Point of sale and inventory should be one system rather than two. Modern retail platforms bundle them, so every sale adjusts stock automatically and the count remains meaningful. A business tracking inventory separately from sales is doing manual reconciliation it will stop doing by month three, at which point it is guessing. If you sell both in person and online, the same system should handle both, because separate stock pools produce the situation where you sell something online that was bought in the shop an hour earlier.
Your local listing is the highest return marketing asset and it is free. For retail, the searches that produce customers are location based and immediate, and a complete profile with correct hours, current photographs, and a healthy review count is what determines whether you appear. Hours being wrong on a holiday is the specific failure that costs the most, because somebody who drove to a closed shop does not return.
Payments should accept everything customers expect, which now includes contactless and mobile wallets rather than only cards. Friction at the point of sale is the most expensive kind, since the customer has already decided. Check what your terminal supports if it is more than a few years old.
An online presence does not need to be a full store immediately. Many first year retailers do better with a site that establishes what you sell and where you are, plus a listing on a marketplace if the product suits it, than with a complete commerce build nobody visits. Selling online is a separate operation with its own fulfilment demands, and adding it before the shop is stable divides attention.
Loyalty and customer records are worth starting early even informally, because retail otherwise has no memory. Capturing email addresses at the till, with permission, builds the one channel you own, and for a shop dependent on repeat local custom that list becomes the most reliable way to bring people back.
Reconcile your stock physically against the system on a schedule rather than trusting the count indefinitely. Even a well configured system drifts through theft, damage, miscounted deliveries, and items returned to the wrong place, and a figure nobody has verified against a shelf becomes confidently wrong within a few months. Counting a section at a time, rotating through the shop, is more sustainable than an annual count of everything.