I wanted to give you a head up so you will not be alarmed when you come, and the website has changed. We are building now a new website; the major delay is that we are converting years of information from our old website to our fresh website.

We decided to change our website even though the old one is fine, because we believe today many people judge an organisation by a website. This is particularly true of new people who are just researching us, and an old outdated website does not give a good impression. It also does not communicate the right message to people about what we are, and that we continually work to improve. We have also added new features and soon will be putting up more content to make it even better.

The new site has been designed to be accessible, to work across a lot of different devices and screen sizes.

We know that there may be teething so it may not be right, please let us know if you find any problems.

The News section on the new site will continue to regularly publish high-quality content.

After the launch, we would like to hear from you what you think and please send us your comments and suggestions.

Stay tuned for more exciting details.

Readers here had a few questions about our Bill Payment service on our point of sale software, going by the volume it clearly is very popular. I have been told that applications for it are now five times above what they were. Clearly, its availability has attracted much attention. Partly I think it's because the margins on our Bill Payment are very competitive.

The first point I need to stress is that our integrated solution is available for Bill Payments currently. Almost all of you can have it NOW in our system. That is something, no-one else can say in our marketplace.

Now let me run through a few points.

95% for reasons, I stated earlier pay in cash and for reasons I stated in my early post here, it is unlikely they can pay online. This is unlikely to change in the medium term (5 years).

The Bill Payment service is not the same as the BPAY service in the post office. It's better. You get more commission on almost all transactions and certainly on average. You get paid instantly. Most importantly there are more billers - BPAY has in the post about 2,000 to 3,000 billers while Bill Payments have over 40,000 billers. From a marketing perspective, there are many advantages in this larger pool of billers as our clients as in many areas will have a monopoly on many products as they are the selling long tail and niche products. Also in practice retailers today make most of their profits from items that few others have. Someone needs to pay an obscure bill and they need to pay in cash, where are they going to go? They cannot go to a post office as they do not handle it. Hopefully, they will come to my client, probably once a month.

The fee schedule, we suggest now does have is a payment of $5/month because this gets you currently the best commissions.

Currently, all advertising material is free. If you want more, there are some new posters coming out soon, which I do not have a pricing on, but it's purely up to you whether you want those posters. I would say wait until the Bill Payment service proves itself in your shop before deciding whether to get them. The most important are signs that shows to your customers that you have Bill Pay, and those signs are free.

Some people asked me what is the number of customers a shop are getting on our Bill Payment service. Looking at the figures, although it is a hard figure to qualify, I would say most shops fall into a range between 50 and 300 transactions, revenue you can expect would be between $25 and $150 a month plus whatever else they buy in your shop. However, many of you will do much more than that? How much would say Facebook charge you to get those numbers of people into your shop who may buy nothing?

Although the bills are paid the same day, your bank account is swept the next day, which gives you the time to get the money into the bank.

There are no lock in contracts. If say the VANA system starts, which is quite a while from now and only open to a small percentage of our clients and you decide, for any reason, you want to stop ours and go on their scheme, you can do so. You are not locked in.

Want to know more give us a call.

Your point of sale system does use quite a lot of power, and so it does substantially add to the electricity bill. If you are thinking of saving on your electricity bills, then you should look at it.

There are several things you can reduce power consumption of your pos system.

1) Maybe you do not need all the computers and equipment on, all the time. To save power, consider turning off all the equipment that you don’t need. One item, in particular, to watch is laser printers, which consume a lot of power even if not in use. Have if possible one electric switch to turn off all the equipment at night so you do not accidentally leave say a printer on overnight.

2) Look at the equipment, most current equipment is more energy efficient, for example, an LCD monitors uses much less power, and I think looks better. Consider upgrading the old equipment and when you are looking to buy more modern equipment ask about its power consumption.

3) It is a good idea to set the computer to turn off the screen after a few minutes of use to save power. Check your power management plans in your computer.

4) While on the power management plans consider using the computer's automatic Sleep mode. Just make sure that these computers that you are setting for sleep are not being used for automatic backup and/or running services like Xchangeit. If so what you may consider is doing all of this on one computer so you only need one to remain on. Sleep will reduce the power consumption slightly, and the computer will restart in seconds if required. It is ideal for computer that you use off and on during the day.

If you want to go on further then Hibernation mode is something you can also consider if you are using computers that will in the course of a day will not be needed for long periods but this mode can be messy, so you will need to experiment first on how it goes. I have noticed that some peripheral equipment have problems if a computer using them wakes up from hibernation.

With these simple ideas, you should be able to save about $300/year on each computer.

One very successful service that our clients have integrated into our POS software is bill payment. Currently a good client of our using this bill payment system does about 10 to 20 transactions a day.

And there is good news.

Recently, there has been a change to the commission structure which does away with the merchant account fee. From now on, there will be no cost to our clients to switch on bill payments and so they will be able to offer their clients bill pay facilities

So from the merchants' point of view

- It cost nothing to set up or run the bill payment
- The Training Time for the Bill Payment system is minimal.
- It has no impact on the space on the shop.
- It requires no special equipment as it used the point-of-sale equipment.
-It also now comes with advertising material and store signs too all for free.

The outlook for bill payment services

For the next five years with our clients we see bill payments as a growth industry. Currently an average Australia Post outlets did last year from figures I saw about 200/day. Even if you consider that its dropping by 2% a year, that is still a lot of people in the medium term, as if you consider that that in five year assuming a 2% as year fall you still have 180 people a day. So there is definitely room to grow for our clients.

In this five year term, little we see changing in that about 27% of the Australian population has limited access to many financial resources, such as credit cards and bank accounts. 15% do not have internet asccess. Plus there are many people who are not technically savvy or literate in English and they find paying online too difficult. As such these people prefer to walk into a shop and pay their bills in cash. Plus there are also the people that have some bills that needs to be paid on a certain date and for some reason these people, need to be 110% sure that the payment went through on that date and they have a receipt in their hand to prove it.

Other benefits

There are also a number of immediate benefits of offering such a service.

-Additional revenue stream.
-You will get increased traffic to your shop with new customers who never came before.
-More repeat customers as there are over 4000 different accounts on Bill Payment and beside them now having as such over 4,000 reasons to come to your shop, they also need to come often many times a month to pay them.

Want to know more please contact us.

Next week on the March 8 at 1:00pm with our free training webinar we are going to take you though some tips and tricks for keeping your computer running pos system smoothly.

While your computers that run point of sale software is not part of our standard support package. we do endeavour to help you understand as much as possible about them, and the windows platform that they run on. So we will take a look at backups, operating systems, shortcuts for saving time and much more.

If you have any questions about windows before the event and/or while watching you can ask them via the comments here or on the video.

For details click here

One common problem we get is that people ring up about issues they have with their receipt printer. Since the cash draw works from the receipt printer, if the receipt printer does not work, then the POS system does not work either on that computer.

Firstly, check that there is enough paper, that everything is closed. If all this looks okay, next switch the receipt printer off, wait say 10 seconds and afterwards switch it back on again. If this does not fix the problem, then check the cables are firmly in. Normally, there are three cables one goes in the cash drawer. The next is for the power. The other goes to the computer. I find taking them off and putting them back it, often helps. After you do this try turning the receipt print off and afterwards on again. Now if it still does not work, now give us a call.

I was reading an article here about how Coles and Woolworths are now cutting brands and ranges in the face of the success of Aldi whose ranges are much smaller. It's not only Aldi; I have seen Australia Post concentrate on a large number of categories but small ranges in each. Unlike some people, they do not stock fifty types of paper clips.

The problem is customers want to feel in control over the buying process. They do not want to be pushed into a single choice but want to select the option that works best for them. The problem is people are coming to you with a problem; they want a solution. Like these people in the photo, they want a shampoo, if you offer them too many choices in a category, this decision making becomes difficult and complicated, next they get confused and often, then prefer not to make a choice, so they don't buy.

As a general rule in any category, three choices is perfect, four and five are fine for anything over six, is starting to get risky.

There are other advantages too, such as simplifying your stock control and better buying prices that you will benefit by reducing your range.

PS One trick that you may want to consider that is very successful is having one choice outrageously expensive. This high price will make the other choices look more affordable.

If you want to read up more on this
To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple
Too Many Choices: A Problem That Can Paralyze

On Monday, we had a meeting with XChangeIT. The problem is that we have identified that anyone with a pos system who has subagents cannot get to their gold standard because of what we believe are flaws in the Gordan and Gotch system. It is due to a technical point that no-one has apparently ever thought about. Hopefully, we should have a resolution soon. The situation of our clients with subagents not being able to get a gold standard, is of major concern to us.

We will soon be moving our webinar system for our point-of-sale system to the new Facebook Live system.

There are several reasons why we have decided to switch.

Facebook Live is available to everyone!

This is the main reason, almost all our clients are set up already with Facebook. Currently before the webinar starts we have to set people who have never attended a webinar user meeting up. We actually have to run in parallel. We have one person taking it and a second person doing damage control for problems.

We have found it for the users incredibly easy to use!

As most people know Facebook as they are using it, we find that they have few problems using it. In the past, we have always had to have someone doing some coaching on some feature of the webinar software.

You can see that too as people because they are used to Facebook, are relating much more than our previous webinar software.

Notifications are sent by Facebook automatically.

Once you like our page, Facebook handles the notifications, makes it easy for our clients, to get informed

It works on anything.

Our clients can watch it on their mobile, iPad, computer, whatever

There is a lot of flexibility.

If we require privacy. we can do a private meeting.

Finally the future

We think technology like Facebook Live is the future and as a company we pride ourselves for being a market leader and Facebook Live we see as part of our strategy to continue to stay ahead of the competition.

Presenting today's webinar on how to set up an online store. If you are interested in this sort of technology or just want to findout more, please click here.

Cloudflare it has been recently claimed has suffered a large security breach, and a number of major sites were affected such as Uber, Fitbit, OkCupid, etc. and we too. We use Cloudflare ironically as a security layer. Now some have started to spread nasty rumours about our point of sale site because some people like to do that about us a lot. Let me explain why I really doubt anyone needs to worry about us.

1) With this data breach, it is not yet clear that any hack ever happened. What we know is that it might have happened. It is very theoretical at the moment. It is a maybe hack. Say you left your security code for the shop on a sheet of paper at work. Did anyone read it, did anyone write them down, did anyone know about it and did anyone realise its significance? This is the situation with this hack.

2) Cloudflare was only an extra layer for extra protection, not our primary defence. Even if the Cloudflare layer was broken, a hacker would not get into anything. An example above might say that a person above now has your security codes for the shop, they still need a key to get in. At no stage did we give the key. Unlike many others, as recent events have shown who just use standard software, so get frequently hacked we are very careful about security here so we have never had a hack, touch wood!

3) Cloudflare is now contacting sites that they believe are affected by this possible hack, and we have not been contacted, suggesting that they think we are probably not affected.

4) We have only used cloudflare for a very short time, for much of the period in question with this data breach our website was not using cloudflare.

However, just in case, every user on our site has received from me an email about the situation, and we are now enforcing a forced password reset campaign so any user who wants to continue using our site as before must reset their passwords

Anyone wants to talk about it more, anyone wants to discuss further, I am more than happy to do so.

These are the average speeds of EFTPOS in our point-of-sale system by type and day of the week. The lower the bar, the faster it is. The times are listed in thousands of a second, and as you can see with an ethernet connection, we are doing an acceptance now in just over a second. What is interesting is that the days of the week made very little difference. Using a network (light blue) it's a bit faster on Thursday, and I have no idea why but if you look on the slowest day which is Tuesday, you will see that the speed difference is irrelevant as who would in practice notice about 0.05 of a second? 

What also is good is that even with the slower WIFI connection (see dark blue), EFTPOS it is being done in about a 1.3 seconds. Even the older orange units are between 1.4 and 1.8 seconds. Much of the slowness with the WIFI is because of the merchants' router and the Internet traffic in the location, not the EFTPOS. A good way of speeding up the EFTPOS, if this 0.2 of a second is too much would be an upgraded EFTPOS unit, put on a better router and leave the rest of the traffic to the existing router.

This was quite an improvement over last year, as you can see here.

The speed of EFTPOS with tyro that we now have recently dramatically increased overall.

I was at a client's site today and saw their front computer where the point of sale is and see how it looked.

It's one thing to keep on their desktops a few important files and folders, but this is very confusing at a spot where you need everything to be as simple as possible. Please do not worry if it looks boring, its suppose to look like that.

On the point-of-sale system, I suggest that you keep it as simple as possible, with as few items as possible on the desktop as all you are going to do is confuse people. If you need more on the screen, create folders and as many of the programs as possible into them so clearing up the main screen. If that is not good enough, and you really want a better way of cleaning up the screen, I suggest you look at something like Fences.

It's a good question, what exactly in your shop, is stopping you from selling more. The more information you have the better you will be able to find out why.

One method used is traffic counting. Now if you think about it, the only real information, you get other, then gut feel is what your pos software tells you, and that information is purely what happened at the end of the sales process.

This is a result of several different factors.

1) How many people walked past your shop?

2) How many came into your shop?

3) How many purchased?

There is a lot that happens from step (1) to (3) and the only way you are going to know these figures is using a traffic counting software like ours. The rewards of doing these calculations are not huge as overall it is said to increase turnover by a few percent, still say for every turnover of a $1 million, with margins of 30%, by doing it you will be making about $6,000. Which is more than enough to pay for the system plus give you far more control over your business.

Let’s firstly, start off with the theory what we see if we start at the beginning of the sale process and of course every shop and every location is different but say following the steps above.

(1) Out of 100 people that walked past your shop.

(2) 5 visited your shop, and 95 walked past (95%).

(3) 1 purchased something, and 4 walked out buying nothing. (80%). We call this the sales conversion rate and one of the most important measurements retailers need to know is what is the best staff ratio to visitors.

This would be a very good set of figures.

Now the first point with traffic counting, the most important figure is the visitor ratio. Say, for example, with the above analysis instead of 5% coming into the shop, 6% came into the shop. Now keeping everything the same,

(1) Out of 100 people that walked past your shop.

(2) 6 visited your shop, and 94 walked past.

(3) 1.2 purchased something, and 4.8 walked out buying nothing.

A one-percent increase in visit rates has produced 20% more sales.

However, there is much more.

Say the shopping centre suddenly saw a massive increase in people coming. Something like this did happen this Christmas with many of the centres reporting over 30% increase in traffic.

(1) Now say you measured 130 people, 30% more.

(2) 5 came into your shop.

What you would know is that something you did very wrong as what these extra people wanted you were not supplying. Maybe you are a destination shop like a chemist, and people are only coming for their prescriptions. Interestingly though even then chemist are some of the biggest users of traffic analysis we have.

Now say on the other hand.

(1) Now say you measured 130 people, 30% more.

(2) 10 came into your shop.

Something went well here. What?

Now say you had.

(2) 50 come into the shop.

(3) 5 purchased something.

You would know something was wrong because your conversion rate is so low. Maybe you did not have enough staff that day, and your staff could not handle the extra traffic. That is why traffic analysis is very useful for in roistering.

Our traffic counting system over time will give you simple and actionable insights and providing you with real information for your decision making.

If you are thinking of marketing your retail shop online using social media such as Facebook, what you will need is a good camera and a decent graphic designer software.
 

As you will need to produce pictures like this regularly.

The camera is not a problem as most of the newer mobile phones can currently produce images so well that today several renowned photographers almost exclusively use smartphones, so it should be good enough.

A decent graphic design software will take some learning. There are some quite good apps available from the smartphones. One I like is quite simple to use Snapseed which is free takes about an hour to master and it does a decent job. The Rolls-Royce is photoshop which has plans starting from $12/month. It does a brilliant job but does require about a week of solid work to learn.

For most of my people, I would imagine that Snapseed is good enough. If asked I would suggest that you use something like it for a while, and if you feel you need something better at least you have an idea of what you need. You get quite a lot of options, so it would be worthwhile experimenting as you go along. For example, if someone sends you a Photoshop design, you can open PSD file online easily without needing to buy the software. Once you do this you are on the way to being a graphic designer for your shop.

The image here, by the way, took me less than three minutes to make. Once you know what you are doing it, does not take long.

The answer to the question of what is the best gift card to sell in your shop is your own giftcard and no matter what shop you have big or small you most likely will benefit from carrying them in your shop.Here are some facts, Australians love these giftcards astheir recipients can pick their own gift. I know from personal experience. I could not figure out what tobuy mynephew recently soI brought him a $50 gift voucher and gave it to him. Then I thought that "Its nolonger myproblem what he wants its his problem." We buy giftcards in Australia about 2 billion dollars a year. The person who gets a giftcard when they redeem it typically spend 38 percent over the face value of their card.

Plus if they have one of your giftcards, they are much more likely to come into your shop. On top of that, about 8% of giftcards that are sold are not redeemed which if you think about it, is to the retailer a 100% margin.

If you add it up, say you sold a $100 gift voucher with a typical margin of 30% for items purchased with your giftcards. Your profit would be

Not redeemed (8%) = $8.00

Goods purchased = $92 x (1+38% that people pay over the face value redeemed) = $126.96

The margin on these goods is 30% here so that is $126.96 x 30%= $38.09

So your profit is $8 (not redeemed) + $38.09 (item profit) = $46.09

Here is a table which I created based on a range of margins for you to review based on a $100 gift voucher.

As you can see its quite impressive.

Now another use is that if you are giving a gift, donation or reward in your VIP club instead of discount which is cash, consider giving them a giftcard beside gaining a customer it costs less.

Say your margin on items purchased on a giftcard again is 30%, you gave a giftcard say of $25.

Not redeemed (8%) = $2.00

Goods purchased with the giftcard = -$23

Cost to retailer = -$23 x (1-30%)= -$16.10

Extra good purchased = $23.00 x 38% = $8.74

The margin on these goods is 30% here so that is $8.74 x 30%= 3.3212

So your cost here is -$16.10 + $3.3212 (profit on extra items) = -$12.78

Almost half of the gift.

Here is a table which I created based on a range of margins for you to review based on a $100 reward card

As you can see its also quite impressive.

If you aren’t offering giftcards in your shop, you could be missing out on a lot of sales and costs.

With our point of sale system, its easy for you to sell your own gift cards. There is a function on the main menu "Gift Vouchers", press a few buttons and out it prints a gift voucher.

Nor is it hard to advertise, simply put in the shelf that are other peoples giftcards, a big sign for your own.

The most popular gift card amounts are $25 followed by $50.

Product bundling or group sell is probably the second most common marketing system in retail today. The wikipedia has an article on it here.

You can find it in our software in stock pricing under group sell.

What you are doing is grouping certain stock items together, to sell them as a group. Here are some typical scenarios, which can show you the power of this concept.

1) Make a group with a slow-moving item that few want, add it to a fast-moving item and try to sell them together. Often people wanting that fast item, will grab the pack for a little more.

2) Put several slow moving items together at a reduced price and hope that someone wants them.

3) Put many of the same items together and make a bundle for people that want large quantities.

4) Putting several items together to up sell e.g. most people in a coffee shop only want a coffee, make a special item a cake and a small coffee and people tend to order it, so giving the coffee shop owner overall a better sale.

5) Create a pack for people that makes a solution for people so making it easy for them to buy e.g. a set of paint brushes, canvas, etc. for people thinking of doing some painting. This works great with kids.

I do suggest that you look through the options available in our software as you will find there is much you can do with it. Of course as with all business strategies, you will need to experiment in your particular shop.

Over the years with my clients, group selling has proven to being the most successful method of getting rid of unwanted stock without excessive discounting.

Our point of sale software is fast, fastest in our marketspace but now its even faster as we have gone through it, streamlined the code and put in improvements from Windows 10 making it faster still. It uses the latest technology in page switching so you can go through different screens even faster.

This latest patch is purely for speed.

Did you have the right stock for the football starting now?

Today one of my clients called me up and told me that by using the same methods that I spoke about here on Valentine's Day they discovered that they had missed this year start of the football season. So they rang up to thank me. Lovely, I should get more telephone calls like that.

If you look at google trends and put in football and AFL for Australia over the past five years, and compared it for reference with Valentine's day you will see this graph. Apologies to people in NSW for missing them, but I am a Mexican.

As you can see although interest in Valentine's day, this year was unusually high, generally AFL is much bigger and it last longer.

However, they only picked it up by running the reports on our system that I spoke about earlier. Like the people that rung me, if you have done nothing, you need to move now.

Note its a excellent idea to go through your diary and make for your shop a marketing calendar, if you have not got a marketing calendar yet, or you just want to check that you have not missed anything a good place to start is here.

One point that divides my clients are those who use point of sale data systematically and those that do not and are purely gut-driven.

Both are important but overtime a business that uses data when making decisions will win. Simple they have more information, so their decision making will be better as the information will help them make smarter decisions in their business.

With our system, you have 100s of reports, if you want more you can use excel to produce a limitless number of reports personalised to you. I find just doodling on excel extremely enlightening. If you want more you can throw this data into an automated data mining program and see what insights an AI can produce.

Using this with data you can home in rapidly on specific issues, so use your POS software to dig into your sales data so you can make more reliable decisions.

Here is one tip that a major Coles buyer told me, at any time he wanted 12 new items on the shelf. When I said to him, you have 100s of items on the shelf now, is 12 enough, he replied yes, whether I have 100, 1000 or just 10, I want 12 new items to experiment with at all times. He does not work in the shop, he has no gut feel from the shop floor, he works only by data. Now how many new items do you have *NOW* in your shop?