Years ago a friend of mine worked at a local BestBuy-style retailer as a consultant. I asked him why they continued to use green screen POS terminals on the sales floor when much better technology existed. Apparently they had tried 3 separate attempts to implement new systems at costs of millions of dollars. These initiatives failed and even if they reached a pilot implementation stage, the company would roll back to the old trusted system with all its flaws. These systems often have extraordinarily complex and arcane integrations with multiple supplier and manufacturer systems to manage inventory and supply flows, calculate commission/spiffs and payroll, and integrate with ecommerce systems. IE, like any decently sized software project, the devil is in the integration, and the sales cycle is almost comically long.
Eliminating the licensing costs of a new untested inventory system is not a very compelling incentive for any medium-to-large sized retailer to consider trying out an untested startup's product. For various reasons the IT deparments of big retailers are very conservative.
As for smaller retailers and mom-and-pop-shops that have less integration concerns. It might be easier to have them find your system and be willing to invest hours of labour to have staff recode their existing inventories into your system and integrate this into with their existing POS systems (oops, there's that problem again) or I guess pay you for your fully-integrated POS system.... signing these up presents its own set of challenges. I think you're overestimating the licensing costs of existing POS systems for smaller retailers, and underestimating the costs of replacing any system that has already established itself.
A better approach might be to get a feeds of data from the inventory systems that already exist, which larger retailers are already sharing with their suppliers. Then you're still faced with similar integration problems, just from the other side. Others in this thread have covered the reasons why it would be very difficult to convince retailers to give up this valuable information.
Eliminating the licensing costs of a new untested inventory system is not a very compelling incentive for any medium-to-large sized retailer to consider trying out an untested startup's product. For various reasons the IT deparments of big retailers are very conservative.
As for smaller retailers and mom-and-pop-shops that have less integration concerns. It might be easier to have them find your system and be willing to invest hours of labour to have staff recode their existing inventories into your system and integrate this into with their existing POS systems (oops, there's that problem again) or I guess pay you for your fully-integrated POS system.... signing these up presents its own set of challenges. I think you're overestimating the licensing costs of existing POS systems for smaller retailers, and underestimating the costs of replacing any system that has already established itself.
A better approach might be to get a feeds of data from the inventory systems that already exist, which larger retailers are already sharing with their suppliers. Then you're still faced with similar integration problems, just from the other side. Others in this thread have covered the reasons why it would be very difficult to convince retailers to give up this valuable information.