Anytime your store carries high-ticket items, you may have customers interested in a layaway program, therefore, running a layaway transaction can be essential to stores.
For those that are unfamiliar with layaway, it is basically a way for customers to reserve items and make payments before picking them up. Typically, the customer does not take the item home until it has been fully paid off.
Ricochet does not offer automatic, scheduled payment processing, so in most layaway situations the store requires the customer to come back to the store or call to make payments on a purchase, rather than automatically charging them every 30-days or so.
It is important to make sure that your store has clear layaway terms, covering details like: Required down payments
Payment terms
Eligibility
Restocking fees, and more
Layaway Best Practices:
If a customer wants to both place an item on Layaway and make a normal purchase at the same time it is best to run those two processes as completely different transactions; the layaway on one, the normal sale on another.
If a customer has an item already on layaway and wants to place another item on layaway, it is best to create a completely new layaway transaction rather than adding the items to their existing layaway. This is because editing or changing an old layaway can make your accounting incorrect.
To create a layaway transaction:
In Ricochet,
Click POS
Add all items for purchase
Add the customer in the Consignor/Customer field beneath the total due summary NOTE: Consignors/Customers can be found using their first name, last name, account ID, email, or phone number.
Click the yellow plus (+) sign to create new if they are not an existing customer.
Enter the amount that the customer is paying today, as their first deposit, into the Payment Amount box
Select the tender type
NOTE: If choosing credit/debit card you will be prompted to process the card payment based on your credit card processing setup
Click the Layaway button in the lower right of the POS
NOTE: There are two (2) 'Layaway' buttons.
The one on the bottom right hand side of the screen near the FINISH button is for creating new layaway contracts.
The one on the bottom left is to retrieve existing layaway sales to make additional payments.
Click FINISH
Print, email or bypass the receipt to complete the layaway creation.