Around the holidays and some other times throughout the year, some bigger name retailers will have sales that involve getting to the store close to opening time. For example, if a store opens at 8 AM, they are giving anyone who arrives before 9 AM a 10% coupon off their purchase. They can stay in the store and shop until 10 or 11 or even later, but as long as they have that coupon, they get the discount.

 

Some stores offer tiered sales. An example of this would be: Coupon 1 (30%) is handed to the people who show up in the first hour of opening, Coupon 2 (20%) is handed to people who show up in the second hour after opening, and Coupon 3 (10%) is handed to people who arrive in the third hour. Again, these people can shop as long as they want, but whatever coupon they received, they can get that discount at any time during that day.

 

TransActPOS has the ability to establish these sales. We even had a store test this process during the holidays and it increased their throughput of their two registers to 177 invoices in a single hour of sales. This annual sale would have typically created long lines at the register and required multiple steps by the clerk to complete the sale.  When asking the store owner how the sale went, he stated that "it did not really feel like a sale because we did not have those long lines like we normally did with our previous system.  In fact we were able to process more sales per hour than we ever had before!"

 

The page below will offer assistance in creating your own Early Bird Sale and achieve outstanding sales like the example above. With this sale in place, the Early Bird can truly get the worm.

To create a coupon, click IC | Inventory File and click Add to create a new item. On the first screen of the Add Wizard, enter a unique Item ID and a brief description of the coupon you are creating. In the example below, the 30% coupon we are creating has an Item ID of 30CPN and description of "30% off Coupon."

 

You can click Next two times or click the drop down menu at the top of the wizard and select "Pricing Information." On this screen, you need to change the Item Type to "Coupons."

 

You can now click the Save button twice to complete the creation of this coupon. But hold on, we are not completely finished setting up this coupon. By default, the Coupon is set to "$ Off." If you wish to set the coupon for a dollar amount off, this is fine. In this particular example however, we need to change it to "% Off." To do this, click the Edit button along the bottom and change the Matrix to "Percent Off."

 

Now, the $ Off field has changed to % Off. We can now enter 30.00 to set the coupon up for 30% off. You can establish a Minimum Purchase amount and/or set the coupon to affect Retail Prices Only (No Discounted Items), but for this example, we will leave those at the default values.

 

Once this is done, you can click Save to complete the entry to Inventory. You can also repeat this process multiple times in case you are created a tiered Early Bird Sale as stated above. The creation process is the same, but the values will change.

 

 

This section is more of a recommendation. Obviously, now that the coupon has been entered into the system, there needs to be a physical coupon that can be printed out and handed to the customers as they walk in. You can use any program you wish to use. A program that comes with any Windows installation called "WordPad" works well. The key component on the coupon is the ID that the cashier will have to enter in to get the customer their discount. You can do one of two things. You can type the Item ID you used to create the coupon on the coupon itself (above example would be 30CPN) or you can create a barcode for the cashier to scan. The barcode looks better, but does take some time and patience to get setup and use. For more information on creating a barcode, click here. Another recommendation is to color coordinate the coupons, especially if you are creating multiple coupons for a tiered sale. This way the customers can distinguish the difference in coupons and it is easier for your cashiers to recognize the coupon.