BLOGS AND ARTICLES FROM THE POS SOLUTIONS TEAM

A customer-facing screen is a screen that faces customers at the point of sale. Most large retailers use them.  Often in a three-in-one unit like this one.

Using them while you are ringing up the transaction, your customer can actively follow what you are doing.

Here are some advantages that it gives you

-It helps build customer trust, as the customer can see what you have put in while you are doing it.

-It speeds up the queue as the customer will have many of their queries answered on the screen, eg the price of a product or whether a discount was applied. 

-It gives you an aura of professionalism. 

If you are interested, let us know.

When you talk to retail managers of large retail companies, what is interesting is that they consider their CRM more critical than the Point of Sale Software. One of the first questions they will ask does it talk to Salesforce or IMS. We go YES as we have more integration than anyone I think. only then they are interested in talking to us.

These people feel I think correctly that relationships are the heart of any business, and this is their top priority. This is why we provide a CRM module free in our software.  

Ask yourself this, does not every sale that is done in your shop represents a relationship. The more control you have, the more bits of information you have on the sale e.g. the customer’s name, the items they bought, how they brought it etc. the better. Bluntly these people do not care much about one of their shops in XYZ or the one in ABC, what they care about is the customer. They are spending big with loyalty programs which cost them about 1% to 2% of sales, to get this information. 

Think back when you were much smaller, you probably knew almost every person that you did business with their names, maybe family members, etc.  Do you think that this information helped your business?

Once your business starts to get over fifty customers, it starts to get impossible to do this with a paper note.  There is too much information. Now what you will find is the information you require is scattered over many different places e.g. filing cabinets, computers, handwritten notes, someone memory, etc. and you soon lose track. Now you start to look impersonal.

Where did you put all the personal information about your customers – like birthdays, names of children and avid interests? In what file did you keep all the service issues and complaints? In which spreadsheet did you track customer responses from your marketing campaigns?

This is where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes into play.

It automates many tasks. The CRM does not forget birthdays, it does not forget that the customer is starting to run out of the perfume, dog food, photocopy paper, etc. and it knows peoples names. It puts all the information in one place, which gives you better relationships by helping you to understand your customer and the customer’s history and experience with your business.

I suggest trying our CRM module to try to get your business to grow.

If you feel after a while you want a bigger package, at least you will know more about what you need, and there is no problem with us going to something like Salesforce.

This came up yesterday, a customer wanted an invoice from some items he purchased a few days ago on a statement.

Firstly our understanding is that any customer has the right to ask you for an itemised bill or account for up to 30 days after receiving the statement and must be provided free of charge within seven days of the request.

The main reason is my experience people do request this, is because some of the items have GST and some do not. 

It is actually very easy to do in our system as we have automated the operators and you can print in seconds.

I would suggest here using the A4 receipt, in the cash register look for the item, click on the "Receipts" button, find the receipt you would like to print, then select the "A4 Print" button:

Out will come an A4 receipt:

Speed vital when it comes to POS software, no-one wants to wait. The customers want to be in and out quickly. If the queues start to get big, then people walk out. What annoys retailers is when they see people dumping their proposed purchases and leave.  What is even worse people then often avoid shops that they know has long queues and do not come back.  

Industry-standard to do this is about 40 seconds a transaction plus about three seconds for each item to scanned and rung up.  So if you want to ring up four things, the time taken industry expects to be about 40 seconds plus four items in their basket at 3 seconds each, so it is about 52 seconds.

The fact is no matter how fast you go, you always need faster speeds. That is why there is always a demand for faster computers.

There were two leading suppliers for computers Intel and AMD.

Recently both have dropped their prices on high-end products so resulting now in a lot of people being more interested in getting super-fast computers. In the past, Intel was considered the premium brand and AMD, the more affordable. So the price points were stable.

Not any more, today the new AMD with its Ryzan chip is more powerful than the Intel alternative in many cases.  Plus its getting better. What I like as well is that it has smoother performance, I hate it when the software slows and then jumps at you.

The battle between AMD and Intel is heating up, and we can already see the price drop because the quality difference now I think is tiny, so we are now having super-computers at a budget price.

With your Customer relationship management (CRM), why not now offer an extended birthday reward?

People respond positively to birthday greetings with a positive reaction, surveys show up to 88%. This is when people do some self-indulgence and spend. It possibly the most important marketing holiday in retail as nothing else seems to bring people in like a birthday offer. Here is a screenshot of a study.

According to a study, 51 percent of consumers do feel special if a retailer acknowledges their birthday, and 40 percent are more likely to shop at a retailer that recognises their birthday. I believe that as nothing seems to bring people into a shop than a birthday offer.

With our point of sale software, Birthday offers record typically of about 25% success.

Now because of the COVID-19, many people have missed their birthday and only now starting to come out. Why not offer an extended period on a birthday offer now? What you are saying is that we know you could not celebrate it then but now we are getting back to normal your reward is waiting for you to use.

Here is how it works and it is easy to set up, when you are entering a VIP customer, simply put in their birthday. It is much better if they use their real birthday but if not, put in their join date. You can always correct it later if they point it out.

Today many retailers who are approaching financial institutions are being asked by them to provide estimates. It is not that these institutions are worried about security as most of these loans the government is helping out with that now, what they are concerned with is can you pay the loans?

One of the best tools to reassure these people is the break-even analysis,  something that I have discussed here a lot but now seems to be mentioned a lot more.

The Break-even point, where profits are equal to expenses!

Although because of coronavirus, its all the rage now. It has however widespread use beyond that e.g. how much extra sales do I need to cover a proposed shop fit to make my initial investment back, how much additional sales do I need to pay back the setup and running costs of a loyalty program or how much extra sales do I need to increase my shop hours?

It is an invaluable starting point for finding out where you are at and where you can go. In this case here, is it better for the business to spend its spare money on a shop fit, a loyalty program or to increase its hours?

Here what the financial institutions want to know now is how much business could you lose and still pay your way? 

Now what people often do is give the figures to the accountant and let them do the analysis, which is what these financial institutions want but now they are being very flexible and often will take your figures. 

To calculate a shop's break-even point in you need to know the values of three variables: You can get it out of your profit and loss accounts

Sales turnover: This is simply your turnover (this one is generally easy to get)

Now go through your expenses and put them into these categories.

Fixed costs: These are costs that don’t change whether you sell a few or a lot. These are the costs of just keeping the door of the shop open.

Some examples are 

Rent

Full-time staff

Insurance

Electricity bills 

Bank repayments

Accountant fees

These need to be added up.

Variable costs: These are costs that depend on sales, the more you sell the higher they are:

Part-time staff

Cost of goods sold

Credit card fees

Now, these need to be added up too.

Notes here:

Some of these costs can get programmatic as to which category they are in when there is doubt the rule is to put them in fixed. Generally, unless they are huge, it does not matter much.

Also, often people argue that some of these variable costs change dramatically depending on volume. Well in most situations unless you go pie in the sky, they do not change that much, e.g. you can get a better margin on many items if you sell heaps but are you likely to sell heaps? Like everything, you do need some intelligence to use this analysis.

Now the formula is

Variable profit = (1- (Variable costs)/Turnover)   This gives you your shop profit for each $1 you sell.

Now the Break-even point is (Fixed cost)/(Variable profit)

Say for example you had a turnover of $550,000 

Your Fixed costs are $60,000 a year

Your cost of goods sold is $370,000

Your other variable costs are $40,000

So your variable cost is here is $370,000+n $40,000 = $410,000 

Variable profit = (1- (Variable costs)/Turnover)   This gives you, your Variable profit = (1- (410,000)/550,000) = 0.218

Now the Break-even point is (Fixed cost) /(Variable profit). This gives you your Break-even point as  (60,000)/(.218) = $235,714.29

This would signify that this business is relatively healthy from coronavirus as it can continue with over half the loss of its sales.

Once you get used to doing it, you will find that it typically is like half an hours work.

Now what a lot of retailers would do now is look at their basket reports in their point of sale software, see what a typical basket profit is and divided that into the Break-even point. This determines how many sales they need a day, but that is just the start because there are heaps you can do with it and this will be a subject for a future post.

If there is a lot of interest, I am quite happy to do a webinar on this calculation, so please let me know.

The coronavirus has caused significant change across all our lives. We all have to deal with the new normal. Today in the world of business, life moves on, and effective meetings need to be done. 

So today, almost all of us are using online meetings. 

This was a growing trend earlier but this pandemic has speeded up the process, and I am sure that this trend will continue even if COVID-19 suddenly disappeared. Today in Australia, court hearings are being done with zoom and skype.

Now I would say that every business needs the proper equipment to participate in these meetings.

What I suggest you need is to upgrade your back office computer by adding another monitor. 

This will give you a Dual Display, which allows you to participate with the online meeting and also get organised. , It is said that dual monitors increase productivity by 20-30 percent.

The monitor should have built-in speakers if your premises can use them, I think it looks better then a headphone and works better. Also like many others, I find extended use of a headphone painful on my ear. That is why I prefer to use the built-in speakers. 

Since you are going to be looking at people, not text for quite a while on these conferences, I would recommend a 4K display to see a decent image. Plus you need something that is a reasonable size so nothing smaller than a 27 inch. Who watches TV on small screens nowadays if they can help it.  Check it out and make sure that it is clear and has a readable screen (to prevent headaches), I prefer the brighter displays to cut down on the glare. Remember you are right in front of it for a long time.

What would you be able to see here say on a small screen?

With us, a typical online meeting has over eighty (80+) people attending. I have attended meetings with much more.

I use a 34-inch gaming monitor.

This is a tip that I think will work.

Most of us are having our workplace now cleaned regularly for example, the front counter in many shops is wiped every hour. 

Why not make a sign in the window of what you are doing with a picture like this.

Our front counter because of COVID-19 is being cleaned and disinfected every hour. Deep cleans are done every XXX etc. If you are using, for example, a hospital-grade disinfectant, why not put it up too? 

It you have a hand sanitizer for the public use, why not make it a hand hygiene stations with a poster?.

If you have an email newsletter, why not show a photo of you doing it with a brief note?

Show them that you have a good hygiene program!

If you are thinking of a switch to ePay from Touch networks for virtual products, please follow the instructions below.

For those not sure of what these virtual products are, you will find a list of the products here, Overall I would say that there is a lot of customers for these products, it does bring people into the shop, and it does pay its way.

We are confident that we will be rolling it out next week on beta.

For those running Touch, ePay can work together with it, so this is your chance to test out the ePay facilities with no risk and no cost. As far as the different offering are concerned, I think you will find that they have higher margins on ePay so many of you will want to jump into ePay immediately.

What you first will need to do is set up an account. To do that, please click here.

Now you will need to tick the boxes in the following order which I have numbered 1 to 5 in green

Then click next and enter your details.

Enjoy!!!

Now, the stock levels in many shops are a mess. The reality is that the world is moving on and you need your stock right e.g. summer clothes in winter do not sell well. 

This needs to be addressed. 

I suggest that you look at a report that contains the sales of the stock items and the stock on hand figure. Here is one such report, the top N stock report which you can find in register reports here.
 

Put in the last two months and ten million-selling lines to include everything.


Now you will get a report, that has current sales figures and stock on hand.

Now you need to review these items ASAP

Unfortunately, Microsoft do not have a terrific track record with Windows updates and looking at the current list, I can see little that most of our users really need urgently.

So what you may want to consider doing is pausing your updates, to let other people test the new features first for you. This particularly now, when every computer call center including ours is flat out.

If this is of interest to you then do the following

Select the Start  >  Settings  > Update & Security   > Windows Update

Now click pause updates for 7 more days

What this will do is delay your updates from Microsoft for a week so others can check it for you. If you want more details please click here.

Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry  conducts regular surveys to see how businesses are adapting to the current crisis, we participate. What they have noticed is that many companies in Victoria are changing their delivery system. 

It makes sense if you think about it what business should and many are now thinking about customer values, rather than customer value to them. If you want customer loyalty, you need to realise that it works on both sides, customers and you.

Okay, ask yourself what is important to customers now and how has this COVID-19 pandemic changed their behaviour? What is important to them to help build a connection.  Consider offering more delivery and/or click and collect to your selling strategies.

The problem with delivery in Australia is that delivery costs are too high and unless the item is somewhere over $100, its not worth delivering. Click and collect add very little to the charges. It is convenient and fast.

Here is what one enterprising retailer, I saw who set it up.

The owner told me here, due to the success he is having with it, they intend to continue this once the lockdown ends.

My advice is to try these items and see what happens simply. You can also make adjustments as you go on, if it does not work you can stop it.

Google has created a new tool — Rising Retail Categories — to provide retailers with information on the fastest-growing product categories in their search results. The point Google makes is that since the outbreak of coronavirus, there has been a significant change in consumer interest, so to help retailers see the changes they have created this tool. I picked on the category "Greet & Note Cards" selected Australia and looked at the past week.

Not surprisingly Mother's Day was big, but interestingly birthdays and anniversary cards were on the increase.

Here is a video to explain it.

If you want to have a shot click here have a play and see what you think. I think it will give you some ideas.

Tyro made an offer to our users which I thought you may be interested in reading. However, they have a few points that are changed from my initial post so I have decided to post the offer with the changes below.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The big problem now is that because of this coronavirus. Shoppers are increasingly wanted to pay by methods that don’t involve touching terminals and cash. No-one seems impressed by the hand sanitisers nearby and the frequent cleaning of the terminals. Today people do not want to touch the terminals thinking they are unclean. I think they are right, how many people touch those terminals every hour in shops? 

As such some of our clients have reported cash is way down and have seen big jumps in contactless payments by almost 40%.

We have been asked to submit a report about this but based on preliminary figures, this is considered to be real and a general problem as few seem to think when this coronavirus is over this will go back to before.

This is seen as a big problem looming for retail.

This means that many of our clients need to rethink their EFTPOS strategy.

So I think this offer is very timely as tyro has excellent contactless payment systems.
 

Image

If you want more details please click here.

We had a problem with one of our clients a few days ago trying to use their laptop at home over WiFi for work.

If this is you then there are two problems that I suggest you look at:

1) Make sure your WiFi modem is close to where you are working. Ideally, it should be in your view, construction, e.g. cupboards, doors, etc. and distance will reduce your WiFi speeds.
2) If your WiFi modem is old, it may need replacement. Technology has moved on. If the modem is fine, but the WiFi needs help, consider instead of a new modem, going to mesh WIFI. You get boxes like this which plugs into your modem and handles the WiFi.

These you place around the shop to improve the WIFI signal, so you tend to get better speeds as well as less dead zones.  Plus you get a more extended range. 

These figures are what are leaders will be using to base their decisions, so like many people associated with retail, I was looking forward with great interest to see what these people produced. You will find their results here for the March month. 

Unfortunately, it is limited as it only breaks it down into these retail types

Food 
Household goods 
Clothing, footwear and personal accessory 
Department stores 
Other retailing  
Cafes, restaurants and takeaway food services ;

The spreadsheet, I think that you will find to be the most useful is: TABLE 3. Retail Turnover, By State 

Now select the retail type you find most useful and compare March 2019 to March 2020.

Now you will get a feel of what the government and ATO think is happening now.

From what I can see, based on these figures food and household goods are up. No surprise there as many people were sitting at home with little to do in March so they cook and fix up the house. Conversely, clothing and restaurants were taking a big beating although not as high as I expect. We will need to wait till April as lockdown only started in Australia in late March so most of that change here is the voluntary lockdown. which we can expect to continue after the official lockdown ends. People are not suddenly going to go shopping just because the government says they can.

One point that does appears based on our figures that it does not show here but I think you will find when you compare figures is that people are shopping less but buying more on each trip. 

If you want to see precisely how this coronavirus pandemic has changed people movements in your area, check out the Community Mobility Reports from Google. 

It works from the location setting from android phones.

I found it interesting to see trends over time in places, particularly in retail areas. I am not sure what is going on, but the Eastern states' retailers are getting clobbered in visits while the other states are almost unaffected and in fact, in NT visits to the groceries and pharmacies are up 9%. You want to figure it out.

Now, what will happen, as the legal lockdown starts to end, is unclear. Even before the government lockdown came into effect, shops were recording fewer people coming.  Yet we need people back. 

Many shops are now frozen with goods from March.  Shops will be looking for money plus a lot will have stock that must be moved e.g. summer clothes soon we are coming into winter. Plus many people are now out of work, and it will take a lot of time to get them back working so many do not have money. Prices will need to cut, so what we are looking at is possibly the biggest clearance sale in history starting up.

From a retailers point of view, a loyalty program is giving up value to get their customer data. This customer data can be used to market. That is why we know the most successful of these shops will be those with an active progressive retail loyalty program. As a rule of thumb, the cost is about 1% to 2% of turnover. 

Does it work? Check these figures. 46% of Australians are actively involved in a loyalty program, and of that, these are the results. 

That is 25% of all consumers. 

These marketing programs do influence customer's buying behaviour, and research has shown that people do buy more from shops of which they are a member of its loyalty program. For many years, the study "For the love or money" has been the best study of customer loyalty and loyalty programs in Australia. The 2020 edition has just been released. The study itself you need to pay for, but the executive summary is here free.

I found the summary absorbing reading.

If you have not already got a loyalty program, I urge you to research companies like yours starting on Facebook to see what they are doing.  I can tell you this, I have seen many successful retailers from very big to very small and one point they stress is their loyalty program.

We are now shortlisting candidates for the Department of Social Services Cashless debit cards in the trial which we are involved.

Now the Federal Government has decided to extend the trials, while I don’t have any inside knowledge of future government decisions, I believe that It is likely that within two years, these cards will be Australia Wide as these will be I expect the primary means of paying social security. 

I know that stores on the program are positive about it. 

Currently in some areas now, over 60% of the people have these new debit cards. For most of them, it is their only financial means. The situation now is if you are in these areas, if you cannot accept these cards, you cannot make much trade with these people. 

We are very pleased with the fierce competition out there that we picked to do the trials in our market space we were picked by software and computer experts. 

In the long term, by numbers, depending on how you count between 33% to about 50% of Australian households get social security payments and with our aging population, this is likely to increase in the future. Plus I can also see many people with drug and gambling problems volunteering to go on these cards and the courts enforcing these cards too on people with problems. 

If you want to look at it in dollar terms, we pay about $180 billion now in social security a year of which at least 80% plus will probably go through these cards. The adult population of Australia is around 18.2 million, so just with that, we are looking at about $9,000 a person a year.

For many retailers now these cards are significant and I am sure soon for many more.

MYOB software is the most popular accountancy system in our market space, and our point of sale software integrates into MYOB Essentials and AccountRight. 

This is available free to our clients. 

Using this integration will save an MYOB user saves our clients time as it removes manual data entry; this reduces errors and is quicker in transferring the information.

Having worked extensively with MYOB for many years and is one of the first software companies to have done the integration, we have gained much respect for this accountancy program. 

One function they have that I like is the "smart bills", where a person can drop an image of an invoice into MYOB, and it can often read all the information even if the invoice does not have an ABN number. This function is not available in many other accounting programs.

If you are interested check out the automatic MYOB Data Transfer section in your POS software.

Once set up, all you need to do is select the dates to go.

By doing this both your point of sale software and MYOB will work together to bring businesses like yours, an integrated point of sale and accounting platform to helps you better manage your business.