeted marketing, personalization of the services or the products that customer they’re getting to. But the flip side of this is, this is a well of data that malicious threat actors can try to get access to to create damage, not only to the retailer itself, but also to the area of customers.”

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