Apparel Retailing is witnessing a huge make-over with traditional markets making way for new formats like Hypermarkets, Discount/Specialty Stores with shopping experience like never before. Apparel is the second largest category in Indian retail business and is growing every year. To cater to the growing need, GoFrugal has recently launched Apparel Manager a business specific software solution based on the market needs. Thirst to understand the business Needs and Challenges and how this is quenched with obvious benefits reaped is showcased.

The main challenge of Life Style and Fashion Industry is reduced life of design with short windows of opportunity to maximize revenue from new designs. Added to this Apparel purchases have become a highly periodic activity for consumers and the importance of building loyalty and catering to the highly specific taste that consumers look for at the point of purchase is very important for business growth.

Apparel software solutions help connect your business with visibility and tracking to all channels of your business from stores, to online and ware house. Key features include comprehensive business management features, extensive categorization to support size, design, fabric, brand, style etc, best-fit barcode for every item/category, image(s) and image based reports and few critical apparel features. Complete business footprint with BI and Dashboard help analyze the purchase behavior, stock movement tracking, non-moving stock, re-order management with secured features to prevent pilferage and fraud.

Mobile & Web based CRM solutions helps to bring back customers by tracking his behavior and keep them informed on offers, sale, new arrivals etc. to drive repeat business. Mobile apps for stock taking helps to save lots of time with less man power. Taking your business online is made easy with our integrated e-commerce solution. GoFrugal is a pioneer in retail software solutions and helping you to achieve customer delight by being a cool retailer. We have range of solutions for every retail business from easy-to-use basic models, to top-end solutions for Multiple store chains by connecting businesses to increase productivity.

Increases eyeball and footfall with our unmatched quality, unbeatable reliability, uncompromising value with unfailing service. Our extraordinary solutions helps you to ' Exceed your vision ' by taking informed decisions to lower investments and increase profits.

For more details visit http://www.gofrugal.com/lifestyle-fashion/retail-apparel-single.html

GoFrugal wishes each one of our prestigous customers a wonderful financial year ahead. We help you to have a peaceful year end process and let this success continue throughtout the next financial year 2012 - 2013 too. We request you to upgrade latest version to get continued service and great new features - for more details click on Download button in below table for the respective products

For more details, please visit : http://www.gofrugal.com/yearbegin-2012-13.html

Also we would like to inform that, our 24x7 is on emergency mode today, we request you to contact us for only emergency needs

Please feel free to contact RayMedi 24x7 center for any doubts in patch download and patch update process,
Mail: techsupport@gofrugal.com
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(Cross-posted on the Business World magazine )

Cloud technology is helping small and mid-sized retailers increase their revenues and face up to the retail giants

Four years ago, Anaka Narayanan, an economics graduate working in the US , returned to India and set up her own designer clothes store in Chennai. She needed technology to make her business grow and was recommended a high-end software costing Rs 7 lakh. A chance meeting with a representative of Chennai-based GoFrugal, a company providing cloud-based technology to small and medium-sized retailers, however, helped Narayanan save some serious cash.

Cloud technology is the new buzz word. Diverse entities, ranging from retail companies to government departments have taken to it like fish to water. But cloud’s inroads into the retail industry have been bumpy. Big companies such as Reliance Retail, Bharti Walmart and Big Bazaar still work on legacy software. Small and mid-sized retailers have been wary of the technology. Some have been too cautious in using technology to understand their customers and others have been afraid of recording any financial data lest the tax authorities question them.

Thanks to GoFrugal, Anaka set up her e-commerce store on the cloud. She also had all the store’s customer data hosted on the cloud, enabling her to analyse customer behaviour. And all this, for less than Rs 50,000 per year. “I need a lot of reports to tell me about garment size, the fabric that is used and the collection category on a daily basis. The report generation is just great from such technology,” says Narayanan, founder of Brass Tacks Madras.

GoFrugal's cloud-based technology helps small stores take on the larger chains. They are providing small retailers with software and data storage on a pay-as-you-go basis, saving them lakhs of rupees. The software analyses data enabling retailers to win customers and build customer loyalty.

The Kirana’s Friend

While generation- next entrepreneurs, focused on medium-sized retailers, Kumar Vembu of Chennai-based GoFrugal , is a veteran who saw a huge business opportunity in reaching out to the really small retailer or the kirana. Vembu was one of the founders of the globally renowned $100-million cloud company, Zoho Corporation. After quitting Zoho in 2005 he realised that the cloud could be used in the Indian retail industry. He spent the first few years selling on-premise software because most small retailers did not use broadband and cloud was yet to take off.

“Five years ago I was sick of explaining the benefits of computerisation to small retailers,” says Vembu, founder and CEO of GoFrugal. Times have changed since. The second-generation kirana owners are youngsters aspiring to build organised chains. GoFrugal has around 100 very small retailers with their stores’ data and billing systems hosted on the cloud. It has another 15,000 kiranas using its POS software.

“In 2004, 70 per cent of small retailers were still working on DOS-based systems or had no technology at all, and only about 20 per cent had Windows-based systems,” says Vembu. However, in the last couple of years the monthly usage model has created a buzz and word-of-mouth publicity has prompted small retailers to adopt cloud-based technologies.

“The cloud gave me an opportunity to change the way I approached my retail business. My accounting, warehousing and POS were Island softwares, and were not intelligent,” says Rajesh Narang, CEO of Ample, the Apple reseller, which has built a Rs 100-crore business in Bangalore in the last 15 years. He uses GoFrugal to host the database, billing, accounting and customer relationship management systems on the cloud. He is now able to get live sales reports on his iPhone and iPad for just Rs 20,000 per store per month. He has four stores now and plans to open another 20 in two years.

Sunil Bishoni has two stores selling accessories for electronic gadgets and generates revenues of close to Rs 30 lakh a year. He never used technology in the past. “I don’t know what the cloud is. But it allows me to pay less for the technology and increases my sales because of better customer relations,” says Bishoni. He pays Rs 1,000 per store per month to host his billing system on the cloud with GoFrugal.

GoFrugal generates $2 million in revenues annually, and so far, it has stayed away from external funding.

Catching The Customer

According to Protiviti Consulting, only 1.2 million small businesses use technology — just 10 per cent of the 12 million small businesses in the country which undertake some form of billing. That is a huge market for GoFrugal. A Zinnov report says that the cloud SaaS (Software as a Service) market was around $300 million in India in 2011 and is expected to grow to $2.5 billion in five years.

ARL Parivar, the Rs 12-crore network marketing business in Delhi that handles 60 distributors and sells soaps, food items and fabric, was trying to stem the flow of spurious bills. And that is the mandate it gave GoFrugal. “The cloud helped me monitor all the distributors’ sales online, I can monitor them by sitting in my office and there are no spurious bills generated,” says Ravi Joshi, managing director of ARL Parivar.

Cloud is definitely the future but there are a few bottlenecks: “For cloud to become a reality in India with retailers, the broadband speed needs to go up and costs should come down significantly to support high volume transactions at the point of sale,” says Sharad Sharma, Co-Chair of Nasscom. To handle high billing, say 3,000 transactions a day, a broadband speed of at least 25mbps is required, which currently runs into lakhs of rupees. “The cloud is a reality and will move in clusters which will adapt in a small way first. Something like a textile cloud in Tirupur,” says Rajesh Rajan, managing consultant advisory at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Bangalore. He says that SaaS adoption will be the fastest in India.

GoFrugal is eyeing the global market as well.

GoFrugal has strong presence in Middle-East, South Asia, West Asia, Australia, Canada, UK and growing aggressively.

There are innovations happening with new technology and hopefully, the little kirana store can survive the onslaught of the big retail chains after all.

GoFrugal customer speak

Welcome..!

Mr.Ramesh Ramakrishnan of ' Just Salwars ' ( http://www.justsalwars.com ) is very happy and exited to share his experiences with GoFrugal. He talks about the business benefits that he enjoys with the implementation of GoFrugal POS software. He talks about the retail best practices that come along with GoFrugal POS software and how it benefits him to manage his business in style...!

Customer business overview: 'Just Salwars', an exclusive collection of stitched and unstitched Salwar Kameez and ready to wear Kurtis. Runs with a warehouse where purchase are done centrally and sales through Retail Showroom. Look forward to open 3 more retail stores in company owned / franchise formats by year 2012

Solution delivered: GoFrugal Retail Point of Sales Software implemented to manage Point of Sales, Inventory, Accounts & Statutory, CRM and MIS

"We started our business along with GoFrugal Retail POS software. For each and every business, software is necessary. Particularly in Retail, GoFrugal Technologies helped us a lot, they support well and guided us along with our business. I can simply say, 'Everything is good about GoFrugal'

In fact, without software, we could not have improved our business. We are able to manage the inventory - monitor item wise / category wise performance, store performance, salesman performance etc., all at ease. Visibility on which vendors' / manufacturer's products are not moving is very important for us to do business. We are able to track performance like vendor wise sales, manufacturer wise, category wise sales - design number wise sales, item wise sales etc. and track the items that are fast selling, as well as non-moving very easily. We get what we want in a click of button

We benefit a lot because of GoFrugal retail POS software. We are able to keep the inventory under control. We can make purchase orders for specific design and keep our customers happy. The shop lifting % is very high in India and keeping inventory always under check is very very important. We are able to keep track of the inventory - item wise design wise very easily

Measuring sales man performance is very important for the growth of any retail store. We are able to motivate our sales team based on their performance which reflects as improved sales

I must say that 'GoFrugal has improved the quality of our life' and we are very peaceful . In traditional business, people cannot track everything about their business. So, t hey have to come and sit from the time of store opening in the morning till store closing at the night. But now, we feel free and whenever required, we go out peacefully because of GoFrugal POS software

We are in total control of our business because of GoFrugal. In fact, we are nothing without GoFrugal. Actually, we gained a lot implementing GoFrugal POS software..!"

Watch the customer speak

Click here to watch video in youtube

Holidays are big business and Valentine’s Day is one of the biggest. Valentine's Day is held each year on February 14 and is the celebration of love and affection between intimate companions. It's a peak selling season for any small business. It's an opportunity to be a magnet for the increased consumer spending that occurs around Valentine's Day, when millions of shoppers are seeking that special gift.

Customers will show more interest in sharing Flower bouquet, Candy's, Greeting cards, special gifts to their loved ones. Now a days online shopping – “A Magic” which make people shop online from any part of the world. Consumers enjoy shopping online and they get things delivered at their door step.

Retailers have to think and sell new products during special days like valentines day is very special for cards and unique gifts. Customers are aware of latest trends and looking for the best buy and they don't mind spending money.

Industry Research

Retailers say that its a strong Valentine’s Day this year too. Industry research forecasts total sales for the holiday to grow 5.0 percent from 2011.

Increased Sales

Local florists are ordering extra delivery vans, and chocolate shops are ensuring an adequate supply of heart-shaped boxes. Jewelers are preparing for an onslaught of hapless last-minute shoppers.

Great Shopping Experience

Retailers can increase their business in this month by giving offers, gift vouchers and can also have a virtual window-shopping experience etc., Retailers plan their February month in a great way.

Our existing customer who is into florist business shared their business experience. 15 days or 1 month before they send business alerts & SMS to their existing customers. They do promote and give offers in online store, Facebbok, Orkut, Flipcart, Snap deal etc. They create a default category based on the market research and sales history. They proudly say compared to last year this year sales has increased, increase in number of online users and also increase in international orders.

Have a Great Business This Month

GoFrugal Blogs

GoFrugal Blogs

Apparel Manager - One Stop shop for all your Apparel POS Needs

Year begin 2012-2013

Kirana On The Cloud

Life Style Apparel Retailer "Just Salwars" strongly recommends GoFrugal POS

GoFrugal customer speak

Welcome..!

Get the best Gift to the business you love, this valentine's day...!