A solid loyalty program has been proven to increase sales and drive customer retention. So it is interesting for retailers to see what the best are doing.

Roy Morgan research has released its latest research here.

71% of the Australian population are members of at least one rewards program. The most popular rewards program is Woolworths Rewards, which has 49% of all Australians 14 or over of which 78.2% of all shoppers in Woolworths/Safeway use it.

This rewards program is very simple and easy to use. For every dollar you buy, you get one point, when you get 2,000 points, you get a $10 discount on your next shopping trip. Based on a gross margin of 30%, it works out to about 1.2% cost/sales assuming that all of these points are used, which is within the industry average of what the cost ratio should be of a rewards program. As a rule, most reward programs are looking for about 30% of all customers to join although I have seen figures deemed acceptable as low as 10% acceptable.

This program is very easy to set up with our software and it seamlessly integrates into our point-of-sale system.

Most importantly it gives you a user base to market too and our POS system has a large section for doing such loyalty marketing which you will find in register reports marked with a red arrow.

Once you click on it, you will see the following.

Now you can select the special categories you can set up, for example, here it is lotto mail outs, Facebook's clients etc.

Now you can compose say an email to these people advising people on lotto mailouts if say a big draw is going to be held this week. Actually, today would be a good day to have sent out a lotto mailout as a black moon is coming and its an important sign astrologically.

The cost to you is nothing, and if anyone comes in, it has paid.

This gives a highly detailed report including this.

Now in trying to track down an incorrect GST amount divide the GST period into smaller units say months and check each month separately, do not worry about the time, our software is very fast and it will only take a moment, then divide a suspicious month into two and check each of these, afterwards the one that looks wrong divide into two and so on, until you find the day where the mistake is, then I check the transactions on that day.

For the last few days, people have been complaining of the size of the latest window updates coming down also many have once its loaded been having problems with Windows 10 updates as it knocking out receipt and barcode printer. So our support bay been busy fixing up printer problems over the past week. One point that I do wish is that Microsoft stop releasing updates over the week-end; it really hit hard our after hour and weekend support staff.

Not what is really annoying is that much of what is new in the latest update will be I am sure of minor use to most of my clients. Still once you load the update you may want to try Cortana, which is Microsoft digital personal assistant, although I think its too new to be much use in a commercial setting. Still she is a lot of fun, ask her to tell you a joke, what weather is like, who is going to win the grand final, etc.

One feature that saves our clients a lot of time is its ability to automatically update paper price changes, add bumper editions, and paper stops so they do not need to process the changes manually. This saves a lot of time.

So far these are the updates we have planned for newsagents now.

[2016-10-02]: The Monday to Friday edition of the Age will change from $2.50 to $2.80 GST inclusive from Monday 3rd of October[2016-10-07]: The Saturday edition of the Age will change from $3.50 to $3.80 GST inclusive from Saturday 8th of October[2016-10-08]: The Sunday edition of the Age will change from $3.00 to $3.30 GST inclusive from Sunday 9th of October[2016-10-02]: The Monday to Friday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $2.50 to $2.80 GST inclusive from Monday 3rd of October[2016-10-07]: The Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $3.50 to $3.80 GST inclusive from Saturday 8th of October[2016-10-08]: The Sunday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $3.00 to $3.30 GST inclusive from Sunday 9th of October

Plus we know there is special pricing for fnnsw but have not heard confirmation yet so that one maybe needed to be done manually.

This is all on script 2391, that gives you an idea of just how many changes we are automatically updating, and if you conside that it takes just a minute (which is for many people very conservative) to do each one manually you get an idea of precisely how much time using our software can save you as this one script alone is a saving of at least six minutes.

Of course if you decide you do not want to subscribe to the automated updates, all you need to do is double-click on the feature you do not want and untick the option.

Clearly electronic products sell well and there are heaps of them but there is always a *but* as I will show.

With our clients its dominated by two big player's Touch and ePay and even before the recent problems that we had with ePay, Touch is by far the biggest and growing rapidly. The main reason I think is because Touch seems to be more active in the marketplace, and they have a better range. Range is everything here. If people want an ABC voucher, and you do not have it, then they are most likely to go elsewhere, that is why people tend to have touch, they may not have anything else, but they will have touch because they need the range.

Here is a graph of ePay sales over the last eight quarters done about three months ago, before they had all this problems and its fallen since then again.

Conversely, here is a graph of Touch sales in our client base.

Every year sales are going up about $100,000.

We are debating now whether it's even worth supporting ePay much longer.

When looking at it from an individual shop perspective, one problem I do have is that as I am dealing with averages, some only use Touch to buy discounts for what they and their family personally already use and do not bother to market it, which mucks up the figures.

Still I can only look at what I have.

Overall the number of electronic products sold has gone up. Overall every month, our clients are increasing their sales of electronic products by over 200.

The value of the unit price has gone up too by about a $1 each year.

The problem is that the margins have been falling.

When I looked at it per shop, what I found is despite an increase in sales both in quantity and unit price, the profit per shop is falling by about $15 a year, although if you look at the recent figures, it does look like it is going now steady.

The problem in Australia is that this market is dominated by a few large players, who do not see the retailer as important in the sale process other then supplying an outlet.

Still that is not the way to look at it, looking at this graph you can see the number of items sold is about 110 a month or about 4 a day in an average shop.

So the average retailer for simply adding a service with our software and putting a sign up on the wall so is getting about four people a day coming into their shop and hopefully buying more stuff in the shop and getting paid about $140 a month which is clearly why people are delighted with Touch. You can see that from the number putting Touch into their stores, which has been increasing every month. Currently, we are putting Touch service into our clients at a rate of about two to three shops every month.

Overall though I think you can say this, it does pay its own way and there is nothing wrong with an extra 1a0 people in the shop every month, but it's not a game changer. It certainly worth getting before summer hits.

If you want to know more, please let us know. As you can see we have heaps of data.

You can rapidity increase your scanning of barcodes at the register. Our scanners are very good, and they are designed to look for the barcode. This they do much faster than a person. So rather than look for the barcode and aim the scanner, I suggest that you swipe the item in a long arch. If its there the scanner will find the barcode and scan it in less time than you would take to examine the item, find the barcode and scan that spot. If it does not find it, then you have to start looking.

Once you look into your dead stock, you will find it easy to collect dead stock. For example, in a department that is selling well, large amounts of dead stock can collect in the example I am going to quote here the shop had $80,000 worth of dead stock in the shop.
Here it was an accidental problem that as some stock did not sell, it collected but sometimes I have seen it as deliberate policy from a supplier. Its true suppliers generally want their customers to move as much stock as possible so they can sell more but sometimes they have to sell what they have, and if it's dead stock, then so be it as they have to move that dead stock too. If not watched the amount of dead stock can be huge.

That is why it is important to identify these inefficiencies and drill down on these points. When you have robust stock management like ours, you can put in place a solid stock management practice that can warn you about buying and stocking these slow moving items and help you clear out the space out for something that sells.

This is one report to use.

Go to Register reports > Stock > Slow moving Stock lines

Now call it up here

I am going to do it by department but for many shops it does work better by suppliers. One point of our retail software, it is your choice. Here I asked for anything that I had sold less then $100 in a year and am now stocking something.

What I got out of this report was pages of stock items which added up to over $80,000 of worthless stock much in this department.

This is just one report in our point of sale software that can help you expand your business and grow.

Everyone needs speed. It is vital at the point of sale counter in my experience in any retail business, for example, people do walk out if they cannot get served fast.

Here I will try to explain some of the concepts to improve and how you can gain some significant speed increases with hardware now with no or reasonable costs.

Here is what the Windows Task Manager shows you can get your up bu going Cntrl-Alt-Delete at the keyboard and selecting Task manager.

On the top left you will see a section called CPU usage. This shows the overall amount that the computer is actually processing.

A) Put the more powerful computer as your main computer. In a network once you do this all the other computers should benefit too. Often a major speed increase can be achieved by simply moving the most powerful computer to be the main computer. We call this playing "musical chairs", when we shuffle around the computers in a shop so the most critical ones that need the speed are the best computers in the shop.

However, it's never as simple as that. On the diagram above you will see the CPU Usage history and what you will notice is that there are four boxes. That is because this machine has four cores. Cores should be though of as four separate computers. What the computer manufacturer is trying to do is get more speed by giving you more computers. The problem is that often one core cannot be used until another core has finished its task. Say, for example, I want to do the following.

1) Make a list

2) Go to a supermarket

3) Buy goods

4) Report back with the goods

Now until I do (1), I cannot do (2), until I do (2), I cannot do (3) and so on. In the meantime, you are just waiting at (4). Each of these items could be called a thread and there are lots of them. Here on the diagram above you can see there are 1393 threads running.

So what happens is we can all get frustrated because most of the capacity is just sitting there idle waiting for others. It is the same with computers.

B) Get a point of sale software package that can balance the load so more can be done at once. We call this multi-thread, and our software does it very well as it uses Microsoft SQL, which does this naturally. That is why often some software runs faster on the same computer then others.

However, like a person the more it holds in memory often the less work is required. If you can remember more things, then me, you will refer to your list less than me. You would be faster because you are not continiously referring to the list. This memory we call RAM. See the diagram above in the section called memory. The RAM is the main memory. The more memory a computer has, generally the faster it goes. This is particularly important as you are running today's point of software system, which are large, the computer just cannot hold it all. By increasing the RAM you give it more memory so it can hold more.

C) This often the cheapest and quickest way of speeding your system. Increase your RAM in the main computer. Most competent engineers can do it in just a few minutes with no changes.

Lastly, the harddrives are the biggest bottle neck for speed in our computers. For a small cost, you will get a terrific speed increase by switching to the newer SSD drives, particularly on your main computer.

SSD drives beside being a lot faster are more reliable.

D) Upgrade to a SSD drive.

Speed is vital in retail, particularly at the point of sale. This will help you get there, and if you want to know more. please let us know.

What is happening is that people are coming into your shop wanting to buy a certain product, and you do not have it?

Here would be a typical sale of products in a shop in order of sale quantity.

The stuff in blue everyone has that is the 70% of sales, the stuff in grey marked with a green arrow which makes up about 30% of sales, but it has more items.

Generally, it's because it is not worth stocking that you do not have it and these products are part of what we call the long tail.

Yet its not as simple as that, the interesting point is if you are trying to get new customers is that the people who are looking for items in grey do most of the searching, in fact, about 80% of the searches according to research by google. The people in the grey zone are looking.

So in modern retail it is considered that range is everything here as if people want an ABC voucher, and you do not have it, then they likely will go elsewhere to get it.

Here is a graph of the average speed of our EFTpos from when the amount is authorised to when acceptance comes broken down by types and by days.

Monday is the fastest but Wednesday the slowest the difference is only about 3% or about 0.03 of a second. No-one would even notice such a difference.

What is important is you can see its fast. Using what we recommend a latest Yomani XR unit on a standard ethernet our clients are doing an EFTpos transaction in about 1.1 seconds. I would be pleased for you to compare these times to what you are getting. For absolute "breakneck" speeds, we recommend this as the way to go.

WIFI is the slowest as you can see, which is part of the reason we do not recommend it to our clients, if you want mobility, a 3G is the way to go. It's about 1.4 seconds, still faster than almost everything else.

If you are interested in doing EFTpos as these "breakneck" speeds, please let us know.

Years ago, I remember getting really excited, rushing to work and announcing to everyone that I finally figured out how to get our system to send an SMS at a decent price. We already knew of people that used SMS for business for marketing, but we had worked out places where SMS could be used in our marketspace not only for marketing but also the administration such as in the rostering system. What I did was ring up people I knew, hit google, got on the phone to many companies, spoke with many people until I had found a company that was prepared to take a chance with us on a group deal that was reasonable. It was 10c an SMS with a promise that if we could get a large number on board, it would be cheaper still. They also were prepared to give us free coupons for my clients to try it out free. I was really excited; this was going to be right. However, what I did not realise was just how difficult it was to get our system to talk to them, and so it took heaps of work, but we did it. None of our competitors ended out able to do it with them, so they went off with easier systems to use but which were dearer systems. I, however, wanted our clients to have a really good system at a very economical price. It worked, and our clients went on an SMS frenzy.

SMS has several advantages over email and Apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber.

• Almost everyone reads SMS almost immediately, often within seconds while email and apps varied a lot. I read personal emails once a day and apps like Facebook messenger twice a day.
• Almost all SMSs get read. This is not true for email and many of the apps.
• SMS is available almost everywhere. Email and apps tend often to work only with WIFI.

However, the big problem is even if one accepts that 10 cents an SMS reasonable, its more then zero for email and apps. As well as that people do not like often commercial SMSs. They consider it spam. So over time, most of our clients have been switched to emailing or using apps. Plus I think most people think of it as obsolete technology, for example on my mobile plan, I get plenty of free SMS a month which I use only a few as if I want to message someone I tend to use Facebook messenger or if it longer, or I do not know them that well, I use email. The main advantage for SMSs for me is that I can schedule SMSs so late at night. I have a great idea; I can schedule the SMS to be sent at 9:00am or its something that I need an instant messenger system.

As such the SMS part of our system, although still available with even a better offer now which includes three free SMSs a day is rarely used.

Here are some pictures from the Tyro nextGen Banking Summit which I attended.

Reader here will be happy to learn that POS Solutions, was especially noted in the speeches as being the first software company to integrate into their banking system. We are actually a foundation partner of Tyro.

One point that came out in the summit is that small and medium-size businesses is Australia has generally better technology then large business and that is actually large business which is holding SMB back.

By far, the most popular accountancy system in our marketspace is MYOB. Having worked extensively with it, I have gained much respect for it as an accountancy programme. One function they have that I really like is the "smart bills", where a person can drop an image of an invoice into MYOB and it can often read all the information even if the invoice does not have an ABN number.

Normally, the problem found is that integrating your point-of-sale systems with your back-office accounting systems like MYOB can be a lot of work but there is an inbuilt solution available free to our clients within our point-of-sale system. It is an interface, which allows you directly to interface into MYOB by sending the revenue and expenses that you select for export into the relevant general ledger codes in MYOB automatically or manually if you prefer.

This of course saves our clients time, reduces errors and is quicker.

Once setup all you need to do is simply select the dates and go.

Many of you have been replacing your cabled keyboards with wireless keyboards. These are regular keyboards that are not connected to your computer by any cables but use either radio or infrared to connect to your computer.

There are many advantages for a wireless keyboard, as you can you put your keyboard in the most convenient location without having to worry about the cord, you can move your keyboard around and at night store it away. During the day, it is very handy when doing say stock control with your POS software to be able to pick up the keyboard, walk to a heavy box 10 metres away and put in there your information.

There are some problems though that come about, they tend to be slower in use. People who type fast often complain, some areas tend to have problems as there is too much interference, and as they use batteries, they stop working when the battery goes flat and that always causes a problem until someone realises that the battery gone.

There is now, however another big problem and that is security. Most of them, in particular, the older ones do not have encryption so a simply device; a keySniffer can intercept and read what you have entered on your keyboard. Which can be anything including a passwords or credit card information. Which presents a problem with the most popular wireless keyboard, the K400, which is the old model that has been replaced overseas but is still very popular in Australia, which is not surprisingly as I think it's a great keyboard.

Here is a list of wireless keyboards affected.

For those interested in the technical issues, here is a youtube explaining in detail. The problem for those that the patch is explained at 30min38s of this video. This suggests to me that logitech response here is dubious but please make your own mind up.

We contacted logitech about this in July of this year, when we first were made aware of the problem and got no response from them.

So our advice now, is if you use a wireless keyboard at work, make sure it uses encryption.

We all have to make purchasing decisions every day and what we buy will have dramatic consequence for our business. It is particularly hard if we are dealing with new products that we have little idea of what they will do and there no formula for making the right decision. The best we can do is to try to get as many different perspectives as possible and then choose a course of action that seems reasonable. Here are some sites that may be able to help you decide.

The first site, I recommend is

In Amazon, you will find a best seller's list here.

You can break it down to department and category and see what are the best sellers in that group of stock items. You will also find there some other interesting list of similar products, including new and gift. Looking through the lists, I am sure it will give you some ideas where the market is moving.

The next site is eBay. Enter the category, once they are up, on the left-hand side, you will see a button called sold listings, if you click on that you will show you when and how many were sold on eBay and what price people are paying for it there. This I am sure will give you a lot of ideas too. Consider the delivery fee carefully as an item that sells well at $19 with a week delivery at a fee of $20, now consider that you could sell it for as you can also offer instant inspection, hands on advice and delivery.

Finally, the last site is will discuss is alibaba

Enter in the category and sort by "Most Orders." I am sure you will get lots of ideas here too plus some pretty good prices.

At this point, some market research by going into a shop that sells similar products would be in order. Once you get a feel, you may be able to make an informed decision.

One of my clients, noting that in his medium size shopping center no-one was selling seriously mobile cases but they were in the major centres thought that he could do something better than magaziness. So after looking at the Australian wholesales he made a decision to bypass the Australian distributors by buying direct from China, cases that were selling well on ebay and amazon. He now sells quite a lot of these cases and has replaced much of his magazines with cases.

Here are some tips when you are looking to purchase a receipt printer for your point of sale system.

Firstly, remember that a receipt printer should last you for many years.

I would say get a brand with local support, at least Australian support. If something goes wrong, it's a great help to be able to call someone. Even if someone in the store knows that receipt printer well, who says that this person will be available in a few years' time.

Then check the print quality – that is something everyone will notice. If nothing else a lousy receipt sends a bad message to your client about you.
I have very sensitive ears, so I will check how noisy the printer is, if it's too vocal this is something I do not want to live with for next few years. Furthermore, this can get you in trouble is one of your people has tinnitus.
If I like it then, what I would ask is to see is the documentation in the manual, some of the manuals in Chinglish (Chinese/English) are impossible to understand while some manuals are just not good enough. Even if the vender offers to install the receipt printer for you, which is great but that receipt printer will probably in its lifetime will go through a few installations and after the first time, you are on your own so you will need the manual.

If you want to use this receipt printer for a range of software, please check with the suppliers of these software packages. I have noticed that a receipt printer can be very much hit-and-miss on software, and it can be very frustrating to have a receipt printer that doesn't work with only some of your system.

I prefer receipt printers that use cable as we have had problems with receipt printers over a network and with the newer range of receipt printers that use WIFI instead of cables, I can predict a lot more such problems, particularly if you are in a shopping centre.

If you are in an area that has bad power, consider a UPS because otherwise the receipt printer will often get a "red flashing light" and worse switches off in the middle of printing.

Finally be prepared for some headaches regarding the setup. You are going to do the installation yourself, I suggest that you use the installer and not let your computer automatically select the correct driver so make sure you get an install CD and/or the manufacturers download location.

Like always if you need help gives us a call...

Reader here will I am sure be happy to learn that POS Solutions, was awarded in the Best Point of Sale System in Australia with the status of a leader by coming in third in Australia.

Number one is a credit card processing service and number two is Revel Systems which is a point-of-sale system used primarily in restaurants and bars. Nether of which I consider to being in our marketplace.

What made me feel particularly good was we were the only Australian company to get into the status of a leader as the other two are USA companies.

In our marketspace, clearly we are seen as the best.

I am sure part of the reason we won the status of a leader was because the ease of use of our systems, the enormous flexibility our users have both in hardware and setup, our backend which includes features like CRM, stock control and accounting, our specific industry tools like XChangeIT, our online ordering, E-commerce integration with websites, our loyalty and VIP programs, our merchant services, the many third-party integrations possible like Microsoft office, evernotes, GannttProject and Tableau, our reporting and analytics, data mining and above all our programming team and our customer service.

Most of us gave up on Windows XP ages ago, but if you are still running it on your POS System, I think its time to upgrade. One of my competitors has recently started to take a hard line on this. If you have a problem, people ringing up for help are being asked is it an XP computer, and if they say yes, they are being told to replace it. Perhaps they are right, and we should start making a strong line too.

However, I know many of our users are determined to keep using XP, as long as they can mainly for budget limitations and hardware compatibility issues.

If so here are some tips.

The big problem you have is that as Microsoft and just about everyone else has stopped supporting it, so there are no patches, no fixes and no updates for your system and attackers are taking full advantage of this.

1) If you need say a new printer, you need to make sure that it has drivers for Windows XP so consider buying old models.

2) When surfing the net use firefox and drop chrome and Internet explorer as they have both stopped support on Windows XP.

3) Consider moving to a web-based email service like gmail or outlook as support for outlook express on windows is over. Be particularly careful about what sites you go to, and what links you press and what email attachments you open.

4) Current figures are that Windows XP systems are getting about six times more viruses then Windows 7 or 10, so I would recommend installing a modern antivirus system like AVAST or Qihoo 360 both of which are fast and are very good and still supporting XP. Note Qihoo is not easy for a novice to use but is totally free.

Hope this helps.

POS Solutions has noticed a substantially larger than usual enquiry rate from users of the Tower Systems Software about upgrading and switching their Tower software to POS Solutions Software.

What often is required is the ability to create adhoc reports for specialised needs in our retail point of sale software. It is one of teh two criteria for smart software. The problem is often yes, you have the information on the report but what it has is not what you require.

So I am going to show you step by step how to create such a report.

Say, for example, you wish to know the average days to sell your existing stock inventory. If your average days is low, you may be running the risk of going out of stock. On the other hand, if you’re taking a long time to sell your stock, you probably are carrying too much slow-moving stock and there is a real danger that some of it could turn into dead stock.


So we look at a report that contains the sales of the stock items and the stock on hand figure. Here is one such report, the top N stock report which you can find in register reports here.

We then put in a period in this case, I will use two years because I like a lot of history and for this, example we will select the drink department. Note I put in about 10 million-selling lines to include everything.

I then get my report, it has got my sales figures and stock on hand.

I then get my report, it has got my sales figures and stock on hand.

Since I want to make an adhoc report, I press export (on the left) with the green arrow to go into excel. If you do not have excel, you can use a free product openoffice which is available here.

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

Now once we put it into excel, note in green that one stock item (which, by the way, I put in) is negative. That one would needs to be investigated, as negative stock means that there is something wrong but the rest looks okay.

Now for our purposes here we do not need Profit, GP or sales figures.

So I highlight the columns, right click and then click delete

and get rid of them.

Now I want to add my formula, which is the Stock on hand figure by the sales divided by two years x 365 days. Although I am not doing it here, normally I would add 20% more, just for buffer stock.

I then drag the formula down.

And get this but its a bit confusing with all these decimal places as you can see, so I right click the column and change its format to one decimal place.

So now I have this.

Overall clearly here I am way overstocked and am buying too much. I can also see although water assorted is my best seller, I am overstocked on it as well, as I am on Coke. Conversely, I do not have enough Nippy 500ml chocolate milk. Furthermore, I am out of Pepsi Next, and I need to investigate Pepsi Max...

Now I could use the filters, but we will discuss this another time.

If you are not using adhoc reporting, you are missing out a lot on the power of your point-of-sale system.

If you are not sure how to do it, we do run online courses to help you.