Practical guides for your store
Concrete answers to the questions you face running a shop: the till, prices, customer credit, stock and hardware.
Each guide takes a few minutes to read and ends with what to do, not with theory. They are written for a physical shop, with a tablet and a connection that comes and goes.
Running your till without Internet
What to prepare before you open, what keeps working during the day, and how to lose nothing when the network comes back.
Calculating your margin and selling price
Margin and markup are not the same thing. Here is how to calculate correctly, with a worked example.
Tracking customer credit
Unrecorded credit is forgotten credit. A simple method for tracking what customers still owe.
Spotting and clearing dead stock
A product that no longer sells takes up space and locks up money. How to spot it and what to do with it.
Tablet point of sale: the hardware
An Android tablet is enough to run a till. Here is what really matters when choosing.
Where to start
The guides read independently, but this order follows what pays off fastest for a shop:
- 1. Running the till without Internet — so you never lose a sale to a network outage.
- 2. Calculating your margin and selling price — to sell without working at a loss.
- 3. Tracking customer credit — to get lent money back without falling out with anyone.
- 4. Spotting and clearing dead stock — to free up the cash tied up in unsold goods.
- 5. Choosing the hardware for a tablet till — to equip your point of sale without getting it wrong.
These good practices are easier to keep with a tool that files them for you. See MerchantHQ's features — till, stock, customers, staff — the details of the plans, and what a till changes for a Congolese business on the point-of-sale software in the DRC page. And for practical questions: the comparison of tills, an offline till and the standardised invoice in the DRC.