Retail Loss Prevention Tips

What is Retail Loss Prevention?

Retail Loss Prevention is the process of preserving profits.  In convenience stores and gas stations, this is an everyday concern but is key in finding and controlling losses. The most common areas of loss to try and control are:

• External / Internal (employee) theft
• Fraud through suppliers
• Administrative Errors – human error

What is Shrinkage?

Shrinkage is the loss of inventory that can be attributed to things such as theft, error, damage or fraud.  In 2021 retailers on average lost 1.6% of their inventory to shrinkage. With the Covid-19 pandemic came a huge impact on the retail industry.  That also has opened up new avenues for shrink and criminal activities.  Included in this is ordering online, remote pickup or delivery and more have become ripe with opportunity for theft.  This makes it even more important to keep track of what comes in and out of your store, and the transactions that go with them.

How to Control Loss in Retail

Getting insight on every aspect of cash flow in a business is very important.  Above all if you know exactly what was sold and what is missing/voided you can easily account for your inventory and expenditures.

Internal and External Theft

Theft that’s done by an employee is considered internal and can be very common.  Employees are often more likely to steal from where they work than customers are.  External theft is normally someone posing as a customer to shoplift.  This can also result in return fraud.  The best cost-effective solution to this is to install an electronic surveillance system and often in an easy to see location to deter any wrong doers.

Supplier Fraud

Vendor fraud is when an individual impersonates a vendor only to receive a payment and leave.  In some cases employees can also assist in the fraud.  Common practices to try and detect and control supplier fraud could be, managing your checks and balances with vendors, rotating who handles vendor processing to eliminate internal cooperation and conducting audits of all vendor information.  These can be accessed in the ePB software to give you the proper view of what is going on.

Human Errors

You can never completely eliminate human errors.  Best practices to try and reduce errors would be; proper training and scheduling.  Make sure your employees are comfortable using the POS system.  Also it may be time to upgrade your POS.  Older software can be clunky and harder to operate.

ItsRealTime Software to Help Control Loss

You can get a better line of sight as well as instant alerts with our loss prevention solution.  How valuable is it to be able to receive a copy of a cash register receipt on your cell phone, laptop, desktop or tablet all in real-time for cashier voids, error corrects and open draws? ItsRealTime® does just that on top of much, much more.

Not Just Loss Prevention

Our software is a very easy to use daily loss prevention tool.  It will improve merchandising by helping you figure out what is selling and what is just sitting on the shelf.  You can quickly evaluate customer traffic, find buying patterns and margins.  Improve upon control of cashiers and internal theft with instant alerts of things such as voids, error corrects, or an open drawer.

ItsRealTime has an easy to use dashboard view to at a glance see analytics of your store and how it will help improve your sales.  Together with the reporting our software offers, this solution can be designed to fit your exact needs.  If you want to gain better control over your store give us a call 800-653-3345 or reach out to us to get a demo of how it works.