Today many people do some of their work remotely. I saw a report in Deloitte Access Economics that stated today every week about one in three people work remotely for about 36 minutes on average, and the trend is for it to rapidly grow It is a big boost as this work can be done instantly. It also often avoids a commute to the shop.

Our software can work through several different methods remotely. You do not need a good Internet connection, although it does help.

This picture above is showing a person using her mobile to work our POS software, and it works well.

Free workshop on ecommerce on the 28 August at 2:00pm

Amazon coming to Australia now, hopefully, is a wake-up scream too many retailers that to succeed in today’s world, every retail shop owner must understand e-commerce as today retail needs to change. That is why we are running this free webinar.

To succeed, in retail you need to have a strong online website because retail has changed. We live in a world where almost everyone Googles and Facebooks. Before they even see your shop, they will be passing judgements and making decisions about your shop. If they do not like what they see, or you are not online, the odds are they will move on to someone else. The number of people that just window shopping is dropping.

For example, yesterday, I wanted a pizza, so I googled "Pizza near by", I look at a few that pop up, read a few reviews and decided which one to go too. If the pizza parlour did not have a strong online presence, it could not get my business. Here even a bad website, it is better than NO website.

No Website = Losing Business

If you don't have a website, you are missing out on opportunities for customers who want to spend money with you. So at this workshop we will share our experience and expertise on how to connect your shop to a website.

Pos Solutions Australia has been a leading provider of point-of-sale software for over three decades as we never rest when it comes to answering the call for innovation and development on behalf of our clients. Taking your shop online is the next step. That's why we have decided to bring you Webtail, a fully integrated synchronised online store built that works within your POS software to deliver your shop online. Plus we design you a commanding landing page, give you dazzling gallery, a professional blog and an online store all mobile-ready.

Please let us know if you wish to attend.

Here is a step by step method to measure how much interest there is in a brand compared to other brands. This was asked of me by a client that sells sunglasses, but I will use dog food as an example.

The problem is that often you want to know how much interest there is in a new supplier's products compared to what you already have. There is little point is stocking a terrific brand unless you are confident of your ability to sell it because say it came with an unbeatable price. Generally, however, if the public has little interest in the product, it will not draw people in and sales will be poor.

So now head over to google trend, which is here.

https://trends.google.com.au/trends/

Now I decided to select five dog foods that I know about, what you would do is look up your three or four top selling ones from your point of sale software reports and put in the new one on offer.

So I entered in "Fish4dogs", "Earthborn Holistic", etc note with quotation marks one by one into google trends. Unfortunately, we only get five, but what do you want for free.

I then changed the country to Australia (green arrow) and the date to the last 12 months (blue arrow). 12 months gives me a feel of current trends.

Now I can compare the search popularity. Out of my list, most people are searching for K9 Natural, but notice almost none for Artemis Pro Power. Furthermore, XP3020 seems to be a fashion item it comes in and out very fast, that is why I suggest using a year of history. One point that can cause problems, and you need to watch is that some names K9 often searches with be for other things then dog food, but this will give you a good start.

There are a whole lot of reports at the end, which will be of use too.

With everyone now complaining about the electricity bills, here are some tips to reduce the electricity bills in your shop.

Do not leave electrical equipment, e.g. computers on all the time, switch them off when they are not in use.

Look at the energy ratings of this electrical equipment, a laptop uses much less electricity then a desktop.

Check out whether another electricity supplier is cheaper, we saved over 20% on our bills by switching to another supplier.

Go through the bills and work out how you are being charged. You could find that you could make some decent savings.

Check, whether you can reduce the lights, switching to energy-saving lamps can help too. Have you considered pulling up the binds on the window?

Look at your air conditioners and heaters.

Reduce printing, to many people print too much, printers and photocopiers use a lot of power.

An effective method of drumming up business for your retail shop is by sending to your VIP members emails. Do not send too many but at least once a month send out a newsletter though something like mailchimp which is free for SMB promoting your shop. Most email marketing engagement rates range from 1.5 percent to 4.79 percent, according to MailChimp. We have a free email seeding service for our clients if you require it. If you have say a thousand people on your mailing list, which is not that hard to get that is about 15 to 50 people.

There are plenty of points to send these people, the best ones as readers, here will know is birthday offers. However, thank you ones are very good too. If they have just brought something off you, why not try to get them to buy more. It does not have to be so recent. Here’s an example: Thank you for shopping with us, customer _______ in last financial year! To show our appreciation, we’d love to inform you that now we have _____________. Please check it out the next time you are in our shopping centre_____________, wishing you for the next financial year a happy great year!"

Furthermore, if you have some new lines, you could advertise them, e.g. we now have XYZ products, or say you have lotto and a superdraw is on.

The cost of this is zero to you, and it may bring you something good.

One tip that came out of the gift fair is that many people found knowing the price points of their shop helped them source items.

If say your margin was for that department 100% and that most of your sales are about $20 for that item, then you know you are looking for items with no more wholesale then $10. Knowing that makes life a lot easy when you are dealing with such a large number of possible stock items.

Well, it is easy to get this figure for a range of possibilities from our point of sale software.

Go to register reports.

In sales, select "Turnover by unit price" (marked in red)

Now click Report Criteria and select the dates and departments you are interested in.

I recommend rather than doing all departments that you restrict it to a selected few so you can examine each department on its own merits. In this case, I picked confectionery.

When the report pops up in this case, you can see that in this department you have two major price points about $2.50 and another at $16.

If you want to study it farther, please use the adhoc reports with excel.

Knowing your stock theft is vital.

The following method will tell you how to determine your figure even if you only have rough figures, you will find it a big help.

1) Do a total's report in your cash register system for 1/7/16 to 30/06/17 and tick by department. Now put this aside depending how you are setting up; it may include GST or not. If it does include GST, then take off GST by dividing by 11. If you have a department that is partly EXEMPT, you need to make an esimate for GST which you can get from your GST reports.

We will call this figure by department (RVS) Retail value sold.

2) Now you need to determine is by department.

Stock Turned Over in the books

This is simple to do.

Stock on hand at the start of last financial year which your accountant will have.

+ purchased last year again your accountant should have this.

-stock on hand at the start of this financial year, which you should have now

Now use the expected margins of each department to determine what is the retail value of this stock.

(RV) Retail value = (Stock Turned Over)/(1-Margin%) now this is EX GST, which should match your total's figures.

Your Loss = 1 -RV/RVS

Multiply by 100 and you have the percentage.

Now as a general rule, we divide this loss into four categories.

(1) Public - shoplifting
(2) Employee theft
(3) Supplier problems
(4) Internal issues- not really theft as such - accountancy errors, goods wrongly classified, goods with incorrect prices, goods discounted to clear but not put through the system as a discount.

As a first-level approximation assume each item equal although from my experience, I would say (2), (1), (4) and (3)

Well, the Gift show in Melbourne closed today. As it is the largest in Australia, so many retailers come from all over the country to see it.

Overall, I had mixed feeling about the Melbourne Giftware show for retailers. It was clearly a great chance for retailers to see thousands of unique products. It certainly presented them with a large and fresh assortment of products and resources, plus it was a great opportunity for retailers to meet many of the newer and smaller suppliers.

My big concern is that I thought most of the items on offer were too expensive. I think if I was seriously thinking of selling gifts, I would go to a large Asian overseas gift show as well. Trips to Asia are not that expensive and it would not take a large order to cover the trip.

Anyway, here are some photos which will give you a feel of the large range of products that were available.

You can read up on it here.

They have a warehouse in Melbourne and are advertising for 140 positions in Sydney and 20 jobs in Melbourne, and everyone is talking about it. I noticed a piece by Chris Samartzis the general manager of VANA who has a lot of retail experience that has written his opinion on what Amazon coming to Australia, means. You can read it here.

From what I am reading is that he feels that Australian business conditions are different enough to be in his words "not necessarily be conducive to the pure play model of Amazon." He does accept that Amazon has incredible resources behind it. He also feels that if Amazon attempts to enter the brick and mortar channel, in Australia it's going to be effected by the same problems as any other brick and mortar company so its not going to destroy the current brick and mortar channel.

I am only partly in agreement. It will not destroy the brick and mortar channel but it will change it. I was one of the first customers of Amazon and have been following them for many years. Firstly, Amazon is not coming to Australia; Amazon is already here. A large percentage of Australian consumers are currently its customers. A better description is that Amazon is expanding its operations in Australia. This is a big plus. It is much easier in retail to sell an established customer who has brought two books off you, a third book then it is to sell someone who has never brought off you a first book. Amazon has an established market here. They are very used to dealing with other countries, and I doubt our laws and labour requirements are much different or tougher than the European Market.

Australian investors are clearly worried. Australian retailers on the sharemarket have lost about $200 billion in the ASX recently due to Amazon. Now I will try to explain what is happening on the share market and why Amazon is such a threat. For those that know something about the share market, you will know what I mean when I say that Amazon P/E is over 240. Translated a SMB business opened a warehouse that costs a million dollars, it would require for a million dollars of valuation, about three years profit or about $300,000 of profit a year. A large multinational like Wesfarmers requires for a million dollars of valuation about $60,000 of profit. An Amazon shareholder is happy with 4,200 dollars of profit. Clearly, the investors in Amazon are not looking at the short or medium term. They are in it for the long term.

Exactly what Amazon means in the long term. Let look at some of their assets because that is what many of you are now going to see now.

1) They have a well-established VIP marketing system with an effective predictive marketing system. You buy something, Amazon will suggest other products. With their VIP club, they keep in touch with their clients. We need to get our clients who use VIP marketing up on a predictive marketing system too.

2) Amazon have a fast and affordable delivery system. You need to look into a delivery.

3) Amazon has a terrific eCommerence website which is extremely informative. You cannot just stick around with a small tiny eCommerence solution. You need something professional.

Retail is changing. You need to adapt.

I recommended that any Australian retailer thinking of making or doing something with a loyalty program for their shop to read the free Executive Summary of the latest for love or money 2017 loyalty research report.

They have just released some extra interesting point here.

Although not mentioned, the most successful loyalty marketing offer is a birthday offer. Success rates with these birthday offers are almost 25%.

We are showing off our point of sale software plus our eCommerce products at the Melbourne Gift Show.

The actual show is huge, so much that I would think that almost everyone of our clients could gain at least some ideas for possible products for their store. Although I do feel that many of the products were too expensive for example I doubt many people would buy $25 socks. I know my daughter has a ball looking at some of the stuff.

Here is our latest brochure for the best point of sale for newsagencies. It's probably now the most popular one in use overtaking many others now in use.

If you are looking at upgrading your software, please take a look. It can do

VIP marketing,

Discount vouchers,

Maximise your stock,

Reduce stock outs,

Handle returns,

Speed up your purchases,

Laybys,

Data mine your information,

Do eCommerce,

Work with tablets,

and much more.

Please have a read here

As regular readers here will what I like very much to do is monitor the economy.

Here is the Reserve Bank Economic snapshot of the Australian economy for June 2017

Now compare this with the one released for June 2016.

From a retail perspective, the inflation rate is an immediate concern as it is hard to imagine how prices charged can be increased, but clearly they need to be although for many the interest rates fall will help, as will the stronger Australian dollar. The number of new customers is up, and the unemployment rate is down so we now are employing more people then ever before. Unfortunately people weekly earnings are almost the same, Australian have not had a pay rise in many years. Retail is steady, but clearly we need our mining industry to get back up.

Very soon a search engine of hacks will pass 4 billion emails mark of addresses that are hacked email. If you think that the world wide web has about 3.2 users that means about one and a bit email addresses per user. As you can see the hacked emails listed is now 3.9 billion.

With the recent hack of the Swedish goverment will certainly add another few million to the list as it looks like almost everyone in Sweden accounts were hacked.

To test to see if you are hacked go to Haveibeenpwned.com, enter your and some of your closest friends and relatives e-mail address. Then click the “pwned?” button to the right. Your email will be checked to see if it is on the list. Check as many as you want, then notify them if they have been hacked. As a tip make sure that they do something,

If it says an email account has been hacked, change the password of the site immediately. Here are some passwords to avoid.

One advantage that users of our software have is the large number of suppliers that they can talk too compared to users of other point of sale systems. Our system when it imports stock details does not just take the price but also pulls in other details like stock quantities. This is important because over time package sizes will change as well as price. Remember how much bigger this used to be?

This is important as it makes your retail businessmore productive with significant productivity savings in staff time and administration.

I do not know what happened today but we had a major EFTpos outrage today, at first I thought it was just Tyro but clients rang up about Westpac too. I later heard that NAB and ANZ had problems too. Anyway it should all be okay now.

The biggest loss of revenue in repair shops is that people do not enter in all the details as paper gets lost and people forget to enter in all the details. We have a client that once they computerized their bike repair section in the shop suddenly picked up about two thousands dollars a month from correct billing. Plus they have the added benefit, by using a point of sale system of better customer accounting, better communication through SMS and email and access to a VIP marketing system so hopefully leading to more customers, and higher revenue.

We will be running a User Meeting in Townsville next week.

Monday 31st July 2017 @ 5.30pm

Where: Vincent Newsagency.

Shop 12 Vincent Shopping Centre,

249 Fulham Road,

Vincent QLD 4814

The Agenda

Bpay Payment

Learn how to integrate Bpay into Posbrowser and process bill payments for any Bpay bill!

Website Integration

Find out about our great new integrated Webstore integrated using Webtail. Stock control, processing orders and managing customers from your webstore is now all possible through Posbrowser!

Magazine Reconciliation

Learn how to use our unique reconciliation report to make sure your returns are on track!

General questions

You chance to ask any questions you have.

Please reservations are essential, so please contact us if you wish to attend.

We look forward to seeing you on Monday.

If you need them, these can be a terrific time saving in the shop, particularly if you can put in the price per weight and out pops a price. There are two basic types - label scales and scales, we can help you with both as we can link them into our point of sale system. In operation, label scales will be faster as the items can be weighed in advance, and the items prepared to go. It also speeds up processing at the till.

However, if you are considering getting a scale, here are some quick points that I think you should consider.

- Some have this irritating habit of jumping between two values until it finally settles on a weight. Do you really want to keep waiting while it decides?

- Can it handle the weights systems you require. Some people still require imperial as they get products from the US. Some US scales can only read imperial, and you do not want one of those.

- Also check the design, run your fingers along the edges, one problem some report with their scales is if they are not careful and hit it on the edge it can cut them.

- It can be a problem if you need to switch a scale on before using them, and they are one of those that take forever to boot up. This would not matter if you intend to leave them on all day.

- Check the display is large and clear. The idea after all is that while weighing it, no only you but the customer can read the display too.

- Check that the design can take punishment. It has to last for years. That is why I think the cheap plastic scales are worthless. Retail often is a slap, bang and whack. It needs to be able to take it. Water and drink splashed too. I have seen a scale after coke got spilt on it, and coke and electricity did not get on well together.

- Check the scales regularly, particularly on the high amounts, I have seen scales that underestimate on the top end. Do not trust the supplier, check to see what is the reliable limits of your scale.

- Lastly they need some TLC, and they should if you get them from us last for years.

Hope this helps.

Fortunately most of our users took our advise and only did delay the latest Windows 10 upgrade to Monday or Tuesday. Although most had no problems, a few did.

If you are not running Microsoft Defender which is what we suggest, then please turn off your antivirus program before doing this update.

The most important problem was that many complained how long it took to do the upgrade. As long as its moving there is not much you can do but wait it through.

The other big problem was not as such a Microsoft problem but a hardware issue, particularly with USB devices. We have been busy today reinstalling hardware devices. Some there is little we can do although so far no-one has gone down, but a few are reporting problems like the screen not quite being right.

Some computers are reporting problems getting on the network, so what we are doing is re-installing the latest network card, and that seems to be fixing it.

The slowness and odds effects being seen in the startup that some are experiencing seems to fix itself after doing a few shutdowns and restarts. If that does not fix it, what I am telling people to try is rather than turn off the computer use the hibernate option and see if that works for you better. So far, it seems to be working and in a few days, I am sure the shutdown will work properly.

One point I do recommend is after the update is done, go to Settings > Privacy then check the setting there.

Other then that it looks good, most people are reporting that the computer now seems more responsive. For point of sale, the improved security is the big plus.