[2016-02-07]: The Monday to Friday edition of the Herald-Sun will change from $1.40 to $1.50 GST inclusive from Monday 8th of February

An automatic update has been issued that will update your prices automatically. Of course please check it afterwards.

Note people on old DOS systems, will have to do manual prices change.

We have just checked and updated Henderson Greetings Barcode File

For this and other supplier files please visit here

There seems to be something wrong in some of our sites with their touch system. Version 4 of Touch software is not everywhere updating the products. Please verify to make sure that you have the latest products. If you have any doubts contact Touch support to verify on 1800 286 824

We are currently working with them to see if we can get a list of these problem sites.

Often a transaction has a story that needs to be recorded.

What happened recently with one of our clients, for example, is that they sold without realising a book that had pages missing. Many people came back complaining that the book had pages missing. Many did not want their money back; they wanted a new copy. So many of these returns had to be noted.

Many other examples would be that someone gets a very special discount, for some reason.
Another some damaged goods are sold cheaply as an "AS IS"

In all cases and more what we call transaction tracking needs to be done.

Well, our point of sale has an extremely sophisticated transaction tracking system, here is how you use it.

When ringing up the transaction in this case a return there is an item on screen *Change Description*, If this is pressed you can see on screen another option *Attach as Note*.

Now in this case I wrote, "IT WAS BROKEN" which is fine as its a once off but sometimes people that need to go to the next level will use a code, e.g. B5, which is a book with a broken cover and then press "Attach as note", see where the red arrow is.

Once the return or any transaction is saved, you have a full reporting and analysis available. For example, in find register transactions

I am looking for this refund done today.

I was able to search for this transaction by a wide range of filters.

And here is a report of the books with the broken covers. Now I can find the one I am looking for.

This is done on a line basis so you can have many different reasons on a transaction.

Just another example of how POS Solutions software is giving retailers more in their software.

Since 1995, you set how you want the updates done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update

and windows, your antivirus programs, accountancy packages, etc. are all updated in accordance with your wishes. So saving people time, effort and software support fees. An example a while ago was one particular printer driver released behaved very weirdly. So we released a patch to fix it. Our users got updated without even knowing there was a problem.

Here is a screen shot from windows 95, 20 years ago... did time fly.

Our system as most systems today has enormous flexibility in doing updates. You can turn it off, set it to happen on any day of the week, etc.

Sometimes though it's nice to review the changes to your system to see what exactly has changed. It's easy to do.

In register reports, select Automatic Update Notes History (see the arrow marked in green)

Now enter in the dates, generally I suggest the past month.

Now the detailed notes appear on what was changed.

In this case, a Financial Review price and availability were automatically changed for the long weekend, the virtual support program internal to our software was changed because of a windows update, the school book program... etc.

I do not know the legality of this under Australian law, but it's certainly the future.

A small business in the US put a picture of a suspected shoplifter on their Facebook page and asked their followers to help identify the suspect.

Their Facebook followers started contacting them within an hour; she was soon identified and shortly thereafter, was in police custody. The days of an anonymous shoplifters maybe over.

More details are available here.

[2016-01-31]: The Monday to Friday edition of the Financial Review will change from $3.80 to $4.00 GST inclusive from Monday 1st of February[2016-02-05]: The Saturday edition of the Financial Review will change from $3.80 to $4.00 GST inclusive from Saturday 6th of February

It is for a FREE 2 hour Seminars for Newsagency retailers

I am sure you will find that the information presented is highly practical and useful.

Details are available here

See what the Lucky Charm Rewards program which we wrote for them.

I would say its the most cost/effective loyalty program in our market space.They have about 50 stores so that works out to about 7,000 members per store. A typical purchase in a Lucky Charm shop is $17.74 but reward customers spend $29.07, which is 63% higher. Furthermore, reward members are buying more about 11% more than they did last year.

The best part is that much of the cost is supplier driven.

Hacking passwords is very simple and most point-of-sale systems because they process credit cards, virtual products, and they are on the Internet are desirable targets. You probably read a few days ago that The Park Hyatt Sydney and Melbourne systems were cracked. You only heard it because Hyatt is famous. Many more stores have been hacked. In our market space, one of our competitors has admitted several times that their sites been hacked.

The reason security comes up every year about now is because a list is produced of the worst passwords for the previous year. Here is the start of the list.

Here is a free book by them on the subject which is worth a read.

If your password is on their list, then I suggest you change it.

All a hacker would have to do if he had access to your system, is try these passwords in your system and they would have a reasonable chance of cracking your system. Its not hard to do.

Their are other methods commonly used too. Here are some of them.

The easiest way is to ask, listen or read. Someone in your shop simply asks or is told the password. I have gone to shops and seen passwords written down hanging on the wall. Almost anyone can read them.

As a rule you should never write down your passwords.

Another popular way is guessing, people that are close to you often know much about you, your maiden name, your old address, etc. People often reuse passwords, if I know your password on one site, it may open your system to me.

Hackers often use two other methods, the first is simply try every word in the dictionary.

As a rule never use a word in the dictionary.

If that fails a hacker will try every combination of letters, words and punctuation.

Here is some times how long it would take a hacker to crack your password if they have access to your desktop based on a site howsecureismypassword.

Common words
Karen - Instantly
maiden - Instantly

Every combination
television - 8 hours
infomation - 10 days

Note the longer the password the harder it is to crack.

Finally do not check only yourself, what about your staff?

Furthermore as a rule regularly change your passwords.

A simple way to do this is add the first and last character of last year premiership team at the end of the password. For some more tips on how to make good passwords click here.

I was reading about the coming closure of Cleo. There were many articles about it. However, I noticed that as late as 14 Jan,

"a spokesman for Bauer Media told Business Insider the magazine would continue to operate. Apparently "The report by the Daily Tele is complete speculation, and we have no plans to announce to staff or issue a statement that we are closing Cleo today,"

However, a few days later they announced it to the staff, and to everyone else that Cleo was closing.
 

The reason why this struck me, is something very similar happened to Network Services.

On the 3rd December 2015, the Australian Financial Review announced that Bauer Media was planning to wind up its Australian distribution business Network Services Company in early 2016 and that Gordon & Gotch would pick up the distribution.

When we and others asked Bauer for more details, we were told blaa blaa blaa and more blaa but if we wanted to discuss it, we would need to sign a non disclosure agreement.

I said if I know about it but am unable to talk about it, what is the point of knowing about it?

What I found interesting was that the share market was not buying that nothing was happening either as there were big volumes in trade the next day here. If it was because of this heavy trading with all the share market cleverness, these guys lost money as they brought at 51 cents and the price of PMP is now 47 cents.

Since then I have heard reports of people that were also clever and did sign these non disclosure agreements. I am not aware of anything they got that was worth signing it and I spoke to a few of them. I think they would have done better to refuse to sign and created a debate on the public merits of this decision, something that I am sure the creators of this decision certainly did not want. This maybe the real reason why they invited these *clever* people who asked to sign these NDA on the promise that they would get the *confidential* information. That SHUT 'EM UP.

My advice to anyone is do not sign these non disclosure agreement forms unless you really have too.

It is now official there are three speeds to send your letters or statements within Australia,

Regular post now costs $1 and will take 2-6 business days

Priority mail will cost $1.50 and will take 1-4 business days

Express costs $5.75 and has a next-day guarantee. That guarantee means you can get your money back if it does not arrive in time and you complain. In my experience, if you do complain, is it normal to wait over 40 minutes to speak to someone in Customer Service, particularly if it’s a Monday morning?

So now Australia Post is 30% dearer at half the speed.

The problem of speed is almost as significant as cost. Monthly statements have to be there with a reasonable gap before the end of the month. If they are going to take one to six business days, that means they need to be sent out about two weeks before the end of the month, so the books have to be finalised; now as a typical month is about 30 days, we are looking at about 40% of your debt being carried forward another month.

Advantages of paperless email statements.

Besides being excellent for the environment and saving a few trees, they are also suitable for you as you won't have to incur the cost of printing and mailing your statement monthly. They can be done closer to the end of the month, including more of the latest information.

As the statements look very similar to your paper statement and carry the same information, they are now considered legally acceptable for record-keeping purposes.

Plus, sending emails automatically is much easier than a hundred printed emails.

Overall the advantages are so significant that now many businesses are set on you going paperless that they've offered up incentives, discounts, and a chance to win a price to get you to drop your statements.

Let us discuss some of the problems.

Many of your clients do not have or refuse to release email addresses. However, you will find that almost all businesses do have email addresses. I estimate more than 95%. About 18% of people do have email accounts but rarely use them. Many of you may be surprised how many of your clients have email addresses when they discover account-keeping fees.

However, many with email addresses feel that they need to print the email for tax reasons, so they may as well get you to print it and send it to them. I used to be like that too until recently when I decided my wife, my accountant, or someone else was asking for details of an item and could not find it. If it is by email, I can find it by google search. So I switched.

Many find it easier to forget to send their payment as they don’t have that physical bill as a reminder.

Sometimes even if they do have an email account, they do not get it; a typical example is when it gets caught by their spam filters. Another is that their mailbox, for some reason, is down, e.g., full.

Lastly, sometimes people accidentally think it's spam, delete your email without thinking. I know I have done that trick too.

So if you are going to go to email statements, you need to take into account the pros and cons. In practice, you must run both an email and a printed statement. In time, I am sure we are all going electronic.

If you want to know how to set it up email statements, Please click here.

This is how you use data, not emotion!

Investigate

If you go into cash register reports

Select Top N Stock sales for a given period

Now select initially a short period say the last few days and ask for a report by profit.

This gives you a list of your most profitable items.

Estimation

Now look through the list to make sure that you have sufficient stock on hand (SOH). A good seller today is most likely to be a good seller tomorrow.

Examination

Check to see what opportunities you have to improve your profit, as these are the items that are working for you.

Are they in the best position? Are they being properly displayed? Maybe they should be in more than one position. Perhaps if you make them a bit more noticeable to your shoppers by locating them at the entrance or the checkout counter, where they can produce more.

Is there any wiggle margin perhaps you can try increasing your prices slightly on these items since they are popular.

Are your employees focusing on them enough?

Dramatic improvements can be made by examining your performance constantly.

With the recent introduction of Lottoland into the Australian Market a major change, as Australian Punters are now able to play overseas lotteries legally except maybe in South Australia.

Lottoland is off to a fine beginning. It just started here a week ago, and it was reported in Australia that it sold over 200,000 tickets, then saw its website crashed, after 107,000 Australians signed-up to the site and overwhelmed its servers.

Now an Australian punter can decide to go for a $70 million powerball or they can try their luck on many other overseas lottery products like, for example, a $US1.5 billion (A$2.2 billion) Powerball draw in the US or a EuroMillions, which had a prize €183.5 million which is in cash. The other issue is that many powerballs overseas have much lower fees. Australian Punter may be tempted with overseas powerballs with better odds.

Possibly the state governments will stop it as they do not want to lose the revenue they get from lotteries. Maybe the Australian Punter will reject Lottoland as they declined a similar offer from Betfair, but I think a better solution would be for powerball in Australia to merge into powerball in the US. I know Australian retailers would love to get some of the traffic that powerball in the US generated. The other possibility is that powerball could duplicate what Lottoland is doing, in that technically when you buy from Lottoland you do not buy a ticket, but a guarantee that they will pay out the equivalent prize money, as if you had a ticket.

As I stated there may be major changes in the lottery system here.

Although I cannot go into the details here, over the last few months, we have been involved in an investigation on overcharging of a seller of telco and some other products. The figure lost is estimated in the last audit is 7087 products, worth about $191,000.

In the process of the investigations our programmers have identified a major security hole in the processing of telco products. If you consider that one average seller could lose $191,000 you get an idea of potentially how big a problem it could be.

Lucky for this seller they had our point-of-sale system which has a comprehensive telco card historical recording facilities. As such we could verify all of our clients' claims. However I am sure many resellers of telco products would not be so lucky and the money is lost.

The investigation now seems to have gone south so much so that I blasted the investigator as incompetent. So currently the investigator refuses to talk to me. Like I told him, my client comes first, and I do not believe you are looking after their interests.

What can be done?

• The invoices and statements from the telco suppliers need to be checked?
• Balance them with what your End of Day slips show.
• Then randomly check many of the statements to see if the dates, quantities, the arithmetic and the products are correct.

If this had been done in this store about $191,000 would have been saved.

This morning Network Service announced that they would move all their retail distribution activities to Gordon and Gotch. As our systems can handle what will be much bigger return forms, but clearly it will be a major problem for some larger magazine retailers who do not use our system.

We are all now discussing the situation on how to best manage this changeover. Obviously, many patches will need to be made to automatically update your magazines to handle the new codes and return details, they are going to be big ones. We are going to have magazines delivered by Network that need to be updated before they can be returned to Gordan and Gotch.

Of course, it is still in the early in the process so how all of this is going to happen is yet to be fully discussed and decided. More details will be released closer to the transition dates.

Here are some relevant links that VANA have released, the one by Bauer I have highlighted as I think it is a must-read.

Network Services announcement

Gordon and Gotch announcement

Bauer Media FAQ

Gordon and Gotch FAQ

We had three magazine distribution service, then we had two and now we have one.

{All links were removed}

The Magazine Publishers of Australia selected the following company Boston Analytics to provide an independent and robust evaluation on their pilot magazine tests to the ACCC. The public release of this report by is expected in a few days see here.

We have worked closely with Boston Analytics, to help them, however we were not given the data, we requested to do our study what we could do the analytics for our clients. So although we have fewer shops to compare then Boston Analytics, we do feel we had access to more non magazine shop data, plus we used a longer and more extensive shop history, and we think our data mining analytic tools are better.

Data mining (smart software) is something only Pos Solutions retailers have in our market space. If someone in our market space disagrees with this statement, show me your shop reports with it absolute, square, R squared, correlations, squashed, interquartile, etc. errors all documented for equation generations, etc. Data mining in retail is a field that we consider ourselves, a market leader.

With our data mining, we compared magazine sales by unit price, number and profit over five(5) years with every factor we could think of and ended out with the following list of factors to study.

Trial of magazine, Plain packing of tobacco, Hidding the tobacco, Julian date, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Payout_number, Payout_unit, Payout_profit, Others_number, Others_unit, Others_profit, Card_number, Card_unit, Card_profit, Delivery_number, Delivery_unit, Delivery_profit, Drink_number, Drink_unit, Drink_profit, Eftpos_number, Eftpos_unit, Eftpos_profit, Fax_number, Fax_unit, Fax_profit, Gift_number, Gift_unit, Gift_profit, Instantpay_number, Instantpay_unit, Instantpay_profit, Instant_number, instant_unit, Instant_profit, Lollies_number, Lollies_unit, Lollies_profit, Lotto_number, Lotto_unit, Lottopay_number, Lottopay_unit, Lottopay_profit, Misc_number, Misc_unit, Misc_profit, Paper_number, Paper_unit, Paper_profit, Phonecard_number, Phone_unit, Phonecard_profit, Photocopy_number, Photocopy_unit, Photocopy_profit, Stationery_number, Stationery_unit, Stationery_profit, Tobacco_number, Tobacco_unit and Tobacco_profit

I then did almost eight(8) million calculations in our data mining and over 500 billion evaluations on each of the stores, I checked. I know it's a lot of work which is why few do it.

Factors that were shown to be important in magazine profitability were days of the week, card sales, the amount and number of instant pay outs as people who win in often buy magazines, newspaper sales, drink sales as people that are thirsty come into the shop to get a cold drink and while they do this sometimes buy more and phone card sales for similar reasons as drinks.

However, my conclusion is that the trials had no effect on magazine sales.

This conclusion is not surprising to me as from the sales view it made no difference if the non sellable magazines are culled by the newsagent before they go on the shelf, or they are culled by the magazine distributor before they are sent. Although from an economic view, I think it saves a lot in processing handling, bookkeeping, transport costs, etc. if the magazine distributor does the cull.

So in summary I feel that the magazine trials show that the publishers can, with no loss of sales can do a better job of distributing magazines.

Interestingly those on the trial that I talked to, felt they needed early returns as some of the magazines they got they did not like and also they needed the ability to change orders as some magazines that were culled they felt they could have sold.

I look forward to reading Boston Analytics take on the matter.

A short time ago, I wrote that research had been done that showed putting a picture of eyes, on shoplifting signs dramatically improved their effectiveness. Here is a sample I showed of such signs with the eyes marked in blue.

Some people asked me about this, so I found these two articles on this subject for you.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/12/the_world_would_be_a_much_better_place_if_there_were_eyes_everywhere.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.12011/abstract;jsessionid=A3F6C61BB8E32021E28C963D0868D31C.f04t01

I cannot believe it but the powerball in the US jackballed as there was no winner, it's now swollen to $1.3 billion dollars, making it the biggest jackpot in the history of the world. I am sure many retailers here would love to sell tickets for that. It apparently has fueled a frenzy of lotto ticket buying across the United States. What an Australian retailer could do with a powerball like that is mind blowing.

In case you are thinking of entering from what I can determine, you don't need to be a US citizen to win, but *you* need to buy your ticket in the US. It is illegal to buy US lottery tickets online or through the mail, although there are many scammers which will tell you otherwise so please do not give them your money as you may find even if you win, you cannot collect.