St Paul's Cathedral upgrades shopping tech

St Paul's Cathedral is one of the icon's of the London skyline and a prime tourist site for the city - its gift store sees 150,000 customers per year, as tourists flock to buy souvenirs.

Although it is an independent store, it has all the requirements of any other busy retail environment - with a couple of others specific to a world-class tourist site.

St Paul's Cathedral Enterprises MD, Mark McVay, explained the cathedral's retail arm has used electronic point of sale (Epos) for 12 years, based on a DOS system which became too difficult to maintain.

He said: "The previous system was installed eight years ago and was still running well but the company we bought it from had itself been bought and wasn't able to provide the specialised support we needed any more."

The store was preparing to adopt EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) chip and PIN payments in 2006, so this was the perfect time to upgrade from its four aging DOS tills.

McVay chose an Epos solution from Cybertill, because it has a track record in supplying to the scale the cathedral needed. The software supplier already has other heritage sites, such as the Imperial War Museum on its books. More importantly, the new till system integrates the Epos with back-end stock management and replenishment.

McVay said: "Although we are primarily a heritage site with a slightly different range of products, the store is very much in the classic retail model. The Cybertill system allows us to have much more control on stock.

"We can support the faster selling lines much better and don't have to hold as much stock as we did in the past. Because it runs from a central server, we can access the system remotely. That's a benefit for us, because the wiring opportunities in the cathedral are limited. I have an off-site office and the new system makes it easy to find out what's going on."

Finished in January, it is too early to tell whether the system has made any significant impact on sales but McVay is certain it has opened up internet sales for the store.

He said: "We intend to get the store online by Christmas. We think that there is a demand for our gifts in the American market. Plus, we know that a lot of tourists want to buy souvenirs but don't because they don't want to have to carry them around for the rest of the tour. Having the store online will provide a welcome opportunity for them to purchase their gifts and souvenirs when they get back home."