Clarity Commerce Solutions

Designed specifically for leisure environments and fully integrated with the ClarityLive™ suite of applications, our POS solution ensures the fast, smooth operation and management of your site. Utilising the latest Microsoft technology we offer you a great looking, intuitive touch screen POS with full customer branding.

The battle to prevent loss in retail stores world-wide is never ending, and with current projections running between $10b to $14b annually, there are huge savings to be made by retailers.

As a result, witness new employee recruitment and training schemes, changing returns policies, huge investments in data analysis, installation of more sophisticated CCTV systems, establishing Loss Prevention Teams and so on. All these techniques and more are being used to track and eradicate loss.

However those intent on theft continue to devise new and devious methods to work around the changing practices and policies deployed in stores. Their cunningness and creativity seems to know no bounds.

Whilst returns in high value lines continue to be frequent targets, more recently Clarity is aware that grocery is coming under attack from both employees and staff, and whilst the size of each return is small the number of occurrences is staggering.

At one large US grocery chain it was discovered that the number one refund item was watermelons. Not too surprising given that it was early summer and the weather was good, however looking deeper revealed some interesting facts:

• Watermelons are sold by the unit, rather than weight
• They were the highest price product in the produce department sold by the unit
• A simple set of keystrokes at POS enabled a cashier to refund a watermelon very quickly, whereas, a higher valued weighted item would take longer and could not be carried out discretely; and
• The watermelons were priced at $4.95. The threshold for a supervisor refund authorisation was $5.00

The combination of these facts leads to the obvious conclusion that the retailer had a large scale loss issue with staff pocketing the best part of $5.00 for each refund they performed. Of course, once someone discovers a workable scam, it is not long before that information extends to other staff members, and given the backdrop of the current economic climate it could be that a number of people who would not normally participate in illegal activities might also be tempted to implement the scam, especially if there is a perceived low risk of getting caught. Another US grocery chain discovered that a well known breakfast cereal was high up on the list of most returned items. Looking into this it was found that:

• The product was regularly in a promotion, and typically the promotion was either a buy 1 and get 1 free, or a coupon was issued for discount off another product
• Returns typically occurred shortly after the end of the promotion
• The product was refunded to the customer, but the customer was keeping the coupon or the extra free packet of cereal. Given the product was worth around $3.80 meant that the customer had covered the cost of their breakfast for a while.

And it is not just the US where Clarity has seen this behaviour. It has been recognised at a major grocery chain in Europe.

Clarity’s Refund Management System – branded as ClarityLive Refund - is helping grocers eradicate these losses. As an example of its success, a large department and food store chain recently implemented ClarityLive Refund. Within weeks, and before customers knew the system was in use, the number of returns dropped by a staggering 50%. The level of employee fraudulent returns was simply enormous. As customers are now becoming aware that returns are tracked against the original receipt (regardless whether the customer has their copy or not) the number of returns continues to fall. The savings made gave this retailer a return on investment of just four weeks.

In working with our customers Clarity has developed an investment appraisal process that can give grocers feedback on return behaviour and the savings that can be secured using ClarityLive Refund. If you would like our help then please contact your Account Manager who will arrange for one of our experts to undertake an investigation and ROI calculation for you.

ClarityLive Refund

ClarityLive Refund is a centrally based solution that interacts in real-time with the sales channels to provide authorisation services for refund requests. It works with any form of sales channel from in-store POS, to mobile devices, kiosks and the Internet. ClarityLive Refund creates the controls necessary to combat retail loss including fraudulent returns. This includes taking advantage of refund policies and goodwill, using “lost receipt” scams, copying receipts and utilising the fact that many retailers do not have on-line access to accurate records of the number of purchases and whether any of them have been returned.

ClarityLive Refund changes the game by maintaining an enterprise-wide view of sales and returns, building activity profiles of potential fraudsters and enforcing automatic controls over the refund process. It allows retailers to validate returns before refunding funds to customers. It also provides detailed reporting including non-receipted refunds, employee non-receipted refunds and refund activity drill downs.