A while ago, I showed how to use your point of sale system to help you find what the public are interested. The idea being to try to sell to them. Then what you do is grab a few items in the shop, put them together, hang a poster up and try to sell them while they are hot.

My current example was the Game of Thrones which is very much in the public eye now particularly after the recent muck up with foxtel which caused a storm in twitter.

As you can see from this graph the interest in this, is much higher than all footballs in Australia.

The problem some people said to me, was they could not get any appropriate posters. Which sort of surprised me.

Well here is a terrific site for making posters. The software is very easy to use. You can print them yourself or get them done at some photolab professionally if you want something better.

Here is a poster that a client created using it. I think it looks pretty good.

I spoke about this before of the legal dangers of blogging. If you need another example well this blogger said it “was a huge free speech, political communication and public interest matter” what he blogged. The courts do not see it like that and now he has been found here guilty of contempt of court and is looking at possible jail time.

If you are going to blog, please be careful.

With the recent announcement by Coles and Woolies that they are phasing out plastic bags, many of my clients could see this as an ideal time to access what they are going to do about their packaging too.

On one hand, by having bags it certainly encourages people to buy more, many people appreciate these bags. The other problem is that if they bring in their own bags, they are limited to how big their bags are. So I have had clients after getting rid of bags brought them back in the shop.

On the other hand, many in the public do not like it and in places like Canberra, they have already implemented bans, plus it costs. An article on the ABC that estimated the cost savings to Australian supermarkets of plastic bags was $171 million a year?

Here is an idea you may want to chew on, free bags if the customer purchases over a certain amount. It may encourage them to buy more. Easy to implement such a change in our point of sale system.

Anyway now is a good time for many of you to make a decision.

I and many of my clients use spreadsheet all the time in business. Actually after word processing, the first popular task that computers were used for in business was spreadsheets. I find them better than calculators as I can see each step and can take notes. Add 20 numbers on a calculator and who knows if one is wrong, on a spreadsheet you can review each number you put in.

As readers here will know our software uses spreadsheets a lot particularly for reporting so unlike so many other point of sale software, our software can produce flexible and dynamic reporting. It's a big plus.

Well if you are into spreadsheets, I have just discovered a great site with some brilliant spreadsheets with functions like calendars, resumes, time planning, timesheets, general forms, etc. They are extremely professional, look good and free.

Click here and enjoy.

Getting as many people as possible now to come to your shop and buying something, is the key to modern retail. You can often sell them more, if you can get them to buy something.

Telco costs our clients nothing, they get an account and often can be trading in hours. The costs of selling is zero. As such many of my clients have been pushing Telco's products now almost always Touch mainly because I think better margins, better service and larger product line. Over the past two years, the growth has been steady.

I decided to look into Telco's products. The big month for Telco's sales is December. I presume holidayers are the main reason. They also (see 6) tend to spend more in those months. Overall though if you look at the trend line in blue there is little change over the years before the price people pay. Which is surprising as the products' prices have dropped, you get more Internet now then you did two years ago for the same money?

What I did notice though is that over two year,years,margins have fallen as you can see with the blue line is the trend. The days are long past,when we started pushing Telcoto our clients, they were enjoying margins of 30%.

The number of sales per shop has also dropped partly I think this is due to more retailers selling the product and the move by the public to plans and buying on the net.

This has over two years resulted in a fall in profit per shop.

Overall though it is clear, the main reason for the expansion of Telco into our client base is that it brings about 100 customers a month into their shop, costs them nothing to install and brings about $100/month profit.

One important difference I notice between my larger and smaller clients, is that my larger clients know if they want to stay competitive they need to change. So my larger clients tend to constantly trying out new technologies and look for ways to be innovative.

I feel that while you may feel that you do not have the resources to do much different, that doesn’t mean you can’t be innovate in your company. Sometimes even small changes can do wonders for your business. You can start by urging your staff to think creative. Run a brainstorming session with them, beside being fun you may spark some innovation.

Here is a video on runing a brainstorming session with some good ideas.

Another day and another of our clients got hit by the WannaCry ransomeware attack.

With all the damage, that WannaCry is causing us now what scary is that it should have been much worse as by accident a quick-thinking engineer found a way to hack it so slowing down its spread. However, we are seeing now is copycat versions of WannaCry that overcome this hack. That is why it's starting up again.

The dangerous point about WannaCry is that it is believed that you cannot get your data back, there are currently no reports of people getting their data back even after paying the WannaCry ransom.

Our advice remains the same we strongly advise that you do not pay the ransom, if you pay it most of the time in our experience with such attacks, you will not get your data back anyway. By paying ransomware authors, you are contributing to the proliferation of ransomware by providing these people with rewards and so encourage them to continue.

Your best defence is to run a modern operating system on modern hardware whenever you can and always keep backups.

Also as in this case you should not be running a Windows XP anymore.

The latest copy of the most highly regarded review of Australian loyalty programs is now out. If you do not want to pay for it, I suggest that you grab a copy of the executive summary which is free and well worth a read for a retailer.

Overall what it shows is that loyalty marketing is fast growing in Australia in acceptance. Far as some have suggested that Australians are getting tired of it, the reality is that it is growing at a massive rate.

Today the average Australian is more involved is retail loyalty programs then ever before (5% up), and the number that they are active membership has grown by 10% from 2016 to 2017.

Not only that but most Australians now accept the need for loyalty programs.

At 64%, its almost something that is required by a modern business.

I think once you read this report, you will see that a modern shop should have a proper loyalty program, not just a simple but what ends out as a very expensive discount voucher system that so many use.

Our users are very lucky as our point of sale software has an extensive loyalty program system inbuilt which can handle one shop or hundreds of shops several large chains such as Nextra and Lucky Charm use it exclusively for there loyalty programs.

While you are reading this report, what I also do suggest that you grab a copy here which is also well worth a read too.

One point that I agree with many retail experts in Australia is that with Amazon coming, delivery is going to be more important in retail.

Here is an interesting article on the subject

One plus that our users have is that our point of sale system has an extremely powerful delivery module inbuilt.

A client calls and tells us that his computer is not working. Our support staff attempt to get him going but there are no backups. His technician comes to help but cannot get the computer going. Finally, he brings us the computer, and we managed to get it working. When I spoke to him and told him to buy a few USB sticks for backup, he notified me sheeply that he sells them in the shop. He should have used one of them before this happened. If we could not have got his computer going not having a backup could have cost that shop thousands plus a lot of work.

The fact is that a computer is a mechanical device, and all computers will eventually fail. It does not matter how big or small you are, for example, there are continuous complaints from people that Google Gmail has lost their emails, and Gmail Help told them they couldn't recover them and there is nothing more that they can do for them.

Similarly I noticed that Apple stated in their contract "TO THE GREATEST EXTENT PERMISSIBLE BY APPLICABLE LAW, APPLE DOES NOT GUARANTEE OR WARRANT THAT ANY CONTENT YOU MAY STORE OR ACCESS THROUGH THE SERVICE WILL NOT BE SUBJECT TO INADVERTENT DAMAGE, CORRUPTION, LOSS, OR REMOVAL IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, AND APPLE SHALL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE SHOULD SUCH DAMAGE, CORRUPTION, LOSS, OR REMOVAL OCCUR. It is your responsibility to maintain appropriate alternate backup of your information and data."

A backup is considered to be an obligation on the user.

In your Point-of-Sale system, a backup is crucial to your business. It should be done at least once a day.

 We take our client's privacy very seriously. Now others do too. Google, however, is an advertising company which wears several hats. You are important to it both as a client and as a receiver of advertising. Now if you want to know what information Google has about you.

Go log into your Google account and export a copy of your information.

You probably like me will be stunned just how much they have on you.

Most point of sale software can produce standard reports, that work about 80% of the time. For the other 20% of a time, you have a problem. For this reason, we provide a quick and simple way to export your information into a spreadsheet which gives you unlimited reporting capabilities and graphics too.

If you have Microsoft excel, you can use that, or you can use the free openoffice available here, both as very good.

Here is a training video which shows you how to do these exports.

Enjoy

Please let me know what you think of our minute training videos.

Gross Margin Return on Investment, (GMROI) is one of the most popular KPIs used in modern retail.

It is so well-liked that its promoters claim that it is the best KPI for retail and that by using it a shop profit can be increased dramatically.

What it measures is for every dollar invested by the retailer, what did the retailer get back for each stock item so they can determine which items are really profitable, which are average, which are poor and what is dead stock.

Here is a training video which shows you how to do the calculations.

Enjoy

We will be hosting another user meeting in Cairns on Tuesday 18th July 2017 @ 5.30pm

Nextra Marlin Coast Newsagency
Smithfield Shopping Centre
155 Kennedy Hwy & Captain Cook Highway
Smithfield QLD 4878

Everyone is invited to attend.

The agenda will be.

1. Bpay Payments

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

2. Website Integration

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

3.Magazine Reconciliation

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

4.General questions

You chance to ask any questions you have.

Reservations are essential as if attendance is less than five (5) the meeting may be canceled. So please send an email to us if you intend to come.

In retail today, it's not enough to wait for the standard marketing seasons. You have to find them.

While talking a few days ago here about a retailer who pushed Wimbledon

And picked up a few sales, it suddenly struck me today that the "Game of Thrones"

is starting up. There got to be from most of my clients a few sales there too for them if they market right as you can see there is a lot of interest in it and the market season is a lot longer than Wimbledon.

Of course, this is only the start. For example, our Jewellery POS Software shows a surge in sales during the holiday season (November-December), Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and the wedding season (typically spring and summer).

If you try this, please let me know how it goes.

What some people and I am one of them like to do is overclock our computers to get more speed out of them turning them into a cheap, high-end computer.

If you really do not know what you are doing, be careful as here is why.

Computers are built to work at a certain range, what happens is that the manufacturers of the parts are given minimum specifications, often they exceed these specifications so what some people do is attempt to take advantage of this by trying to get parts to work at a faster rate then the designer of the computer demands. The reason the manufacturer did not do it, is because they had doubts about pushing the computer components that fast.

Now if you want to do something like this, you need to be clever, often it takes a lot of time to get it going and making it stable as the results can be unpredictable although often quite satisfying.

This computer where you see the green arrow processor is being cooled with dry ice. What the overclocker is doing every so often is putting dry ice there to keep the processor cool. To keep a processor running fast, you have to keep it cool.

If you are trying to speed up point of sale software, you will get a speed increase on slow computers but not fast computer as most of the delay on the fast computers is due to harddrives and memory, which cannot be overclocked. The added advantage here is that the slow computer is not worth much anyway.

Finally a warning to anyone thinking of overclocking, it will void the warranty of your computer, and it may wreck your computer. In my experience, people are reluctant to buy any computer that has been overclocked for this reason.

With most of our clients, a lot of capital is tied up in stock and not having enough stock will negatively impact customer loyalty. So you need an adequate safety stock level.

So one of the common used methods by our clients for stock reordering is replenishment, it is not my favourite, which is using the AI in our software (the Focus figure), but it is popular. What happens is that you get the computer to order so many days of sales. Its advantage is that it is conceptually simple, makes sense and is very easy to use.

Give it a try and see how you like it.

With the recent changes with the bank interchange fees, you need to review your surcharges on credit/debit cards if you impose them. As to calculate what you can charge is not a simple matter like some costs are acceptable such as merchant service fees and terminal fees there are many others that are not acceptable. So I do suggest that you check with your EFTpos provider first and then document your findings in your diary before changing your rate in your point of sale software. I think too you should discuss with them the new situation with American Express (AMEX).

I think to help you will find this page useful.

This is a rant that came out of the GNS retail show that we recently attended and where we demonstrated the new automatic reconciliation report.

Since only we have these advanced functions people came and several emailed me to discuss it. People also went onto our Facebook page to discuss it with others.

Here is my rant, at present everyone is now working smarter. Here are some figures to prove it from of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Here is a graph of retail sales in Australia since 1982.

As you can see its going up, up and up about six times.

Here is the number of people employed in the retail sector

It went up slower until 2008, during which retail sales to 2008 went up about five times, the employment figure doubled. After 2008, the employment stabilised but retail sales kept going up.

If you do the figures based on these graphs you will see that the average worker in retail is now is about three times more productive, then in 1984. Note these figures do not include that people are working fewer hours and inflation.

Still what I found more interesting was to see what percentage of the workforce is in retail. The percentage is now dropping fast. Something certainly and dramatically happened in retail employment after 2000.

My first thought was that most of us started out in retail, but it does not look from these figures that our grandchildren will.

I think it's partly technology, which allows people to do more, cost of labour so forcing retail shops to experiment with the use of fewer employees and somewhat Australia's growing living standards as the retail sector is not where the big bucks are, nor is the work easy and people are moving into industries that have easier work and pay better.

Why do you think that traditional retailers are expanding their own on-line presence, partly as it requires far fewer workers? The labour in selling an item on-line through our web shop works out to being about 50 percent less than in the shop.

As such I see the new technologies such as the improvement in efficiency due to improved and faster stock reconciliation as a necessary for retail shops to stay alive. A lot of jobs are going in retail and there is no way that the existing processes can do them without dramatic improvement. The "good ole days" are behind us. Believe me that they were not all such "good ole days." I remember spending half a day with a coworker counting stock returns manually. While most of the memories are great of that day, the actual work was hard, difficult and very unproductive. My eyes went blurry after hours of trying to match up stock. After spending hour counting we discovered that we had different figure, and we had to go over it again.

Point of sale software must get better and we need to get better with it.

Check out the Gordon and Gotch reconciliation here only available from POS Solutions. It will save you heaps of time and money.