Store Commerce and store operations
Retail stores, also known as brick-and-mortar stores, are the core of traditional retail. These are the physical stores where all retail activities were fully concentrated until recently. Despite the strong growth of online shopping, traditional retail stores are firmly established, and Commerce is enabling better productivity, personalized customer service, better customer interactions, and it includes the retail stores in a true omnichannel Commerce platform.
To serve the daily activities in the retail stores, Commerce provides the Store Commerce feature. It is a rich and immersive experience that allows sales clerks to interact with the system, see a wide range of products and services, and see information about the customer directly. Store Commerce works across a wide range of products and platforms, and it can interact with several form factors as well. You can display Store Commerce on your desktop, on a tablet, or on a mobile device; it works on iOS, Android, and Windows devices. To illuminate on its extensive capabilities, because the features of Store Commerce provide much more than simple sales transacting, it is often (unofficially) referred to as a point-of-service instead.
Users of Store Commerce can perform various retail tasks, like processing sales transactions for walk-in or named customers, creating and viewing customer orders, managing daily operations, viewing role-based reports, and assigning tasks to store employees. As part of the store operations, Store Commerce also supports order processing and fulfillment so that retailers can create, for example, orders for out-of-stock products to be picked up or delivered at a later time. Store Commerce allows you to manage store inventory and to perform order-specific picking and receiving, inventory lookups in the current store or other stores, and scheduled or ad-hoc stock counts.
The two types of Store Commerce that are available for use in the stores are the Store Commerce app, which is application-based, and the Store Commerce for web, which is web-browser based. When it comes to implementing business functionality, the Store Commerce app and Store Commerce for web are the same. The only difference is that the Store Commerce app can be hosted on-premises in the store while Store Commerce for web is only available in the cloud. Therefore, an advantage of the Store Commerce app is the support for offline mode operation. In offline mode, the Store Commerce can continue to process sales, even if it is disconnected from the Commerce Scale Unit. It can then be synchronized with the channel database when connectivity is restored.