As a business owner, you’re always thinking big; you’re always searching for ways you can grow your business. From one store to a dozen, you don’t want your success to have a full-stop.

While that kind of energetic drive is what turns good entrepreneurs to great ones, in reality you have to know what you’re getting yourself signed up for. While the thought of opening multiple stores might sound amazing, in reality it has its own set of challenges.

Let’s discuss the advantages and disadvantages of running multiple shops:

Advantages:

No middlemen: For multiple shops, manufacturers can directly sell their products to interested people. That way, there is no need for any middlemen who have to transfer products from producer to consumer, and you don’t have to worry about losing valuable items in the process.

No uneven inventory: Every store has its own team employed to restock shelves according to their requirements. Since these requirements are fixed, and there are a fixed number of people handling it all, chances of overflowing stocks or low stocks becomes slim.

More sales: More shops means wider reach, which ultimately exposes your brand to a larger audience. This helps you sell more of your products to more customers, thereby contributing to your growing sales.

Stronger business: If one shop happens to face crises or massive losses, the setback won’t hurt your entire business. Just as a broken branch won’t stop the tree from growing, any mishap in one branch won’t stop your company from growing.

Disadvantages:

Lack of coordination: Since the central office is separate from all other branches, there is a constant delay in communication between the heads and the other managing teams. That creates holes in coordination and ultimately implementation and monitoring problems.

Dead stock: In case your products experience immediate or drastic change, it becomes hard to carry that degree of change through all your branches. Because of this, chain stores may have to deal with dead stock, which only takes up valuable inventory space.

No credit sales: Branch stores usually don’t offer credit to customers, because managing it all can be tough. By taking this decision, you end up pushing away the regular customer who might not always have the most money in their pockets. Hence, you’re limiting your audience reach and trust.

Pilferage problems: Because of the apparent distance between a company’s central office and its branches, the owners can’t oversee the things employees far away are doing. Hence, they can’t catch instances of pilferage or stolen/missing items, which ultimately hurts their inventory.


While these kinds of disadvantages are part of running any business, you should be able to control their effects nonetheless – and a point of sale solution like Oscar POS is a great way to go!

It has its very own multistore management system that lets you analyse progress of all your locations with a single platform, which includes sales, inventory, profit margins, best-sellers and the like. Furthermore, it’s inventory management system not only keeps your stock levels updated in real-time, but also sends automatic low-stock alerts. This helps you stay away from menaces like low stock, overstocking, and even pilferage.


Growth should be the end goal for all businesses – and no amount of setbacks should keep you away from it.