3 Cigar Shop Inventory Must-Haves

For cigar shops and lounges, a POS system can be a powerful tool. Benefits include faster checkouts, transaction and business reporting, and loss prevention capabilities.But there’s one tobacco store POS feature that you can’t go without: A cigar inventory management tool.

The best POS systems act like cigar inventory apps. They allow tobacco retailers to pre-load cigar inventory, easily scan products, and create barcodes. As a result, these systems can help cigar shops increase sales, reduce loss, and gain insights into the best-selling (and declining) products to help optimize inventory.

If you’re shopping for a cigar POS system, these are the three inventory management features you can’t go without.

1. Cigar Inventory Scanning Devices

Your POS system should be compatible with a handheld inventory device. A cigar inventory scanners gives you more complete data. You can see real-time stock levels on the sales floor and storeroom.

This allows you to:

• You can set reorder thresholds to automate replenishment
• Analyze your inventory data to determine sell-through rates
• Optimize your product mix and remove slow-selling stock
• Forecast sales for your shop
• Managing turnover rates to reduce waste and spoilage

Ultimately, by using a POS with integrated inventory management, you create a single source of data for your business. You can then combine inventory data with transaction data to gain more insights into your business.

For example, by analyzing real-time inventory data and sales patterns, you can optimize your pricing strategy for various brands, adjusting prices based on demand to maximize profitability.   

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2. POS Barcode Printing

Your cigar inventory management tool should also allow you to print barcodes.

Barcode printing allows you to barcode your specialty products, it allows you to better manage SKUs (by allowing each brand or blend to have its own unique barcode), and reducing times at checkout for price lookups.

In addition, barcode printing allows you to:

• Get more granular data to see sales patterns for specific items (that may have been grouped or keyed in manually)
• Better inventory control by giving you more accurate product counts
• Eliminating the need for manual pricing errors

This will help you improve your inventory ability, letting you capture data on specialty products, and as a result this can help to discourage theft and decrease shrinkage.

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3. Cigar Inventory Automation

Manually managing the reorder and replenishment risks out-of-stocks and lost sales. A solid POS will automate this process.

The automation process is fairly straightforward. You pre-load catalogs and inventory into the system, and then create inventory reordering thresholds. When inventory levels reach these thresholds, you can receive an alert or even automate reordering products.  Here’s an overview of this process:

• Inventory Tracking: The POS monitors inventory levels (based on sales data and manual counts).
• Reorder Point: You set a reorder point for each product. This is the minimum stock level that triggers replenishment.
• Reorder Quantity: You also set a reorder quantity, e.g. the number of units you want to replenish.
• Automated Trigger: When inventory falls below the reorder point, the reordering process is triggered.
• Purchase Order: The system creates a purchase order with product name, SKU, quantity, and supplier.
• Order Confirmation – Many POS systems then send the purchase order to the supplier and a confirmation is sent.

This type of inventory management feature completely streamlines replenishment and ensures your cigar shop always has sufficient stock.

More Cigar POS Features to Look For

Inventory management is a must-have feature in a smoke shop POS system. But there are many more. Some other features to keep an eye out for that will make your cigar shop more efficient include:

• Age verification
• Digital signage integration
• Carton-to-pack and pack-to-single capabilities
• Mix and match cigar pricing
• Purchase orders
• Inventory scanning
• Barcode printing
• Scan data

Tobacco POS Features in FTx POS

 FTx POS offers all these features, and we have decades-long experience in the tobacco industry. For example, our inventory scanner for cigar shops includes these useful capabilities:

• Automatically convert cartons into packs as needed for accurate item-level inventory management and a superior custom customer experience
• Comprehensive CRM software makes recommendations based on customers previous purchasing habits, detailed reporting, and marketing analytics
• Current Age Validation software including JUUL regulations, which can be printed directly on the receipt
• Configure cashier permissions and biometric security to prevent loss
• Our handheld pinpoints mispacks from the distributor, which makes it perfect for performing inventory spot checks and cycle counts in real time while your store is open
• Every scan is tracked, reportable, and easily viewed within the scan history. You can replace or modify an entry if an item was accidentally scanned. Reconciliations are immediate and automatically sent to corporate for review
• Stay on top of inventory shrinkage in real time to reduce theft and losses. Perform time-stamped cycle counts even when your store is open and daily counts that have been designed with a price book that has deep categories for highly detailed reporting.
• Our powerful barcode scanner streamlines data collection and enables users to alternate easily between the camera and scanner functions to collect data efficiently

With so many POS options on the market today, how will you know which solution provider to go with? FasTrax is your one-stop shop for all of your point of sale needs if you’re in the cigar industry. Not only does our software go beyond basic POS & Handheld, but we cover every aspect to your cigar store’s business, from operations with POS, to marketing.

Learn more about how our retail POS suite helps smoke shops and cigar shops in our Smoker’s Choice case study.