Jon Rydberg, CEO Not unlike any retail business, gun stores must continuously improve their inventory management, marketing, and sales processes to maintain profits and grow sales. However, for those operating in the shooting sports industry, additional accommodations must be made to address the complex regulatory requirements imposed at the state and federal levels. For firearms retail and shooting range operators, the prospect of improving processes by modernizing their retail management system has proven to be challenging until now. Retail Technology Group (RTG) has earned its place amongst this year’s Top 10 POS Solution Providers by creating a retail management system that is uniquely industry specific yet capable of driving shooting sports retailers into the next decade.
Most POS solutions offered to shooting sports retailers are not industry specific. Large software companies can dilute focus by serving multiple industries, yielding a product that requires workarounds and a support team with little understanding into the daily operations of a gun store or range. This condition gave RTG the opportunity to establish its footprints in the shooting sports retail landscape by providing the industry with the most comprehensive POS solution available in the market today.
“In 2018 we purchased RTG and its flagship Point of Sale, AXIS, because of its leading retail management capabilities and its strong adoption in the shooting sports industry,” said Jon Rydberg, CEO of RTG and sister firm Orchid Advisors. “We attribute the high percentage of use among leading firearms retailers to our industry dedication. Rather than being generalists, our implementation and support teams, as well as the application itself, are specifically designed for retail and range management operators.”
Realizing this market void, RTG designed its flagship solution, the AXIS Retail Management System (AXIS RMS), to provide the shooting sports retailer and range operator the best, purpose-built POS software to address their unique set of requirements.
In fact, over 62% of indoor shooting ranges that have achieved the coveted National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) 5-Star rating use RTG applications.
The customer-focused approach of RTG makes it unique and contributes to the track record of success for many retailers and range operators. While most of the software organizations seemingly “airdrop” their solutions into a client’s business, RTG engages with new users in all phases of software on-boarding. Contrary to cliché training denominations by its competitors, RTG leads their clients to gain expertise in the software through their one-on-one training process.
Once installed, RTG on-premise and cloud-based software integrate several features which provide store owners the omni-channel business tools necessary to complete in today’s retail environment, such as, vendor catalogues, live distributor inventory feeds, automatic replenishment, eCommerce, accounting, multi-store dynamic reporting, ATF compliance, serialization scanning, customer relationship management (CRM) and shooting range management. The solution set provides greater flexibilities by enabling retailers with API-based plug and play capabilities to applications such as Quickbooks and processing capabilities on a mobile device, tablet or other common hardware.
The AXIS RMS automated inventory management capabilities provide clients access to entire vendor catalogs of all the top players in the industry. Leveraging this powerful information saves store operators valuable time and money by creating complete product descriptions which may be used in-store or online via an integrated e-commerce platform. Upon hitting a min-max inventory level, AXIS RMS automatically places purchases orders from a prioritized list of vendors.
From a firearms compliance perspective, AXIS RMS platform integrates inventory and sale transactions with federally required record keeping and forms, referred to as the Bound Book and e4473. Retail operations satisfy their operational and regulatory objectives without duplicating data entry. RTG has gone so far as to make available direct integration with FBI background check databases and permit, with government approval, the electronic filing of regulatory forms.
With the vision to help the shooting sports retailer, RTG and its sister companies at Gearfire, Gearfire Payments and Orchid Advisors offer an industry specific, end-to-end solution that includes POS Retail/Range software, eCommerce, merchant processing and regulatory compliance. Together these entities, owned by the same parent, serve more the 2,300 of the industry’s retail and range operators. These solution makes it feasible for clients to easily take a massive leap forward in POS, retail, and compliance modernization.
