Retail industry is one of
most prominent business categories in modern world. It is spread all over world, and has a history that is almost as long as human nature. The definition for Retail is ‘Sale of goods in small quantities to public, usually not for re-sale’. Historical existence of industry is clear by definition itself. Today it has a wide scope which spans from house hold items such as bread, sugar to electrical and electronic items, jewelry etc. Stores also range from large supermarkets to small village boutiques.
Retail industry drives economy of a country. While manufacturing industries create goods and services that people need, retail industry provide a marketplace where people as consumers, have convenient access to those products and services.
The retail sector is one of largest industries worldwide. And it is second-largest industry in United States both in number of establishments and in number of employees. Retail trade accounts for about 12.9 percent of all business establishments in United States.
Wal-Mart is world's largest retailer and world's largest company with more than $256 billion (USD) sales annually. Wal-Mart employs more than one million associates in United States and more than 300,000 internationally. The second largest retailer in world is France's Carrefour.
Customer handling is a critical aspect of retailing since it deals with customers directly. Retail Information Technology, commonly known as Retail IT has become very important in this sense, since traders have understood ease it could give for large volume of customer handling. Computerizing retail stores became a common practice some years ago, but research and development in areas have not ended. IT evolves day by day, and it is wrong to believe that technology, which we use today, is best, since development is never-ending. Therefore, even for retail industry, application of advanced IT solutions would go on.
A basic retail system would have a Point-of-Sale (POS) system to sell goods to customers. This can be considered as front-end of retail system. A POS would normally allow cashier to issue goods and tender. The back-end of system should manage stores, update accounts, allow periodic reports etc. The system should be able to handle customer returns, apply special discounts, handle special categories of customers etc. A good retail system should be competent in enabling users to tender in different types. The number of new tender types is on rise with advancement of technology.
As an example, few decades back, cash was only mode of tendering, but later, payment types such as credit cards came in to play and systems in future would need to handle tendering offered through mobile phones(May be a payment order bound to a bank sent through a SMS(Short Message Service) of mobile phones).
The system depends on business requirements. It is business that requires systems and adopts suitable ones for them and not other way round. Therefore, functionality scope of a system is purely driven by business itself. Complexity of system would increase with complexity of business requirement.
