Your Personalized Playlist for Migrating Your POS to the Cloud

The Challenges of Retail

Retail has always moved fast and been extremely competitive. Today, consumers expect retailers to move even faster, adjust to new market entrants, and keep up with their ever-changing needs and wants. Only those retailers who are willing to constantly adapt will survive and thrive with company lifespans continuing to shrink.

Digitalization has taken the efforts and expectations of retailers and consumers to the next level, creating new needs for final users and for retail businesses. Retailers must offer top-notch experiences, which include pricing thousands of next season’s products in seconds; offering innovative, safe buying experiences; and personalizing every step of the buyer’s journey.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that omnichannel retail innovation services increased dramatically during the pandemic. For example, dark stores—physical stores turned into fulfillment centers in highly populated areas to shorten delivery times—improved customer service and inventory management in the grocery sector during the first months of the pandemic, when 68% of shoppers purchased groceries online for curbside pickup or delivery. Access to robust point-of-sale (POS) and promotion redemption data helps grocers understand order quantities. And, with omnichannel technology bridging the gap between the headquarter-based ERP systems and store-level processes, employees can also not only effectively and efficiently handle merchandise needs, but also manage separate systems for hospitality, convenience stores, or fuel stations located in the same space.

Cloud-based POS Systems Take Business to the Next Level—But It Can Be Daunting

A cloud-based POS system is critical to ensuring that retailers can continuously adapt to meet shoppers’ needs, but migrating from on-premises to the cloud can be challenging. In some ways, it’s like running a marathon: It takes time, preparation, training, and requires the right accessories. And, just like you would choose which training shoes to wear, you should look at your options for cloud service providers, such as AWS, and analyze their cloud migration expertise. The right one is flexible, affordable, and secure, offering a team of experts that can help you with discovery, analysis, estimation, and migration. You also need to create a backup and prepare your team for testing, analyzing, migrating, and optimizing. Finally, you need to plan which data you will migrate (i.e., is it your whole infrastructure, or just partial?), the type of IT professionals you will need (e.g., engineers, developers, architects), and then let the magic happen.

As a major player in the international market for retail solutions—with around 500K retail and payment installations in over 65 countries—GK Software, an AWS Retail Partner, has experienced first-hand the struggles that retailers face as they work to keep pace with this changing world. That is why GK has been working hard to re-platform their solutions to offer retailers a comprehensive, multichannel mapping of all store-related processes and their seamless integration with every other customer touchpoint.

GK Software offers a modern, cloud-enabled, Software as a Service (SaaS), containerized POS solution running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). An SaaS framework lets GK cover complete platform operation. This leads to significant reduction in operational and labor costs over time, eliminates the severe cost of regular hardware upgrades, and keeps you up-to-date on marketing trends. The solution comes with an edge architecture that lets retailers continue to transact in an offline mode when needed for maximum reliability.

GK POS leverages AWS Global Infrastructure to provide increased performance, security, reliability, and scalability. And GK’s Omnibasket facilitates several tasks for developers, who are constantly looking to integrate new features and updates.

During the pandemic, GK omnichannel solutions allowed grocers to orchestrate all business processes in the store with real-time inventory data, thereby letting them reduce food waste using artificial intelligence (AI) to dynamically price products and integrate channels to communicate with shoppers via apps, QR codes, and messaging by leveraging consumer and inventory data. The combination of these processes is only made possible using flexible cloud platforms, such as AWS Cloud.

Why Should I Invest in Migrating to Cloud?

We want to explain the reasons to migrate from on-premises to the cloud with a playlist that we created just for your pleasure:

• All Together Now (The Beatles): All your data is centralized, available in one click, from any device.
• On the Road Again (Canned Heat): Are you a traveler? Don’t worry. You will have everything you need, anywhere.
• 1984 (David Bowie): You can easily become Orwell’s Big Brother, but in a good way. A cloud-based POS system will let you check on every franchise of your business from your mobile phone.
• You and Me Song (The Wannadies): This was meant to be a love song, truly. Cloud-based POS systems offer an incredible range of functionalities with a capacity to integrate—always and forever, as the song dictates.
• The Times They Are A-Changing (Bob Dylan): In today’s world, those who fail to adapt will fail to succeed. A cloud-based POS system provides the versatility needed to conquer these uncertain times.
• Money (Pink Floyd): POS systems are one of the most expensive IT investments a retailer can make, so it’s important to think about the total cost of ownership. Cloud-based POS systems do not require upgrades, and annual charges are fixed. In the long run, the cloud is less expensive than on-premises storage.
• Future People (Alabama Shakes): Stay connected to the cloud with the help of AI. GK solutions can help your system understand market trends and remain up to date.
• Pretty Paper (Willie Nelson): Avoid human-made errors or sneaky employees. Your results will be more accurate, and forecasts and planning will be easier.
• Good Riddance/Time of Your Life (Green Day): It is something unpredictable, but in the end is right… as you climb to the top, our cloud services will grow with your business.
• Don’t stop me now (Queen): Running low on habanero chips? No problem. You will be able to manage your inventory faster and better than ever to maximize productivity.
• Video Killed the Radio Star (The Buggles): Keep up with the cool kids. You will always be up to date on trends, promotions, and more importantly, the flowing of inventory.
• Trust Me (Janis Joplin): There is no better risk-free option for your company than a cloud-based POS system. Your data is stored online and hidden behind an alphanumeric code, thereby making it harder to hack than an external server.
• No Surprises (Radiohead): You will never have to worry again about not having enough room for storage or losing your data.
• Back in the Day (Erykah Badu): Speaking about storage, say goodbye to the heavy machines that used to take all of the space from your physical stores and all of the cables and computers.
• All Day and All of the Night (The Kinks): If you ever happened to have a problem, you would receive support 24/7.

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? AWS is here to help. Contact your account team today or visit our AWS for Retail Overview webpage to get started.