More and more we see the need for a faster and reliable Internet network in for point of sale. The biggest problem now is that as cable TV gets more popular, retailers are reporting particularly in peak periods that their Internet slows right down so as such we are switching as much of our POS software internet for after hours.

The issue is that many of the services are critical to a business like EFTpos which also can slow down and in some occasions just cuts off in these periods. Cut EFTpos and you can cut half of most retail today. That is not to mention other services like email, which are critical for a modern business. I would argue that the Internet is now after power the more important service a retailer requires before telephone, water and gas. So you need to choose carefully.

Australia itself has a reasonable Internet service with several good players. If you are interested you can get a feel of our country status by clicking here from the state of the Internet report by Akamai which is considered the best report on this subject.

Of course, you can make many different conclusions depending on what position you hold, for example, since 2007, we have fallen behind New Zealand, but you could say that New Zealand is a small country and its not a fair comparison. You could also argue that Russia is a bigger country, the people are considerably poorer yet they are doing much better on the Internet then us. Alternatively, you could say that compared to US, we have improved relatively. So be careful before making any conclusions.
 

Selecting an ISP

You need to consider who is going to be your Internet supplier very carefully. It's a great idea to simply walk around your proposed shop location and talk to similar business near you. That is what I did before we moved into our new office. It also gave me a great chance to introduce myself, and I learnt a lot. For example, one ISP people complained was slow in my area and that another one continuously was having network problems.

You will find its great getting a good deal, but also you need to include in the calculation the cost to your business of your customers, staff and you sitting around waiting because your Internet is slow or down.

Perhaps the most highly regarded comparison between ISPs in Australia is the Netflix, who after all monitors more Internet connections then anyone in Australia. You can click here for the latest result. June 2016 looks like this, note how quickly they can change.

From this, you can get a feel of what the overall speeds are like.

Another good site worth visiting is Aussie Outrages here which gives you a feel of how reliable. An Internet service is.

This is what Optus looks like today

Here are some other good questions to ask.

What are the contract lengths and what happens if I break it?

What are the limits on the amount of data I can download each month and what happens if I exceed the limit? One kid in one shop costed the owner quite a bit when he used youtube nonstop for a month.

What are my speeds?

Procedure for support?

How is payment done?

Hope this helps.

Your point-of-sale system will soon get a script for the coming price increase of the Victorian Saturday Herald Sun that will automatically update this papers price. Its script number 2347, buy we have done a lot of automatic proce updates over the years, saving our clients heaps and heaps of time.

Anyway for those on old systems like DOS that still have to manually adjust from the 23 July 2016 the retail price of this paper will increase by 20 cents.

The net price will be $2.40
N/A retail commission is $0.30 or 12.5%
N/A distribution commission is $0.2601 or 10.8%

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available for importing into your point of sale software

For this and other supplier files please visit here

Our hamper system is now being improved in the latest version.

Hampers are a great way of getting rid of unsellable stock. Rather than trying to sell an almost unsellable item say $5 with a RRP of $30, what a lot of people like to do is add such items with a hot-selling item and add say $10 to the price so the hamper sells with a $20 discount. In practice, this works very well particularly if the items are related in some way.

The problem is that what can happen is that the items in hamper pack if you add them up individually price is lower than hamper price. This can of course causes arguments at the point of sale as people can count. The solution here is if you are using hampers do not let this happen so remove at least one item from sale.

In any case our software will consider that the hampers is a fixed price *entity* and the hamper price takes precedence.

It can cause problems in stock analysis too as some would argue that both items are discounted and some would say that the hot-selling items sold at the normal price, but the discounted one sold at a discount. The argument gets more complex if the hamper has ten items which are the discounted ones. This you need to be aware of but there is no easy solution at present so we discount everything for sales analysis.

With our Point of Sale software, retailers are able to maximise the hamper possibility open to them as we administer and monitor each hamper, report on the stock at the item and hamper level so providing you with superior reporting and enabling you to make more informed decisions.

We are pleased to have an chance to help retailers make the most of this.

You switch on your computer expecting to see your normal screen instead, you suddenly see this demanding you pay to an unknown person money otherwise everything on your computer will be lost, welcome to ransomware.

Everyday at least, one of my clients is reporting that they have been attacked. Some we managed to save, but some not. At the moment, its going viral and there is not a cure partly as there are different types of ransomware. The concept is that they prevent you from using your computers and demand you do something generally but not always that you pay them money (a “ransom”) before your computer works. Usually, this is about $700 although one of our clients got a demand for $5000.

I have heard of them hitting home systems retail shops, police stations, government agencies and doctors.

Generally, it is spread by spam in emails. A woman signed up with AGL, a few days later before the switch was done, this email arrives.

She presses the button, and she got hit by ransomware.

A similar story occurred to one of our clients who has an Australian Post dealership. He received an email from Australia Post. Nothing looked wrong, so he pressed it, and he got ransomware too.

What can be done?

Unlike many other viruses as ransomware is fairly new, and as I stated no-one has really got a full solution, although being careful and having a properly maintained antivirus software is a good start.

As a tip if you use a service such as gmail or hotmail and something does not look right put the suspicious email aside for a day. Google and Microsoft have a very active program in viruses and often they will catch it.

A new tool from BitDefender is worth knowing about. It works by tricking many ransomware software into thinking that your computer is already infected so the ransomware stops working.

It's completely free. 

The very best defence and the only one that works 100% is having an image backup that's not connected to your machine in any way. There are many online backup services available to do this, if you find one, you like, please let me know.

If you want to do it manually you will need a portable hard drive, make sure it's fast otherwise it can be very slow and some software, the one I recommend is Aomeitech

which has a standard version that is free, and you can find it there. This is what I use.

Should you pay???

That is a difficult question, by paying you are contributing to the spread of ransomware by providing a reward to these people. Another point to remember that once you are identified as a person willing to pay ransoms, you may be targeted more often. Lastly often people that pay are not given the rights to unlock their machine - they have paid for nothing.

Another issue is that often ransomware will imbed itself on your computer and will strike again later. Any computer hit with ransomware must be totally reformed.
 

Having a point-of-sale software is only half the battle. The other part is learning how to use it. That is why we hold frequent training, write information sheets and hold user meeting so you can master your POS system’s features.

Readers here may be interested in knowing that my previous post seems to have generated some comments. What was annoying to me is that despite this, they seem more absorbed in getting points than fixing the inaccuracies in their report! Despite what they say, their clients or anyone else POS software clients, including ours, should not have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. I certainly hope for the sake of their readers that they do not take their advice.

It is a severe problem, for example, the latest trend Micro report states

"Australia ranked second in the world for countries with the highest number of PoS RAM Scraper infections in Q1, with 10% of the world’s PoS RAM Scraper infections,"

If you want to read just how serious this problem is, here are some links from recent credit card data breaches using this technology.

{links have since been removed}

Are you thinking that under the shelf you do not have enough room for a point of sale computer then look no further.

How does this computer meet you requirements? It is a full blown computer.

A put a pen on it to give you a sense of size.

Fast, small and light weight can handle large temperature differentiation. Although I would not recommend dropping it, we did accidently drop one and it was undamaged.

They can handle register and servers.

We have been installing these for a while now.

Click here for the change in business ownership form

There are several sound reasons for making sure that we get a filled copy of a change of business ownership before the actual transfer takes place including that it can save you money, and it allows them to get free training. Unless and until this, form is completed and received by us, the point of sale licence will remain your property and your legally responsibly plus the new owner cannot get customer support which will not make them happy.

All it takes is a few minutes to fill out this form and email it to us.

Then please allow us a few days for your request to be completed.

If a valid email address is on file, both the Releasor and Acceptor will receive an email confirmation once the change of ownership has been completed.

One software company, I know well has recently released a statement that because they do not hold credit card numbers in their software that their clients have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. Well, it might get them off the hook if a potential court case starts, but it is certainly not the *whole* truth.

Firstly let's start off by saying that such data breaches are extremely serious as I wrote here of a study by Experian, showed that 60% of small to medium business closed down within six months after such a data breach. Much of this, I think must be because the banks, MasterCard and Visa looking into recovering their monies go for the retailer and then there are fines and legal costs too.

Now what is happening is a relatively new class of viruses called PoS RAM Scraper Malware has been created by hackers to specifically target retail shops and its huge. The reason why retail shops are simple, there is a lot of credit card details going through the POS system.

Here is a map of PunkeyPOS found by a well-known antivirus company in June this year. What it shows is the places where they found it.

You can read more details here on what they found here.

What can be done?
 

You may want to have a chat with your credit card provider however here are some tips, I would recommend.

1) Be careful where you and your staff go on the net. If you must go to these sites, use a computer that is not on your POS system.

2) Make sure you have a virus protector that is maintained. Let me warn you here that there is no best antivirus out there, they all have pluses and minuses. Note the window defender in windows 10, I think is very good and its free to all businesses.

3) Update your windows software with the latest patches.

4) A firewall would be good. I would recommend setting up your firewall on the machine that does EFTPOS to stop access to almost all the net. The other advantage to doing this is that your employees will surf less on your time. I think the free Windows firewall is good. Fairly easy to use. It passes all inbound tests (both stealth and open port) and does not have any popup alerts which can be a real pain. Also, it is not likely to conflict with your other programs. Plus most techs know it.

If all of this does not work at least you can have a good argument in court that you did try your best.

What about the potential security threats within your company? We can help here.

What you can do is give your staff the resources to do their jobs, so they can do it to the best of their ability, which involves giving them access to your point of sale software. However you do not have to give them access to all the system. What out system allows you to do is select exactly what they can have access too.

Please go to

Main menu> staff > staff maintenance

Then click Security Level tab on the top

Now you will see the user levels with our suggested functions for each level. Change them at will to suit your own particular needs.

Now click Staff Maintenance

This screen appears

Now set your staff with an suitable security level that they need to do their position making sure that you give them the functions and information they will need without compromising sensitive and dangerous functions and information.

In this current update, on our point-of-sale system, you can print a pre receipt before issuing a formal receipt.

For those that do not know what a pre receipt is, pre receipts are widely used by our clients so that they can issue their clients with a document to double check everything before the transaction is done. It is similar to a quote, but it is only valid now so the wording is slightly different for legal reasons.

In this update, our Point of sale software will now make a special beep if the stock being scanned price is under cost. The reason for that is to warn the people scanning the item at the cash register that something is wrong and to stop scanning more items without checking.

All my life, one product in retail that I have monitored is newspaper sales. Even so, in Australia, probably because I am too close, I just got used to the decline in newspaper's sales so. However, when I went overseas, from what I can remember it was a shock to see the worldwide decline in newspaper sales. The big factor internationally are the cheap android smartphones, which can and are being sold profitably for $50, so just about every potential newspaper customer now has a smartphone including as I saw in poor people in poor countries like Egypt.

France

France used to have many fine newspapers based often on political views, when I spoke to people in France, they told me that the quality had dramatically declined, and they had lost all interest in newspapers. This is the stand this retailer gave it. A wall hanging over the side of the magazine rack.

They had however a nice magazine shelf.

The magazines were all nicely presented and quite reasonable. I thought in price. I saw nothing like the piles of non sellable magazines that I too often find in Australia. Every magazine was well displayed, in order and clearly being monitored for sales performance.

In comparison to the magazines, the card display was small, very small. Why Australia sells so many cards compared to many other similar countries is a mystery to me.

One point that stunned me is the large number of electronic price tags being used there. We have sold many of these, but I had never seen it in such a quantity.

Germany

Germany newspapers tend to be divided up by cities, each large city has their own newspapers. I used to see often a large stand full of German newspapers.

Well as you can see, the stand is gone.

The magazines stand is still there. Not as nicely presented as in France but its tidy and well laid out. Of course very little in Germany is not tidy and well laid out.

Morocco

In Morocco, as in most of the Arab world newspapers are generally sold from newsstands and street vendors in the morning. I noticed a few international French and English papers as well as Arabic newspapers. I saw no magazines for sale there. When I asked people there they told me that they tended to read the newspapers on the Internet, this may be as although Morocco is much better than most of the region the democratisation process has stalled so if you want real news; the Internet is better. Still here is a photo of a newspaper stand I saw there.

Hope you found this all useful and interesting.

I am back at work from today, but as I am starting to work through what is a mountain of work waiting for me, please give me about a week to get through it all.

For those that are interested here are some pictures of my trip. Overall, I think Egypt, Morocco, the Baltic countries (great value for Australians as they speak English there, the food, alcohol and prices in general are good and cheap) and Russia all are exceptionally interesting places. For an English speaker like me, Morocco can present some problems as the primary foreign language spoken is French, although they can handle English and the food can get a bit monotonous. Finland I would suggest giving a miss as there is little to see there.

While in Europe, where I went, I did an informal survey about Brexit. It pretty well confirms what polls show. A few newsagents I know there all wanted out. They were upset with the extra red tape and costs imposed by the E.U. and wanted out. Although it's bad for big business both in the U.K. and Australia, it should I think open up the trade routes for Australia to the U.K., as the U.K. now have to trade with someone and without the E.U., our products have a better chance to get in.

P.S. The French people, I spoke to are happy about the result as they prefer Britain out, the Estonians; I spoke to want out too and are hoping this leads to their exit, and the Finns think because of the political situation they are in, they have to stay in the E.U.

While in Germany, one place I had to go to was the pet shop in Duisburg called Zoo Zajac as it is according to Guinness World Records, the biggest pet shop in the world to get ideas for our software. So we drove five hours to get there, which is not unusual as many people go that far just to buy something there. Once I saw it, I could see. Why. I just went "Oh My God." The warehouse alone is bigger than the MCG. They call it a zoo, as it has more animals then most zoos. It has just about everything for animals, including animals like crickets, meerkats, dogs, cats and monkeys. It has something like 500,000 different types of fishes. It has 170 staff.

Just to walk around is a big job. This is not much of a problem to the owner Norbert as he drives around on a bike all day. I found talking to him; I had an unexpected problem as he only speaks German but fortunately my wife is a polyglot and speaks six languages one of which is German. So she translated for me.

I also meet his brother who was very friendly and fortunately speaks English, and we talked while he and my daughter fed the animals.

Overall pet shops have not done well in Germany in the past few years; they used to have 3,500 but now only about 2,000 exist. Although you would not see any economic trouble in this store, as it was full. It started 40 years ago as a very small shop. The whole philosophy now of the shop is to make it a destination store, as although they are big in Internet sales, they prefer direct sales partly as they get paid immediately as opposing to waiting two to three weeks to getting paid. for example when they feed the animals they make it a public demonstation as here.

I took a lot of notes, pictures and got quite a few ideas for our software.

Here are some pictures, and I hope you enjoy them.

Now is the last chance you have if you want to upgrade your computer system and take advantage of the $20,000 instant asset tax write-off to do so. It would be a serious loss not to take advantage of it if you do intend to upgrade soon.

What I suggest is that people look at getting a new server with an SSD drive. As these servers will run considerably faster than the current ones, this speeds up the whole network so saving you and your staff a lot of time.

I would suggest that you speak to your accountant about it ASAP.

We had a very busy dat at the annual Nextra Conference on the Gold Coast on Saturday. We are proud to be the ONLY POS Software company to be invited to the Conference. We work very closely with Nextra and many other groups to provide services above and beyond most software companies.

At the moment I am on holidays starting with Egypt, I will be back early next month.

This is a must see if you go to Egypt

Another must see

The sweets are deadly here.

I have carried my girl now over 50 countries, I reckon. Its getting tough, she is getting bigger all the time.

Some of the pictures on the wall are just mind blowing

Halva - sugar, tahini, nuts and more sugar.