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StoreTrader at work:
Sainsbury's @ Jacksons

Convenience through advanced PoS technology

There’s arguably no tougher business than a corner shop convenience store. You have to select the most profitable items to stock from a huge range of potential items, recruit and motivate the staff to provide the shop hours and service levels that convenience shopping demands, and protect your niche from the designs of the supermarket oligopoly.

Which makes the achievements of Jacksons, the convenience store chain of 100-plus stores in the Midlands and North of England, quite remarkable. Over more than 150 years the Jacksons name has meant the local grocer, and then ‘open all hours’ to its customers – the place you can reliably get a pint of milk, the paper or a meal for tonight. Jacksons helped pioneer the concept of convenience stores in Britain. Small wonder then that Sainsbury’s, keen to match arch-rival Tesco’s expansion into the sector, bought the Jacksons chain. And understandable that they kept the name – it’s now ‘Sainsbury at Jacksons’ – and the supermarket is very careful to keep the reputation for service that the Jacksons name brings.

A vital ingredient of that success for so long is Jacksons’ understanding of its customers. Keeping in step with changing customer preferences – making it easy to shop at Jacksons – is the firm’s special skill. And a major component in delivering this is the use of technology.

More than in most stores the point of service is critical. By definition a customer in a convenience store wants fast service, and to buy impulsively. Long queues at the checkout mean lost sales – customers will walk or drive on rather than wait. So a PoS system which is responsive is vital. That’s one of the several reasons Jacksons decided to replace their previous PoS software with StoreTrader. With the demands of very large supermarkets in mind, StoreTrader’s design is highly modular and tuned for performance so even on moderate hardware (StoreTrader will run unchanged on Windows 98 and even Windows CE devices as well as NT and XP) there are no transaction delays. With more than 350 lanes to manage, this was vital to Jacksons.

But it was StoreTrader’s adaptability which sold it. The fact that Jacksons can tailor the software to meet new demands, and without any programming, means a great deal. An excellent illustration is the recent change in legislation governing the sale of alcohol. It is critical that the checkout operator asks for proof that the customer is over 18, or the operator may be fined by the local authority. Using StoreTrader’s Transaction Rules facility, it took Jacksons IT staff fifteen minutes to make the change to force the operator to make this check, and to distribute the change across the entire estate automatically. It took days to get the same change made in the earlier PoS software which is still installed in some of the stores. It needed a programming fix, testing, and then IT had to go to the individual stores affected to install it. Setting up new promotions and deals similarly takes almost no time – and no programming – in StoreTrader.

A recent example of Jacksons’ determination to keep up with their customers is the introduction of coupon offers delivered by mobile phone – a system co-developed with StoreTrader’s designer and the Light Agency. Called SHOP SCAN SAVE, this scheme avoids all the problems of traditional coupon offers, which need printing well in advance, posting to the customer and advance notice to the store of redemption dates. A Jacksons customer signs up for SHOP SCAN SAVE by simply texting a message from her mobile phone. Then the system sends her discount offers such as ‘buy 2 bottles of Santa Rita rose wine for the price of one at our Stapleford store before 6 o’clock TODAY!’ along with a unique number (or even a barcode on some phones). All the customer has to do is show the mobile phone at the checkout and StoreTrader uses a broadband internet link to check which offers – there may be several – works out the best deal, and prints all the details on the sales receipt.

Jacksons were understandably anxious to prove that it actually increased customer visits and the average basket value – and that it didn’t cause delays at the checkout. So they decided to try it for six months, beginning in August last year. And the result? They’re impressed. There’s a noticeable improvement in all the data they tracked. It seems everybody wins – the suppliers know how well their products are received, Jacksons increase footfall and transaction values, and the customer gets great deals, precisely tailored to his preferences. Jacksons is now rolling out SHOP SCAN SAVE across all their stores and noticing an increasing take-up as word gets round.

The stores would like to see more types of transaction going through the Jacksons point of service, to make the stores even more convenient for Jacksons’ customers. They already provide mobile phone top-up through StoreTrader linked to Paypoint. They’d like customers to pay their electricity bills, buy a rail ticket or renew their TV licence – and more – when they get their groceries. And they know they can do this with StoreTrader, without extending checkout times.

And that’s the key. At Jacksons, technology is important but only because it helps deliver what Jacksons does better than anyone else – convenient shopping for its customers.