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.

What many find very effective is to run the same report for two different time periods to see what changes have occured over time. So they run the report say for this year and for the same period last year.

Here I selected a report of the basket sizes and on the left-hand side, I displayed this year and on the right-hand side I displayed the preceding year.

Now I can compare the variations in basket sizes over time.

Of course if I wanted to examine further what I could do as marked with the blue arrow transfer both reports to excel.

Update: Sometimes you will see some terrific growth; like those that sell fitbits. I can assure you its going to be a very merry Christmas for retailers of fitbit. Apparently, people cannot wait to get their presents and then to set up their Fitbit trackers. What I think is significant is that they are brought sold in a wide varity of stores such as office suppliers and jewellery stores so you may want to look at them.

There have been problems with giftcards. We have had cases where people have sold their own shop giftcards, sold the business and refused to honor the debt on these giftcards, however, with Dick Smith. we now have a different twist.

What happened is that after Dick Smith, electronics announced it was entering voluntary administration, the new administrator announced that they were refusing to allow customers to spent their giftcards. So many people now have giftcards that are worthless. Now what legal responsibility is there for the retailers who sold these giftcards? Well, I suspect soon we will find out.

We do know that Coles and Woolworths have offered to refund the money of anyone who purchased these giftcards from them, even though they have passed on the money they collected on. There are, however, conditions. They will only do it for purchases done since July, and the customers needs to produce a receipt. How many customers have a receipt? Although I cannot fault them for doing this, I am sure they would have determined that most people no longer have a receipt. Possibly those that used their credit card, which would give them a transaction date and receipt, might find the Coles systems might be able to retrieve the original receipt with the itemised account. I would think not, but I do know that the Officeworks system can do it, so possibly the Coles can too.

The other problem is that several large companies such as Kogan have offered to buy these Dick Smith giftcards; Kogan will exchange them for a $25 gift card from them, so soon Kogan will have a big stack of these giftcards. I doubt Kogan will throw them in the bin, more likely what they will do is bundle them together and attempt to get what they can. As I doubt there will be much for them as an unsecured creditor of Dick Smith after the secured creditors are done with Dick Smith, so they may look elsewhere. Furthermore, if people brought these gift cards on credit, what the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has advised people to do, to try get their money back through their credit-card issuer. If it works, then the credit providers will end out with a bundle too, and they will have retailer's name and addresses as well.

The question is what is retailer liability if they sold giftcards that turn out to be worthless? If you sell giftcards from other stores, I recommend you find out.

Our system in its stock search can tell you if you have sold these giftcards. If you have, you need to make a policy of what you intend to do if a customer attempts to get a refund in your shop.

The most important number in retail is the 'Gross Margin Return On Investment - GMROI'

What it does is analyses a business's ability to turn stock into cash.

The formula for calculating GMROI:

GMROI = Annual Sales $ / (Average Inventory at cost) x (Gross Margin %)

Say, for example, an item A sales per annum are $540 with a margin of 30%; you have generally about 40 that cost $2 so your holding cost is $80.

So the GMROI = ($540 = yearly sales)/($80 holding cost) x (30% Gross margin) = 2.0

So this retailer is getting $2.00 in back for every $1.00 invested in this item.

What is commonly done is to use this ratio to compare different items to see where the money for stock can be best spent as it essential that every dollar invested in stock inventory be as productive as possible?

So we may look at a similar item B which has sales per annum are $780 with a margin of 20%, you have generally about 30 that cost $2.1 so your holding cost is $63.

So the GMROI of item B = ($780 = yearly sales)/($63 holding cost) x (20% Gross margin) = 2.5

So this retailer is getting $2.50 in back for every $1.00 invested in this item.

Clearly, the retailer is doing better with item B even though the gross margin is much less.

Now in practice although this is a simple calculation it can be quite a difficult one to calculate as prices, stock holding and margins can change frequently. This is where a computer comes in.

If you go to Register reports, you will see an item "Sales by return on Investment (GMROI)" marked in red here.

Now select an appropriate date range and department to consider.

You will get a report that looks like this. I used a drink department over five years, which is really too long but I want to show a point.

Now in green, you will see the GMROI%.

Then in red the sales in dollars, you need to look at the sales in dollars as a common trap with GMROI is that although the GMROI is high there are no sales.

In Orange, you will see the stock on hand; this is a quick way of verifying that you have enough stock.

How much it costs you now in holding costs is shown in blue.

Altogether, this is an informative report; you will find the summary at the end is loaded with some very useful figures to examine.

So if you’re a number's person like me, this report can be very useful. For example Diet Coke here for example here looks very interesting. High GMROI and low stock holding.

Just another example of how the advantages of our point of sale that can help you make informed decisions to improve your business.

What can happen is that you find some stock on the shelf without a label or barcode, and you need to print a new one?

Well, it is easy to do.

Go into the Main Menu > Stock Systems > Print Barcode Labels (see the red arrow) > click onto the Received Stock History tab.

As you can see you have a wide number of options from which to select.

In this case, I used supplier, and I put in the approximate received dates, as you can see I put in a wide range then clicked on the Find button.

I then selected the binder book to reprint, I then clicked the Add To Print button, I could then look for more items to print a barcode for if I wanted.

Once done, click onto the Print Labels tab > make sure the Label Type option (top right hand side of the screen) have been set to the option Item Label With Price > click on the Print button to print the labels.

Unlike many other point of sale systems on the market our software makes managing labels easy for our clients.

If you read the comments on the Australian Post facebook page here every post by Australia Post is followed by a stream of complaints. You can see that Australians now are very upset with Australia Post.

Check this image too

The raising of the stamp from 70c to $1.00, that is 43% up is also making people upset. This is the biggest increase we have ever seen and how these charges be justified? Australia Post is the largest courier company here and from what I can see its the dearest.

This is going to increase dramatically the costs of doing business in Australia. This will cost many jobs. It is all well and good for Australia Post to say that they are cheaper than many countries, the problem is that the countries; we are competition with like China and USA, have cheaper postage then we do. Have you noticed how Chinese ebay sellers can offer free postage? While an American postage charges are often less than half of ours.

What I do suggest is that many of you switch over to our email statements which our system can produce plus use couriers more. That will save you a lot

Plus another problem with the mail, is Australia Post has announced that is standard delivery time for a letter is up to six days. Email and couriers are faster then that.

Currently, I estimate that about 20% of our sites are at the moment on Windows 10. Many are now intending to upgrade to Windows 10 shortly. No surprises there its a fine operating system but be warned there will be trouble, but it's probably worth it. If you are going to do it, I will give up one tip, uninstall your virus protector do the Windows 10 upgrades and then reinstall your favourite virus protector, although I do admit that the free Windows Defender supplied by Microsoft is a good product, and as it is part of Windows has much less of an impact on speed, compared to many other products.

What is happening in many sites is that your computer keeps bugging you to update to windows 10! The other problem is that there are reports that some who never decided to go to Windows 10, but the computer did the upgrade anyway. So some people are claiming that Windows 10 is a *Mandatory* optional update. Another scenario which I think is more likely is some people got up in the morning, switched on their computer, which asked them a few questions and without them realising the significance of what they are doing, off the computer started on the Windows 10 upgrades, by then its too late to do anything. Lucky for these people, unlike many other point of sale providers our users do have 24-hour support that can do something about Windows 10 upgrade problems after hours.

Anyway despite Microsoft claims that there is no risk as you can go back to the old version of Windows if you do not like Windows 10, there is now a new "massive upgrade" (Version 1511), which once installed means you can no longer go back to Windows 7 or 8.1.

Now if you are one of these people that do not yet want to do a Windows upgrade, and you are on Windows 7 or 8, there is a simple way to stop this constant nagging by windows to upgrade and to stop your computer quietly in the background downloading the Windows 10 upgrades which is not small, it's about 3 GB.

The way I suggest you do it is go to this site

Select GWX Control Panel which is a free program that runs on Windows 7 and 8. Once you run it, it will stop the constant nagging to upgrade to Windows 10, it will prevent you from downloading the version 10 installer files and it hides the "Get Windows 10" icon from the status bar too.

The old year is nearly done, and the new one is on the way. Now is the time to reflect and plan because 2016 will be different.

Although some things will stay the same, in 2014. we had two very expensive court cases that rocked our marketplace; it costed us a major supply Tonnex. In 2015 the court cases continued with Nextra vs Fletcher in the Federal Court what made almost everyone upset was that in both cases, most of us and the judges felt that these court cases could and should have been avoided. No doubt these court cases will continue in 2016. I just hope no one here gets caught up in one. As a person who has been caught up in one, I can tell you from experience even if you win, it is not worth it. I am sure it feels worse if you lose.

Still in 2016, we can expect much of the same as in 2015 but with the accelerator on. Some of the big changes will be:

The gradual change in the Internet from being a fun place where computer-savvy people meet to swap software and play games is changing rapidly into a huge commercial retail enterprise run by some of the largest organisations in the world. .

The rapid growth of mobiles is another challenge; almost everyone has a smartphone. It is replacing now the credit card

and probably soon our house and car keys. You will soon not be able to come into the house or get into the car without a smartphone.

Windows 10 is going to become the standard operating system. Already about 15% of our sites are running Windows 10. Now that the business approved version is out, I know a lot of people are intending to move in March.

Loyalty programs have taken off in 2015; the biggest one in our market space is TLC.

It's grown by over 20% this year. It works out to an average of about 10,000 loyalty members per shop. Interestingly the basket size in the TLC program has also grown by about 4% too, not only are more people using it but they are buying more with it.

And no matter what your thoughts are on cloud computing, and mine is far from favourable in retail, any business today should be using a cloud backup just in case. If you don't already, get yourself a free online storage account. The market leaders here are Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox.

Finally as the year draws to an end I’d like to thank all our readers for their loyalty through our hundreds of posts and their comments.

I wish a healthy, peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Regards

Bernard
Editor

To paraphase Charles Darwin

"It is not the strongest business that survives, but rather, that which is most adaptable to change."

What is quite clear this Christmas is that people now do not wait? Today no one wanting to buy will wait. Every second of wait is death for retailers. The longer it takes to be served, the more your customer wonder if they really need your items, often today's consumers are looking at mobiles checking out the items they propose to buy. What if they find it cheaper a few doors down, many are out the door ASAP.

You need a quick checkout.

Here is ours, the fastest one I know.

Click on the picture above and see where it is marked in green. As you can see the operators were regularly doing transactions at a rate of four a minute. Using our system your checkout times will speed up. Therefore, your queues will shrink considerably.
Part of this is because scanning with POS is much quicker than keying by hand, our work in reducing the number of keystrokes required and our use of a quick database. Furthermore, for items without barcodes like cardboard we have an incredible range of rapid searches.

With very little training your cashiers can be reaching these speeds.

I was thinking of the saying that

Good is a bad choice
When better is available

while I was reading of a situation that occurred recently.

The facts are that a customer purchased at a retail store an item. It is unclear why the customer left so quickly but by the time the retailer had printed the receipt which had a free offer on it, the customer was gone. Wanting to give the customer their offer the retailer rang the customer on his mobile and told him about the offer. The customer came back to pick up the offer. So it must have been an important offer for the retailer to call and a pretty good offer for the customer to come back and pick it up.

Lucky it was not a discount voucher as the retailer would not have had the mobile number to call. A retailer with a discount voucher system and no customer information would be dead here.

Now in this case the solution proposed to fix the problem is faster receipt printing to enable the receipt to print out immediately but this is not a solution, for example; some customer grab the items and run once the sale is completed.

Now let us say that something like this occurs in a shop using POS Solutions point of sale, the customer is gone before the retailer can give them the receipt and the retailer wants to give them the receipt. What choices would this POS Solutions retailer have to give them the receipt?

Well their receipt printing is instant but as I explained this does not solve the problem, here are some other options the POS Solutions client has:

1) They could set their system to automatically send all VIP receipts though email which is free. If this option is picked they do not have to do anthing.

2) The could have set their computer system up to send automatically send a receipt though a mobile app, using their regular Internet service at no extra charge. The customer quickly waves his mobile over the dongle and when the receipt is available, it will be sent to them automatically together with the voucher and the customer does not need to wait.

This also gets over the problems of emailing receipts as you do not need an email address as if the customer does not have or more likely is not prepared to give you an email address you cannot email it to them now.

3) The retailer could have sent the offer through an SMS service at a nominal cost. This can be automatic or on demand.

4) They could have done nothing and the customer would have gotten the receipt though their VIP membership account.

5) Finally if the customer does come back, on the bottom of the receipt can be a QR code that identifies the transaction. If that QR code is scanned by a mobile, it will display on the screen that receipt such as above which they can share. This receipt is available anytime, and the retailer does not have to print the full receipt only the QR code, this saves a lot of paper.

As all these options are virtual, our retailer have another two big advantages.

1) They can make the receipt as big as they like, not just 450mm but 900 mm making it much easier to read.

2) They can put more on the receipt, for example, above say the 20% off a bike may not work, but the retailer could also include an offer of a bike pump or a new bike seat that might appeal more to the customer. Why not, it costs nothing to add? They could also add shop opening hours, etc. They are limited only by their imagination.

As you can see POS Solutions clients have many more choices.

This is an example of how a retailer using technology using our system can stay in touch with their customers and stay fresh in their customers’ mind.

The writer of this blog will be on holidays until the December 29, I wish you all a great season and seeing you subsequently.

Last year, I remember thinking how weird it was that Christmas was almost like a standard day. The number of calls were the same as normal. People were ringing up with the same kind of problems as they usually do. Installations were on just as usual. Our accounts department were as busy as usual with the same sort of problems. Basically, nothing was any different.

This year, I confess if it would not be for the pressure that so many of our clients are putting us though now as they need an instant solution, it's a normal day.

What does make it harder for us, is that many of our business partners have gone on holiday mode, on what is unbelievable to me on the busiest retail day of the year? I know they have upset many of their customers.

Anyway, I am pleased to report that our clients are getting value today from their support contacts.

These tables are very disturbing to us, as you can see after two years of dropping the number of support calls are up to this year. In fact, they are up compared to last month and there is no reason to expect this trend not to stay. I am not sure what the reason, but it appears that part is the current confusion by many over magazine returns by Gordan and Gotch. The other is the number of viruses are up, fortunately our engineering staff are on board to handle this.

Clearly, we are going to have to roster more staff on to get us through the seasonal break. It is doable as our office does not shut.

So we will be working straight through this holiday period, and that includes not only our regular support staff but also our weekend support service.

PS Programming, engineering and accounts are not shutting either.

Unionpay is the largest Chinese payment network and the second-largest in the world; only Visa is bigger.

It is the main EFTPOS card used by Chinese tourists in Australia. They spend about $8,000 a trip, and on average, a Unionpay transaction in Australia is about $780. So I am pleased to say that come January, we will have a solution to handle it directly, bypassing the dearer option that many have had to do now.

For more details, click here.

Head off to register reports

Once there click on the item marked "Sales Comparison for a Given period"

Now select the dates that you wish to compare.

Out pops out pages of informative information showing how you preformed this year compared to the pervious period.

What I suggest you do is select over a few years to give you a feel of any trends.

Just another example of how powerful our system is for retail management.

I got hit today with some questions about Hubbed, which were actually quite strange.

Firstly, I have many clients that use Hubbed. I am not aware of any of my clients now that desires out and in fact, if they wanted to leave there is nothing to stop them as there are no penalties and the contract can be canceled by either party at any time. They are doing Hubbed now because they want to be part of it and for no other reason, mainly because it has an extensive product list, including international parcels, something we all expect to get much bigger as the Internet grows.

It is true that not everyone can get a Hubbed agency and if they do it may be non exclusive.

Lastly despite what some say, no one owns the Hubbed agent – they make their own choices always.

Repeat customers reportedly spend 10 times more than new ones. Once you have them, what you cannot do is rock the boat. It is something that we discussed here. A retailer set up a discount voucher system, it did not work now they are frightened to change it.

Once you establish a loyalty program it is extremely dangerous to make any changes. So you need to cross your t's, dot your i's and check how its going to work carefully before making one.

This clearly is not what Woolworth appears to have done when they made their recent changes in their loyalty card program in October. Then Woolworths announced that it was going from a point system to a cash system stating that people do not want points, they want money. Well bluntly as you can read in customerthink many people do not want the money; they wanted the points. That is why they went to Woolworths in the first place. The pressure has become so extreme that Woolworths has done a complete turn and are now planning to bring back an option for the points.

Like our loyalty system, the customer will still need to get a card with their personal details. This is because the value of the customer monitoring, email addresses and the information is considered to be worth 1% and Woolworths is not giving up that 1% up, and neither should you.

Clearly as this shows that many shoppers would rather be earning point and discounts when they shop than not. So shops that have a loyalty programs offer a competitive advantage.
 

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 them a lot of time.

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

[2015-12-22]: The Christmas edition of the Financial Review will be on sale from Wednesday 23rd of December to Monday 28th of December inclusive[2015-12-28]: The New Year edition of the Financial Review will be on sale from Tuesday 29th of December to Sunday 3rd of January inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Age will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the AgeSub will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Herald-Sun will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Australian will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the West Australian will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Kalgoorlie Miner will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Daily Telegraph will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Courier Mail will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Illawarra Mercury will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive[2015-12-24]: The Friday edition of the Geelong Advertiser will not be published between Friday 25th of December and Friday 25th of December inclusive

Plus there is no Herald-Sun and no Australian Christmas Day.

This is all on script 2214, 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 ten 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.

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available for import

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