Challenges in selling technology to this “niche” $ 26 billion market which caters to Hispanic, Asian and other fast growing communities from Business Solutions Magazine
“Lau says a touch screen interface that’s heavy on graphics and sales function icons — but as light as possible on language — is key to ethnic grocery POS sales. The MoleQ POS System, for instance, supports upwards of 100,000 picture files that can be associated with specific items upon their entry into the store’s inventory system for lookup purposes, and intuitive icons depict sales operations. With this feature, the solution Lau sells has been quick to displace programmable keyboard-based grocery POS systems, which require considerably longer training of associates. The small amount of language the user interface does require is offered in Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, or Spanish.
Lau warns resellers interested in the segment that even once the culture barrier has been scaled, they’re not out of the woods. Because of the aforementioned boom in the ethnic grocery market, as much as 20% of the POS systems MoleQ sells are sold to brand new start-up companies. “The first 6 to 12 months is very tough for these new business owners,” he says. “They’re building from the ground up without access to much credit. To win their long-term business, we have to be in a position to help them get started, then help them realize success by making the technology part trouble-free.””
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