BLOGS AND ARTICLES FROM THE POS SOLUTIONS TEAM

The current retail landscape looks different from the start of the year. COVID has changed the way people shop, for good. 

Let us look at the payment types people are using in your shop. It will only take a second.

Go to the "end of day" and click "Taking report"

Now put in the report and select the appropriate dates for your shop. 

On the right-hand side click "Show payment breakup"

In a second you will get the breakdown.  I am sure it will make interesting reading.

Two figures considered for EFPOS are most important are the number of transactions and the average amount per payment.

See how you go and as always let me know the score.

A receipt like this below can be generated by your customer from their bank account.

Using this you can say goodbye to paper receipts.

As you can see, this has your logo as well as the sales details of the transaction. It does not have to be a bank transaction as this receipt can be produced on any payment type: cash, EFTPOS/Credit, Bitcoin, etc. 

Formally it is called DTI, and it is the most advanced receipt format available.

There are other more significant advantages to the retailers too with DTI besides that a customer can see this receipt from their bank account. 

Some other advantages would be

- A copy of the receipt does not have to be given to the customer.

- Free SMS sending of receipts (This function is coming in a few days) 

- A verified copy of the receipt is always available to the customer

- Misuse of a receipt is more challenging. Say someone grabbed a receipt from a rubbish bin and tried to claim it in your shop. Now that person has an added problem. They may need to show how come this receipt is not in their account. 

- Similarly, a forged copy of receipts is much harder as a copy is available on a bank-approved secured server.  

It will be available on Monday for our clients free. 

Let us know if you want to try DTI?

Nothing will connect with your customer at the right time better than SMS. 

Current figures are that over 98% of SMS messages are opened, and almost all within the first 3 minutes. Nothing else comes even close to these figures as far as efficiency or speed. What it means is that you can interact with your customer quickly and effectively.

What makes it particularly effective is that the message is delivered directly to your customer. Emails are often now protected by ISP spam and customer's filters. These often block your messages.

There is, of course, the higher cost, but you often get for what you pay.

If you have products that need an instant response, you may need it.

PS Another good idea in some industries is to send a thank you SMS automatically every time they buy.

It was Black Friday.

Many of our suppliers now see this as their final chance to move the retail point of sale equipment before Christmas comes. So they decided to offer some outstanding offers. 

We immediately passed them on to our clients, This appears to have upset one of our competitors as they seem not to have passed on the savings. They admit that our prices are cheap, but then they accuse them of being possibly bad quality. They are not. They are excellent scanners. More importantly, they claim that they might not work with their software. If so, what does it say about their software and business practices if industry-standard barcode scanners do not work with them?  

The fact is this we now have an excellent price reduction on handheld scanners, this discount we are passing on to our clients. If you are interested, let us know while stock is available.

What point I do like about these scanners is some have antimicrobial protection. This will help now as they offer more security against the spread of pathogens. They also are designed with repeated cleaning in mind. As such, they can be wiped down with more potent disinfectants. They also have increased decode range so allowing you to keep a safer distance from shoppers. 

My previous post on late-payment fees brought up a few inquiries. 

What is now the debt situation now in the business compared to last year?

Well, the quickest way is to go into register reports > customers trial balance.

Put in a date, you can pick any date you want, like I put a date most than three (3) years ago. 

Use the date yesterday a year ago. Use the age periods as current, 30, 60, and 90 days. 

Now do the same report as of yesterday's date.

Now you can see how you are going!

No-one runs before they walk.

In computers, learn something. 

Use it and once you achieve success, then use your success to go further. 

Here is one example. 

In retail today, you need to invest your time in meeting your consumer desires.

When you are doing this, you must plan the roster by need. It is better to design this roster for the shop business needs and make changes for the business/staff realities later. You should do it as far ahead as possible as this gives everyone associated with the shop time to plan. 

Our software has a roster system available free.

Before you make the roster, you need to study your current situation. Our traffic analysis report by the hour can help. I marked it with a green arrow below can do.

Now put in dates from a previous period that you feel will give you typical results for the planned roster. For this year, you will have to use a lot of judgment on how you think it will go. Looking at what we see now, we expect you will have about the same traffic as last year but a higher basket size.  

What is the report will give you a color-coded analysis!

Red and Green are the busiest.  

Now you can see where the action, and gives you a formal way to start. 

An efficient staff roster system can increase efficiency. See how you go when you match your shop's traffic to your roster.

This Friday it is "Black Friday", officially this is the start of the Christmas shopping season.

Last year's spending on Black Friday shot up 69 percent on the previous year.

Looking at the Google trends, it looks that public interest I about the same this year as last year.

I hope you are doing something.

If you are interested in upgrading your scanners let us know, we have a Black Friday sale too.

Often you want to figure out what is going on, even if you are sure it's right. Sometimes, you need to determine that it is correct.

 So if you are looking to reconcile your EFTPOS/credit payment to the banks, if so, what you find is you are reconciling your daily sales, yet many of the bank fees are monthly figures. As such, the totals will not match.

Well, here is a report that can help you.

You will find it here marked in red.

Once there you can get a report in excel that you can reconcile.

See how you go, everyone, who has done it has told me that they have found something interesting.

Shoppers are put off your store if they see a lengthy queue, particularly if it's not moving fast. This is worse now as Australian standards need us to put floor markings every 1.5 metres where customers queue. 

So now the queue is longer plus many people for health reasons do not want to queue.

Here are some tried and tested tips to get your queue moving and so increase conversions. 

-Put a noticeable sign on your window when you have a less than 3-minute queue now. Make sure that the sign is in green. 

Also, advertise on your window/Facebook page, etc., at the best time to come to your shop to avoid the queues. 

-Hid the queue, so it looks smaller. A stand can hide a person standing. 

-Use your multiple cash draws facility, so you use many cash draws on one register. This allows many people to use one register simultaneously. Our tests show, two people working on one register with two cash draws can go 80% faster than one register. Not bad for an outlay of about a hundred dollars.

This also helps with cash security as only one person is responsible for a cash draw, but that is another point.

-Have more registers. 

You now have a perfect excuse to move a spare register in the back of the shop.

-Have multiple queues that lead to several checkouts. This creates an illusion of a shorter line.

Some extra ideas

-Make sure the queuing area looks clean. It does not hurt for people waiting to see someone cleaning and sanitising. 

-Have sanitising stations where people waiting can do something.

Start now!

A late-payment policy is causing problems now.

They have always been a sore point at the best of times. Many have been waving the fee for the duration of this crisis. Some have asked people to contact them to discuss it on an individual basis.  Let face it people have lost jobs and many have suffered a major loss of income. Now not the time to act heartless.

Now that it looks like the immediate crisis is over. People are returning back to work, Victoria is the last with the 30th of November. 

So now what are you going to do?

Let me know?

If you want to know which customers are now affected? 

1. From the Main Menu, go to Customers and then Customer Reports.
2. Double-click on the Customer Accounts options to expand the report.
3. Click on the Accounts Options report and then click the Go to Criteria Report.
4. Select any options on this screen and then click the Show report.
5. The customers set to receive a late payment fee will have Yes in the LateFee column.

Here is a step by step method which works to sell more which is very easy to do with our software.

-Get some signs in red with the notation "Bestseller". Above are some that a pharmacy got. If you cannot get them, print a few signs with your printer. Make sure that it's in red. 

-In your POS Software go to 

Go to Register reports.

Now pick "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period."

Now in the form put in the last 30 days

A report comes out that looks like this with your top sellers listed.

- Now go through these items and select as many as possible and put these signs pointing at these items.

- You will find that people will buy these items more.

- Do this process weekly.

I use the button on the bottom right, a lot.

There is a recent decision by the South Australian Government to go into lockdown as they have 35 active cases.

As a Victorian who has gone through lockdown, I can relate to what my clients are about to go through soon.  What can I say, stay safe and I know it is not easy to be a prisioner.

Those businesses that are going to remain open is because they are classed as an essential service.  

This does highlight a problem that I have spoken about here many times that the decision on that as the definition of an essential service depends on whims, there is no standard. 

It is up to the business to prove that they are an essential service. 

Here in Victoria, VANA was able to help many of our clients.  

Until a simple, low-cost sensor that can detect COVID-19 infections is widely distributed and/or a vaccine comes, we will be hit by repeated COVID waves - second, third, fourth, etc. A lockdown can likely happen anywhere. As South Australia shows, this can happen suddenly with no warning in an area doing fine.

Our advice remains the same 

Go through your shop and services. Look at what could be classed as essential.

These goods and services should be right out in the front.

Show the world that you are providing that vital service.

It might help.

A warehouse or kitchen in a restaurant is often hot, dirty, and greasy places.  Environments that are not good for computers. What used to happen is that we would put in a receipt printer in such areas. The idea being is that someone would take the packing slip from the printer. Then put it on a rack for someone else to grab it and process it.

This does present problems. 
-The order must be processed in realtime, not in advance. 
-Someone has to watch the receipt printer. 
-These packing slips get grabbed by people with dirty hands. 
-Often, these slips get misplaced.

In practice, what we find the biggest problem is if changes are made on the order.  Say five items are on the packing slip, but the customer cancels one. The packer or kitchen hand processes the five; soon, the customer gets five things and pays for four. 

These KDS are displays that show people at the required time, all the information they need. 

It then allows them to send messages that their part is done electronically. This significantly increases efficiency and also reduces the clamor and noise.

It is not surprising that now many of our sales now include units. 

The software for such units is free for our clients.

Today much of the time taken to process a transaction is independent of the point of sale software. 

Greet a customer with a friendly smile.
Say hello.
Process the transaction
The cash handling or EFTPOS
Goodbyes are said, 
The customer collects the goods and goes. 

The industry standard is now about 40 seconds a transaction plus three seconds for each item scanned.  

So if a customer is buying three items, the time is about 40 seconds plus three items in their basket at 3 seconds each, so it's about 50 seconds. 

But sometimes, the retailer needs speed.  Please take a look at how quickly one of our clients could process cash register transactions.

These were going through at speeds from 1.6 seconds with an average of 3 seconds a transaction. This is with five operators pounding in transactions one after another. It was not even on a supercomputer. It was quite an ordinary one.

To see what is happening with our point of sale system, I took about 20,000 cash register transactions.  

Here the average speed of a transaction was about 36 seconds a sale.  I expected this as our clients tend to have low numbers in their baskets and are almost always in high volume environments. 

Here is what the graph looks like, but our system can go lightning fast if you look at the above graph.

As you can see in a pinch, our clients were doing transactions much less than 36 seconds, as you can see here in seconds.

Besides all its other benefits, our point of sale system (POS) will allow you to serve more customers in less time efficiently. 

On speed, it will match any system on the market.

This Christmas is expected (hoped) will be the biggest retail event in Australia ever,

So here are some tips for this holiday season from a retail expert talks that I attended and from what is being said around the traps. Some of these are very relevant to my clients.

1) Show your trading hours

Many shops have changed their trading hours. If you are not open, the public may not be aware of when you are open. 

Make sure that they know when you are open. 

2) You need signs that you are COVIDsafe

Covid safety is a big focus for many people now. If you look at the majors, you will see that they all have such signs. Not surprising as the public is worried about it and needs reassurance. Check a few majors out and then put up a few similar signs in your shop's window too.

3) Promote gift cards

With so many people, families are separated due to travel restrictions.

Gift cards are the only way for many to share the love.

4) Click and collect

I have clients now doing a large percentage of their trade with a click and collect option. Because this does not have delivery costs, a small business can compete with online here.

After COVID, it will be a significant point in retail. 

5) Count on a lot more local trade 

I doubt many will go to the CBD now. Many will avoid large shopping centres too.

This is your chance to pick up on local traffic. 

6) Marketing

I'm afraid I have to disagree with my competitor about this. Forget loyalty marketing, today the emphases in retail and business, in general, should be the truth. 

We are in this together. We are all part of this journey. We are in this together. 

Remember, it has not been a good year for Aussies with bushfires, job insecurity, and the pandemic.   Interestingly, US election exit polls have shown that job insecurity is more important now to the public than the pandemic. Everyone knows someone that has employment troubles, few that have had a major concern with COVID.

Replace your loyalty marketing with togetherness.

7) Gift wrapping

If you do not know how to gift wrap items - learn.  I am hopeless in this stuff. Yet it took me in grandfather's shop a short time to learn, and do not worry as you will get plenty of practice soon.

Hope this is of help

It seems to be some problems with the banks now. At first, we thought it was only CBA, but it appears when I talk to our support that a few other banks like NAB are also affected. It's one of those things that we cannot do anything about but wait out.

In Australia, every organisation must have a work safe officer.

I have had a client after an employee collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. He suddenly found himself this officer and having to show that he knew and had done things.  

If so, a free first aid course like this one here might help. It is informative and is certainly better than nothing.

It took me less than an hour, and that was part-time, as I was doing much in the meantime. 

Pick someone in the shop. Then have them do the course, so you do have someone that knows some first-aid then make them your medical officer. As a bonus, they can always add it to their resume as a qualification.

If you have a software question, please use your support. 

You paid for it, so you may as well use it. 

We have the best software support, team!