Another potential cause of shrinkage within retail businesses is around human and administrative errors. Incorrect stock count, for example, will set stock management off on the back foot and contribute to shrinkage.

Human errors can also occur at the checkout. If your business is using a standalone card terminal, known as an unintegrated electronic point of sale (ePOS), then human error can occur when manually pressing in values to be paid.

It’s very possible that staff may enter prices that are too low, which will then in turn increase the shrinkage rate.

To combat this, consider investing in an integrated ePOS system. The immediate benefit of this is that the risk of human error is greatly decreased, as your till communicates the value of the sale to the card machine, as opposed to the till operator.

This creates fewer opportunities for human errors and in return reduces the shrinkage rate.