"If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade." Tom Peters

A while ago, I discussed a Bill Payment service that we have integrated into our point of sale system, that allows our clients to accept Bill Payments. One point that did come up is that in every location, there is a different story. Some areas are well serviced by contact Bill Payment services but surprisingly many are not. I do expect that as the larger institutions withdraw from marginal regions, that many of my clients will find growing opportunities for them to enter this marketspace as in here.

If anyone is interested in trying it out with no obligation, I can certainly put you on to people that have signed up and are using it.

I was please that we were invited to see Sophia one of the most human-like robots in the world. The event was sponsored by Blockchain, a huge US venture capitalist firm, so I was flattered that we were invited particularly as she has only three days in Australia. She is made to look like a real person. Her skin looks natural until you touch it, her face is quite realistic; her eyes are pretty although she does have this creepy robotic look. The big plus she has she is extremely expressive when she talks. What they are trying to do is get these robots human-like in appearance. Once they do this it will inspire humans to relate to them the way similar to how people now relate to each other.

Here are some photos I took.

While watching the presentation, I was thinking that now we could link into her as many of the APIs are standard so soon I am sure once the price comes down we will have robotic shop assistants. One big plus will be that she speaks many languages; I heard her in English and Mandarin Chinese and was told that she could handle Russian too. Listening to her, I do confess that there was plenty of work to be done on her speech.

If you want to see more, I took some videos of her singing in Mandarin Chinese.

It was exciting to see her. If you want to know more, please click here.

One part of our POS system can help you save time and further streamline your financial processes is using the accounting integration. Customer information and account balances can be updated in real time, and sales figures brought automatically into your accounting system. This also save you from making data entry errors too.

Mirror marketing is a proven and best method to make a check on your existing stock lines for the coming marketing season. I suggest you run it at least once a week for now on your point of sale

Here is a step by step method for doing it.

Go to Register Reports marked in green.

Now select in stock, "Stock Sold During Period(a) Not Sold in Period(b)"

What the report tells us what was sold in a previous period (a) last year but has not been sold now so we examine the last year's figures and compare it to what we have currently.

Now this is a bit confusing but bear with me. What we want to do is compare the week coming in last year with this week which we have figures for.

Today is the 20/10/17

So we put in (a) the dates 20/10/16 to 26/10/16 <- note the year.

In (b) put in the dates for (a) as 13/10/17 to 19/10/17 <-last week.

As the holiday season continues you will need to change this every time you run it.

Now here you will also see that there are a lot of different options, which can help with ordering and giving specific department information. We will talk about this later.

Now what you investigate in the report where you get what was sold last year, but you are not selling now in your current period. The odds are you are out of stock.

Essentially the holiday trends are already starting but what we are doing here is making sure we do not miss this marketing season wave.

I spoke about mirror marketing so you do not miss sales. Well, one of our readers read this post and tried it out. What they discovered was that they had forgotten about ordering products for Halloween.

If they had not run the mirror marketing reports they would have missed this marketing event completely. This shows how powerful it is as a marketing method.

Well the PIAA AusPet 2017 Trade Show & National Conference together with Groomex 2017 was for us the place to be! We were thrilled to meet up with some of the movers and shakers in the Pet Industry where we exhibited our finest point of sale software at the two-day event.

What I always like looking at in these shows is the grooming section. It is amazng what these people can do, absolutely amazing.

There is less than 10 weeks to go to Christmas, so I suggest you start looking at whether you have enough stock.

A good way of starting your investigations is here on your POS system.

Go into cash register reports

Now pick "Select Top N Stock sales for a given period" shown with a green arrow.

Now select initially the period from 18/Oct/16 to the 16/Jan/17

I am going to ask for a report sorted by profit.

This gave me a list of the most profitable items.

Checking

Now look through the list to see what you sold during this period last year and check with the stock on hand (SOH) to see if you think you have sufficient Make notes

Review

These are the items that worked for you last year. The odds are that most of them will work again. For many, you need to check with your suppliers the status of stock ordering and receiving from them over this period after all buying a big order is the last resort.

Also what you need to check if they are a excellent seasonal seller are they in a good position? Do you have proper displays?

Is there any wiggle margin perhaps you can increase your prices slightly on these items?

Furthermore, I do suggest running this report again sorted by numbers as this shows what people are actually coming in to buy, remember a buy in retail is often called a vote.

There was some enquires and discussion after my recent post on Google #Masterclass2017 of how important is #local search for SMB. Well, here is a chart that you may find interesting although it's not dealing with SMB as such.

There obviously is a lot of interest in local searches. How influential are they to your business? Well, here is a study of just how important by brightlocal here

Here are some highlights in Italic.

84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business.
74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
58% of consumers say that the star rating of a business is most important.

People today are clearly forming a view on your business faster than ever. Based on this it does not take them much time. A few dreadful reviews, a awful star rating and you are out.

The good news, is that the study shows.

7 out of 10 consumers will leave a review for a business if they're asked to, so ask people to write something good and you have to keep doing it as
73% of consumers think that reviews older than three months are no longer relevant, in fact, I doubt they would read these old reviews no matter how good they are, as reviews are listed from most recent backwards and very few people are reading more than a few. So great five star reviews, three months ago are of minor use.

Here is an example I needed to buy some dog food urgent on the way home as we had run out, so I did a google search "Dog food near me" and got something like this.

I looked at how close they were and also the rating. What would you look at? Now tell me it does not matter in retail?

This is just a tip which I thought I would pass on.

When we go to shows and have a stand, what we need to do is check the public liability insurance. Our staff on the stand are covered by workers comp, but if anyone from the public goes into our stand, falls and hurts themselves, then its the stand holder (us) who is accountable. I suspect that this applies in many situations, for example, say you get a stand in a fete, you have a stand in a street fair or a show you probably are responsible too.

My advice would be to check with the organisers and your insurance broker and get this matter cleared up first.

The Reserve Bank did recently a study on how Australia pays. Here is the result

There are some points here that are clear, cash is still there, but it dropping eventually I am sure like the dinosaur it will go.

Surprisingly its only been a few years but card payments are rapidly moving to contactless and its now by far the most popular payment method.

Cheques are now almost gone; I know most of my clients only very reluctantly are accepting them at the moment. I read that officially cheques will be phased out starting 31st October 2018.

I still think that the credit card will soon be replaced by the mobile but this clearly is in the future.

It was a great pleasure and honour that we were invited to go to the Google #Masterclass2017. So off we came, here is me.

It was packed with some of the biggest advertising and technology companies participating.

The importance of Google now was clearly on display, in the meeting it was brought up that the only company with a comparable reach to Google at present is AMAZON. Although AMAZON would be a distance second.

Google is much bigger in data collection with over 80% of the smartphone market worldwide and just under 80% in the searches. Much of this information is available in some form to Australian retailers. AMAZON has a clear advantage in that their data is more complete. What I mean by complete is that Google will tell you a man of 30 years old in the Brisbane area click your advertisement. AMAZON has the person's name and his purchase history. That is a big plus. AMAZON are also masters at analysising the data. AMAZON is going to be a game changer and its not on price but technology.

So to me the most interesting part of the discussions was about the future in retail, in particular, for SMB. Currently Google local searches are growing at 45%. I believe it as people are now using Google to find local goods and services like florist, pet shops, newsagents, chemist, etc., For example, people now driving to a hospital, will Google "Florist near me."

There was much discussion on how to use information to drive sales.

One point that was made absolutely clear is something that I have been talking about for years. The long tail marketing in modern marketing.

They were talking primarily in terms of keywords in google searches, but the same principle applies in bricks and mortar shops. You need of modern retailing to have more range of products and services that drive traffic to it. Say, for example, you offer a service like ABC, can be anything like bill pay, dry cleaning dropping off and pick up, etc. Somebody wants it and so will come to your shop. That is one customer you would not have. This is even how the big guys at the conference were thinking.

I will talk more about it on a later post, when I have digested the wealth of information I got. Sufficient to say it was a great learning experience.

Well, it is October, and if the world moves as in previous years, many of my clients will do a major part of their trade this year in the next two months. So it is time to start thinking of what to adorn your shop for the holiday season. Please do not leave it too late. Furthermore, among your many other tasks, you will need now to start planning your stock ordering. This is something our point of sale can help you with. You will also need to look into your staff levels again something our point of sale can help you with all this; I be talking about these soon including monitoring with shadow marketing.

Overall, the economy now is moving forward but only marginally.

This is what it looks like now on 4 Oct 2017.

The way it looked a year ago in Oct 2016, when it was better

Still it is in the black, and the world economy is continuing to only slowly recover, even so it would be nice if we got some decent exports going.

There are signs that do appear to show that the yearly growing interest in Christmas trend is continuing up. You can see that this year 2017 is higher than 2016, which is higher than 2015. The public mood seems positive.

Measured interest using Data Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)."

Last year, what I noticed after an analysis of the selling season for Christmas was that in recent years, it has gotten longer. If this continues and I cannot see why it would not, we can expect a Christmas season from mid-December to late January about a 6-7-week period.

Also now, it is important to check that all the equipment you propose to use over the Christmas period is working? This is particularly true of some of the old POS machines that people bring out of the cupboard at present. Please check them to make sure it all works? Furthermore, check the cables. Equally important that your Internet connections are where you need it? I suggest you try it all out now.

Believe me, you do not want anything not working over the coming season. If something goes wrong now, it will not be good for the shop and it may cost, for example computer engineers are often on holidays and those left are on double rates.

One common problem is what to do with old computers, videos and monitors. Well one solution is to use them in advertising with slideshow software.

Simply take an old monitor, put it somewhere in the front window and have it advertise your products and services. If you want a professional photographer can make you a video, and they are not that expensive. If, on the other hand, you want to make it yourself its not that hard and actually its a lot of fun and quite rewarding. The added advantage is also that once you know how to do it, it's a great source of enjoyment to people. I find that people really like a video as a present like after going to a wedding. What I do is send the bride and groom a video and they always love it.

The big advantage in a retail shop is that if you know how to make it yourself, you can change it yourself regularly. Plus if you do it yourself all, it will cost you is your time and some electricity.

What a slideshow software does it take many still photos and displays them one after another in an entertaining way one after another in a video. Overall, they are fairly easy to use.

As the movie you create will need to be about 5 to 20 minutes, and I would recommend about 5 minutes.

Each still photo is displayed in retail about 5 to 6 seconds. Each picture has a gap of about 1 to 2 seconds. This is all very approximate as I find that often each photo demands a different amount of display time. If you are trying to present a complex image, you may need much more, if you are trying to say, "We have tons of greeting cards," then you may want less time for each image. So as such you need about 45 photos. Many you can get from the supplier, but I doubt its really worth the hassle. Simply walk through the shop after it has a clean. Carry around a black sheet of paper to put products on it and go with your modern smartphone taking high-quality photos, the higher quality the better. As you will probably be rejecting about 75% of the photos, you take, you need about 160, which should take you about 30 minutes of your photoshot. Trying to take each photo is some reasonable order. It makes it easier later, otherwise you will need to sort to get them into some logical order.

Now put these images on your computer, and go through and delete the ones you do not want. Be ruthless as you can always go back and get some more. This is one big advantage an amateur photographer has over a professional photographer; the amateur can go back and get more photos if required.

Now load up your slideshow software.

The one I use is proshow, now I am not recommending it because I have never used any other slideshow software. It was recommended to me many years ago by a professional photographer. It was more than good enough for me, so I stuck with it. I will say that I think using it is one of those things that is easy to do on your third attempt. The first two attempts were very hard for me to use; I remember. Proshow does come with a free trial so you can try it to see if it works for you free. I know several professional photographers that use it. If you rather there is a free slideshow software Microsoft Photo Story 3 which may be more than enough for you and there are plenty you will find if you do a google search. You better check how hard it is to use some if you are going down this track as I noticed one came with a manual of 1200 pages. Looking at it, I am sure the results are awesome if someone has the time to work it out. What I would recommend is that you try the Microsoft Photo Story, if that is not sophisticated enough for you, then you look further, but at least, then you will know what you require.

One point is what you do need is the ability to enter in captions with product and shop details. This is very important. On the other hand, I do not recommend sound in point of sale environments, if only because it will drive you crazy hearing it repeatedly the same tune.

Now create your video. Mount it on the old computer, often on a DVD or USB stick and let it play.

If you proceed down this track, please let me know how you went.

This is one of most successful selling tools in retail - upselling. In business, the big problem is to sell someone something, once they have agreed to buy one thing, then often it is not that hard to sell them more. That is why so many places have loss leaders which is a product or service that is sold often at a loss in order to attract new customers to sell additional products and services to them.

But it does not have to be a loss leader, my Mum serving in the shop when a person brought something to the counter would say, "Would you like something else? We have many fine items here!" and pointed to a small pile of items on the counter where we had our top sellers. She did it because a few did buy more.

If you know your top-selling items, which is easy to find from your top-selling reports in our point-of-sale system, you can do this too.

Experiment and try it out. If you do it right many of your customers could be buying two items instead of one.

As a manager, date calculations are a big part of my job, and I have to do them often, as these always change. So I feel like I am forever having to calculate starting and finishing dates to do roistering, it is the same of course in any organisation. This is a site that I use to help me do this.

https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html

Hope it helps you too.

A study was done by Microsoft as what was the cost of running an old computer in the US, and I expect the figures would be roughly the same here. Microsoft just for the records to do *NOT* sell computers.

The results were interesting; a four-year-old computer had over 200% chance of needing repairs and was down on an average 48 hours. The cost of repairing the computer was US$396. The cost of upgrading these computers to keep them going was US$200. Added to that would be the slow speed, and you're paying someone just to sit while the computer process.

Therefore, the cost of running a four-year-old computer was 48 hours down plus $596.

I should add these figures to my costing of what in a point-of-sale environment, computer costs. You can see my previous estimate here.

There was a time when a Newsagency Trade Show would have many point of sale providers on a show, but over time the customer churns overwhelmingly in our favour has had an effect. One by one these suppliers have dropped out as we slowly became the biggest. Today we will be the only point of sale supplier to newsagencies at the GNS NSW show, the largest newsagency trade show in Australia. You will find us on stand 46.

You will find us on stand 46

We have some really good stuff to show you this year such as the new XChangeIT reconciliation which I believe we are the only ones to have. What it does is allow you to instantly compare your return figures to the supplier figures. Users of it tell me that it saves them hours of work and saves them a lot of money.

Please come see the latest in newsagency software at our stand. You will not be able to see it anywhere else.

We also have made some advertising pages to market our products to rivals. So please refer us to a friend. So we have made invitations for users of these systems

Vend_pos

Tower systems

Retail Express

Revel systems

Idealpos solutions

By helping us you will be helping a business upgrade to the best POS system in the world!

What surprised me is that several people jumped at us, following our recent announcement of our Bill Payment services. I doubt any of them put much thought into it or know much about it. Just to correct the initial errors the BPAY system is not operated by Australia Post. Australia Post operates POST BILLPAY, which is their payment system. This POST BILLPAY operates almost exclusively the over-the-counter payment market for bill payments in Australia. The BPAY system is operated by a group of companies owned by the major banks and is primarily an Internet service. The product we have is an over-the-counter payment system, generally called OTC payments.

That over-the-counter payments are on the decline I agreed. However, it is important to realise that it is still a big market, and it promises to be a big market for the next five years as there is a huge market for cash service as many people today pay in cash. We are not just seeing older people, there are large numbers of young and middle-aged people pay in cash too and there are also transient people such as people on temporary residence who have limited access to Australia's banking. These people need and use phones, electricity and heating. Plus even plenty of Internet today is paid for in cash over-the-counter.

That statement of an 80% figure of over-the-counter payments sales buying nothing else, comes from older systems then ours when people tended to put the over-the-counter counters away from the main counter. There is no reason to do this with our system as any point-of-sale unit can handle these payments. This is the reason; I am sure that our figures are higher.

As far as the small fees for each transaction that is being quoted. These are recommended fees. You can charge more if you want by introducing a service fee. No-one can stop you because it is not an agency. No one is telling you how to run your business, if you put in over-the-counter payments. NO ONE!!! You are not signing up to an agency.

The proposed connection to the Bill Express company made by some is I feel is false and misleading and irrelevant. Unlike Bill Express with our over-the-counter payments, the merchant has nothing to pay, no fees and no commitments. If it does not work for the merchant, they can stop it whenever they like, no questions, and it will have costed them nothing. Unlike Bill Express, the billers are paid the same day, and the merchant does not take the credit risk. Furthermore, let me say that the over-the-counter products worked well for merchants until Bill Express as a company went south. The failure for the merchants had nothing to do with the over-the-counter payments itself and the loss by many of them of this over-the-counter payment was greatly regretted by merchants.

The big point is that it is about foot traffic, getting more people in the door probably about 40 to 200 a month. Here is a thought experiment for you, how much would you pay someone in a suit and tie, who came into your shop and gave you a proposal that he would get you 40 to 200 people every month coming into your shop and buying something? As Bill Express proved people paid thousands of dollars, and it is now available for you free.

Try it. It costs you nothing. You can leave any moment. Chances are that you will want to stay once your customers realise that you are offering them yet another convenience. Plus if we get enough people involved there is the potential to promote over-the-counter bill-payment services directly on the bills themselves which will generate plenty of free advertising.

This Saturday, a well-known problem in retail of incorrect prices on an item was highlighted. What happened was that the cover price of The Age was advertised on Saturday as $3.00 but on the paper the price listed at $2.80. So people were shocked when they came to buy the Age marked as $2.80, when it scanned at the point of sale, it came up as $3.00. It happens and to its credit, the Age printed an apology which is here.

The question is here. What is the legal responsibility the merchant has in this situation, which is certainly not uncommon? So on behalf of my clients, I made some enquires.

From what I have been told and what I understand and note here I am not a lawyer.

If the sale of the item has already gone through and the person has paid for it, then you cannot withdraw the item from sale. For example, a person, throws the $2.80 on the counter, you say thank you, and they are leaving; the sale has gone through, nothing you can do now.

However if the sale has not yet happened, and if the item is incorrectly priced, the merchant has the choice on whether to honor the incorrect price or not. There is no law that you must sell the item. If you decide not to sell the item at this incorrect price, I suggest that you withdraw all these items from sale until you find out what is going on. Once you fix up the price only then sell it.

Note if your argument is that its an error and your potential customer complains to the authorities then you may have to justify that *error* statement, I doubt in this case you would have any trouble.

Telstra asked me to pass on an offer that they have for all Telstra clients, and that is 200GB free of cloud storage on OneDrive for all Telstra clients. Which is enough for backing up your point of sale backup. 

Overall there are three main suppliers of cloud storage which my clients use OneDrive, which is this one, Dropbox or Google Drive. I would say for ease of use, nothing is as easy to use as Dropbox which is the reason it comes with the biggest price. It does have one problem that if you do not use the Dropbox account for six months, they will delete your account, and you will never get your information back. Google Drive and OneDrive, I rate about the same, mainly because OneDrive is a lot better than it used to be. Furthermore, OneDrive is very good if you use Microsoft Office.