Since we have released our current prices on software and software support contracts, our competition is now complaining that our prices are too cheap.

Apparently, their clients should continue to pay their higher prices and support contracts. Then what is interesting according to this logic, if they pay more their clients will save money in the long term.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Save yourself possibly thousands, give us a call now.

Several of our clients are now running Windows 10. Many like me, just could not wait. It is proving to being very popular. I have never seen a version of Windows that taken off as quickly as Windows 10.

This is quite surprising to me as business people in my experience are usually slow to get behind new operating systems. Even when they buy new PCs, generally they tend to buy the safe one rather then jump into the new systems. This is probably still true with most businesses who are sticking for now to Windows 7.

There are good reasons for this as well. The big problem with Windows 10 is the old equipment like printers and monitors that after going to Windows 10 that no longer work. These are not so many Microsoft's faults as much as the manufacture of the printers and drivers that are not bothering to get much of their old equipment going on Windows 10. This is actually creating for people with old equipment an extremely complex IT environment. Although it's been promised those people that have tried after upgrading to Windows 10 to go back to what they had often have been unsuccessful. As such many of our users are after doing a conversion to Windows 10, are finding that they have to buy new equipment.

Software is also proving a problem because several software vendors, including Microsoft are demanding money for supplying the necessary updates for Windows 10 for their software.

The other reason to wait is that a new version of Windows 10 is expected next month, this is the one that is supposed to have the bug fixes. This release will take some time to test, which means that many of my clients will be thinking as everything is working fine now, Christmas is not a good time to start experimenting.

As such early 2016, would be my recommendation to consider upgrading.

Here are some questions, you should ask?

Are you happy with the system you have?

If you are having no problems with your current system, maybe the upgrade is unnecessary.

“If it has not broken, do you need to fix it?"

Do you need to upgrade all the computers?

Maybe just upgrade a computer and see how you go before jumping in.

Are you ready to deal with any problems caused by the upgrade?

As sure as day follows night, there will be problems. Not all are big problems, but some are. Many involve some major tinkering with the system just get it back to where it was.

Less privacy in Windows 10

There are now major concerns about the extra information Windows 10 is collecting and sending to Microsoft. Now what are they going to do with this information? Although I am sure it will be legal and above board, the fact is that data collection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars now to companies like Google, Facebook etc even a company the size of Microsoft cannot walk away from that sort of revenue.

I say this because a new patch for Windows 10 was released about a week ago which has something resembling Microsoft advertisements in the Start Menu. Now people are asking are advertisements coming to Windows?

POS Solutions is participating in a new national study of "Study of Australian Leadership" (SAL). This study is being conducted by the Australian Government Department and the University of Melbourne.

It is a huge study and we were quite proud that we were selected to help in this study. What the Australian government and Melbourne University are trying to understand current and future challenges facing Australian organisations, and the capacity of our leaders to meet these challenges.

It's not the only study we are involved in the present with the universities; we are also helping with one on Australian software, and we have been recently in another study to help handicapped people in the workforce.

We feel as well as ultimately improving our community, these studies also help us all to connect to the larger world.

Today data mining is a buzz word. It is of course much more than that as it is the next generation of reporting in point of sale systems. It is where the system can actually act as an advisor to the owner of the business.

It is so important that many people today lie and claim that their systems can do it. In fact there are a couple of systems in the market that can do it now, ours is one of those that can do it. The problem is not just that they do not have an AI or a data mining engine; the data set up to feed these but also they do not know what they are doing as it needs specialised skills to understand it. Despite what some say it's much more than just a few graphs and numbers on a report.

However, those that have the right tools, and you know what you are doing, it can give great insights into what is happening.

Here is a simple example of ePay sales in a shop to show you what it can do. ePay is an integrated option in our system that allows among other products our clients to sell phone cards.

Here is what the number of ePay sales per day over six years look like.

As you can see it appears that the number of sales are going down every year, if so why?

So what I did was take all this data out of the point-of-sale system and added some more and next feed it into our data mining engine. I after that asked the data mining engine to investigate what is happening.

It quickly came up with a result that showed the sales were dropping.

What is stated was the number of sales of ePay was about 3 every day, in the summer months, you could add one in summer plus about 23% of each tobacco sales minus one a day since the introduction of the government policy that tobacco products had to be hidden from the public view. The last is quite a lot, since they have hidden the tobacco, they have lost an ePay sale a day. But overall, it was the drop in tobacco sales that was responsible for the decline in ePay sales.

When I decided to check, as you can actually see that days that have bad tobacco sales do tend to have bad ePay sales. The bad figures clump together on the bottom left.

Now I decided to see whether it can tell us more, it did and its quite interesting.

It is not that summer is so good but the people that are buying magazines in summer that are the cause of the increase in ePay sales and in winter in general people there have less interest in ePay products. Furthermore, that the people that are buying tobacco in his shop are progressively less interested in ePay so either the shop is doing something wrong with ePay in the shop and/or the market is changing.

So what actionable information does this give the shop owner now. Well, people that buy tobacco products have to be made aware that the shop has an ePay service and what it does, as do in summer the magazine buyers. These simple changes should result is quite a few extra sales.

If you are interested in learning more, let us know as there are major changes in the software industry now, they are not the same and you need to ask yourself whether the software you are using now, is in the direction you require.

If you read what many experts say about retail sales, what is clear is the best and easiest way of increasing retail sales is to sell a little more to everyone that buys in the shop.

That is why our system has reports that tell you what items sell well with other items or categories

You will find one here in the Sales reports "Category Companion Sales by Period"

Once you click on that it will then take you to another screen which lets you select the dates and the item or category that you wish to check.

What is a useful is to select a good selling item or category. Now run this report for last year for the same period this year that you want. Now check to see for the items and categories that sell well with these items or categories. Then make sure that these items and categories are clearly noticeable to the buyers of the checked items. Its a great way to pick up additional sales.

For example, I would suggest anyone who sells tobacco makes sure that anyone buying these products can clearly see that you have touch or epay, drinks and confectionery.

A payment gateway is a service that allows a retailer to accept a customer's payment; examples would be VISA or debt card.

The problem is that the number of such payment gateways as the mobile replaces cards, is expected to increase dramatically. The problem from the merchants' point of view is that sales will be lost if the shop cannot handle these new gateways to Australia like Amazon, Authorize.Net, SecurePay.com, etc. Now these gateways are not small; they are huge overseas and people will come who want to pay using these methods, and if they are not able to will result in sales lost.

The first problem is that since the merchant account is small, its fees tend to be high. This can only be partly overcome by the introduction of surcharges, as some of these gateways have account-keeping charges. Say a $ US49 monthly account-keeping fee plus 10% is impossible to pass on to the one customer a month who buys an $A15 book.

The second problem is more serious, although, from the Australian retailer now, these gateways are small, there is much work in making just one payment. You need to set up an account for each gateway, sign forms, get it activated into your software, train staff how to use it, reconciliation, etc. Until some of these build up to reasonable volumes, activating a gateway may not be worth the time and effort. In the meantime, sales will be lost.

Our solution at present is to use payment gateways in Tyro and let them worry about the many gateways available. Since there is no commitment in Tyro, we do not see this as a problem for most of our clients.

The Tyro rates for these payment gateways are cheaper than going direct, plus our clients will have no hassles in use.

Trials are being done now with the permission of the ACCC and the magazine distributors

"to optimise the supply of magazines to newsagencies generally and increasing the sustainable return on investment for newsagents, publishers and distributors."

Then I was upset that the raw data is not being released, despite ACCC assurance that it would be. I still see no reason why this data should not be released to interested parties!

Still after we were asked by the magazine distributors to help with their data collection, we decided to look into what the trials look like with our clients. Although its early days yet the results do look promising, in fact, they look very good.

Overall sales of magazines are down for those in the trial but then, so are just about everyone else so I am not surprised about this. The complaints have generally been on the amount of unsellable magazines being delivered. It makes no difference to retail sales in whose back room these unsellable magazines sit. It will not affect retail sales.

As people involved in the trial are reporting that there is a lot less rubbish coming in, their work load is much less. This results in lower labour costs and better cash flow. All this does increase the return on investment which is what the magazine distributors promised to do.

The other problem with sales is that magazine distributors are not able to fix the problem that sales of magazines tend to be linked to goods that most of their agents. In this case, most of their agents sell products like newspapers, books, gifts and tobacco. Except for gifts, these items are generally down so this alone will drag down magazine sales. I find that most agents that are increasing magazine sales are doing so as they are selling more gifts and toys. More customers for gifts and toys mean more buyers for magazines.

Now this is an interestingly point Gordon and Gotch's magazine sales are doing better in the trial then Network. Why I do not know, but full marks to Gordon and Gotch?

There are some issues with magazines that could sell but have not come in, I would estimate that this would be top about 10%.

What we have no investigated yet is.

1) Magazines that the agent did not get enough quantities, so they sold out.

2) How much rubbish is still coming.

These issues we still need to investigate.

Overall there is no bad news to report that I can see. I still have questions; the big one is can this, can this trial be done industry wide? Clearly, this improvement can be done for a few sites but its a big difference if everyone is involved.

Still people on the trials who I have discussed it with me are happy with the results. No-one wants to go back to what was and no-one I know has dropped out. It will be the job of the ANF to make sure that they do not go back, and these trials expand.

Its lovely when you get these.

What I noticed is what Central News Bunbury do very well is their facebook page, details below on how to access it.

We are passionate WA newsagents who are striving to be the best in the business. In 2015, we were once again crowned ANF WA Retail Newsagent of the Year!

We are proud POS Solutions users and installed the system many years ago. What we like about the system is its ability to truly help Ian and myself manage our business which is particularly vital when you have three beautiful young children. As newsagents we always hear people saying that we need to work smarter not harder – POS Solutions will help you achieve this.

These are challenging economic times and, at Central News Bunbury, we are truly embracing diversification with the addition of the CONNECT system by Hubbed, a new online exclusive and personal card range and we’re the Bunbury specialist education provider and hold contracts with many of our local schools.

I would encourage any newsagents thinking of changing to POS Solutions to contact Ian or myself to discuss the benefits. If you currently do not have a point of sale system and you’re considering POS Solutions – this is a good business decision and you won’t look back!

Ian & Suzanne Cross

Central News Bunbury

Facebook page.

ANF WA Retail Newsagent of the Year in 2015, 2014 and 2013

ANF WA Committee Member

Its lovely when you get these.

What I noticed is what Central News Bunbury do very well is their facebook page, details below on how to access it.

We are passionate WA newsagents who are striving to be the best in the business. In 2015, we were once again crowned ANF WA Retail Newsagent of the Year!

We are proud POS Solutions users and installed the system many years ago. What we like about the system is its ability to truly help Ian and myself manage our business which is particularly vital when you have three beautiful young children. As newsagents we always hear people saying that we need to work smarter not harder – POS Solutions will help you achieve this.

These are challenging economic times and, at Central News Bunbury, we are truly embracing diversification with the addition of the CONNECT system by Hubbed, a new online exclusive and personal card range and we’re the Bunbury specialist education provider and hold contracts with many of our local schools.

I would encourage any newsagents thinking of changing to POS Solutions to contact Ian or myself to discuss the benefits. If you currently do not have a point of sale system and you’re considering POS Solutions – this is a good business decision and you won’t look back!

Ian & Suzanne Cross

Central News Bunbury

Facebook page.

ANF WA Retail Newsagent of the Year in 2015, 2014 and 2013

ANF WA Committee Member

Kerry and I have been proud users of POS Solutions for 10 years. A point of sale system should provide significant assistance with managing your business and this is exactly what POS Solutions does. We are a family run business with strong year on year growth thanks to our decision to review our product range and make significant changes in store including the introduction of gift lines appropriate to our area’s demographic.

Our POS Solutions system makes our business decisions clear and simple - we run an extensive range of reports – we analyse our sales data and this enables us to make more informed decisions. We make full use of POS Solutions loyalty program which employs inexpensive and fun methods to reward and have additional contact with our customers as part of our daily operation.

There are many WA newsagents without a point of sale system – we encourage you to contact POS Solutions and have a discussion about your business needs. You need to be able to fully understand how your business is travelling to know where your business will be in the future.

Kerry & Wayne Martinovich

Myaree Newsextra – ANF WA Committee Member

Subiaco Square Newsagency has been with POS Solutions since opening our doors 16 years ago. We also installed POS Solutions at our previous store located in Floreat WA in 1997. POS Solutions offers a professional product dedicated to the newsagent industry which assists with effectively managing and growing your business from a range of detailed reports to an easy to use loyalty program.

POS Solutions’ customer service centre are very skilled and remedy issues fast and efficiently. If you are considering a point of sale system, give POS Solutions a call or please contact me if you would like to talk further about my experience.

Dean Scott

Subiaco Square Newsagency & Lottery Centre

Chairman, ANF WA Committee

WA Retail Newsagent of the Year 2007 and 2008

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available for download as is the latest uniball.

For these and other supplier files please visit here

Standard stock file was created to make a simple standard that all suppliers no matter how big or small could use to communicate with their clients both big and small. It probably now is the most popular file format in our marketplace today.

It is a fairly simple file format, designed anyone who has excel to send their catalogues to retailers with a point of sale system.

It does have a few rules.

) If any barcode is not valid it is cleared out.

) All items must have a unique retail barcode. You cannot have two items with the same barcode, nor can you have an item in standard without a barcode.

If there are two items with the identical barcode, the item with the cheaper retail price will be deleted. If they have the same retail price, then the second item listed will be deleted.

This is to avoid confusion at the register.

) Margins must be zero or over, if they are under zero, the cost price is to be cleared.

This is because something is probably wrong and its best to check the cost price.

) All wholesale barcodes are to be unique. If two or more exist the wholesale barcode with the cheapest retail price will be cleared. Again if they have the same retail price, then the second item listed wholesale barcode will be cleared.

This is to avoid confusion while stock receiving.

) All items should have a unique supplier code. If two or more exist the supplier code with the cheapest retail price will be cleared. Again if they have the same retail price, then the second item listed supplier code will be cleared.

This is to avoid confusion while stock receiving or ordering.

6) This is not a rule, but a request that suppliers limit the number of items to those relevant. It is not appreciated when a supplier loads his catalogue file with so many items that were sold years ago.

These are simple rules and yet its amazing how few suppliers can abide by them.

Go to reports > stock > Sold Out or Selling Out Stock Lines

In theory, this report only shows items that are selling well in the nominated period, but that you are running out of, so you need to check on them ASAP. This can help you make sure you have adequate stock.

However, it does much more, what it also alerts you is whether items are not properly entered into your system as the stock on hand figure is negative as you can see by the example below.

I would recommend running this report regularly as it will alert you to both out of stock situations and errors in invoicing.

We tend to use a much more formal structure in our point-of-sale system then most.

What I will do here is a few of the terms we use. Note for those that use focus in our system, this is totally automated by our software.

The blue line has the quantity of a particular line in the store.

The Max marked in green is the amount that you feel is the most of that item that you want to hold. So in this case we have stated that we want no more then ten (10).

The reverse of this marked in purple is the minimum, this is often called the buffer stock and is the least number that you want to hold in stock. Commonly these are set to zero which saves time in a manual system but is not right often. In this example, I have made it two (2). Basically, it is determined by how harmful being out of this stock can be.

The re-order point is the trigger for when a new order should be placed ASAP to the supplier. Formally it is determined by the expected sales from the time from when you send an order to a supplier and when these items arrive in your store plus the minimum stock in this case, it's marked in red and is four (4) here.

An interesting observation is that the more often you order the less the maximum, minimum and the re-order points needs to be.

This struck me when I was in Denmark, what it is a coin change machine. I have seen them before, but these were better. A customer can put their coins on the top. It checks that the coins are valid currency for Denmark, next adds up the total the customer puts in, sends the total to the point-of-sale system and subsequently once the operator finishes the transaction the point-of-sale system sends a message to it which issues the customer their change. It was much faster than a manual cashier. One coin machine could handle two cash registers. It then sends a message to the point of sale with the coins it used so the point of sales knows at all time what coins are in these machines. At the end of the day, it sorts the coins for the bank. I am sure they save a lot of time in high-volume retail shops.

We could now add these machines to our point-of-sale system is someone was interested.

It’s October, and you can already see many retailers are adorning their shop fronts with Christmas paraphernalia and starting to adding Christmas stock such as Christmas trees and decorations. However, many leave the preparations too late.

Although the economy is not doing well now this year, the signs do appear to show this will be a good Christmas, retail sales are up, interest in Christmas is up from last year, which was up from the year before and the public mood seems positive.

Measured interest using Data Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)."

One of the points I have noticed and this graph show that the selling season for Christmas is in recent years getting longer. It is now from mid-December to late January. So we are talking about 6-7 weeks.

Among the million and one jobs, you will need to do now is to plan your stock ordering, so you need to estimate your stock requirements something our point of sale can help you with. You also need to look into your staff levels again something our point of sale can help you with all this; I be talking about these soon.

Right now, there is something else that you need to check is all your equipment work? The odds are its going to get much busier. Many of you are now planning to bring in some of the old POS machines “out of the closet” to accommodate the rush period. Have you tested it to make sure it works? Some of it have not been used in almost a year, a lot can happen in a year even if its just in the shelf. Have you checked that you have all the cables? Do you have a connection into your network where you need it? Can this equipment link into your system? Does it all work if you plug it in? I suggest you try it now.

What is going to happen if you have extra staff and the computer register does not work? I have seen this happen all to often.

It is wise to test this now in advance to ensure they’re running properly.

The closer it gets to Christmas, the harder it gets to repair in time.

Preparing for the Christmas holidays is a fun time, but you need to use these next two months wisely to put your best face on your store.
 

So far, the fair been wonderful for us. We have had a terrific mix of existing customers and new prospects. Having a great reputation and being the oldest and almost certainly the large point of sale supplier there in the industry which is a big plus.

What we have noticed is the mood is wonderfully upbeat – one point about pet shops I love, is that these people love what they do. The positive vibe from these people is wonderful.

What proving to be a real bonus is that we have brought a software support person on the stand as we can answer technical questions for our existing customers.

Screens from Pet-Expo

Books' sales are now weird. Overall, they are down as people are switching to e-books. There are still many stubbornly like me stick to physical book but slowly the market is changing. As large specialist books' stores like this one

slowly dwindle.

Even so, that is not true for the smaller ones. I have several clients that had a large bookshop near them that closed down, and many of the former customers of the large bookshop are coming into their shop now. They are actually reporting higher book sales.

Still what quite surprised me was when I was asked to data mine one of my client's shops and investigated their book department. I just did not expect to see in their shop any improvement in books actually neither did the owner but when we looked at the figures, we saw the data mining program show that the book department profit was up by 17.8% in the past year.

Why was it missed?

Well because nothing really changed, what it was, was the result of several small incremental changes in the book market place.

The number of books actually dropped by .5%

But because the sales every week are up and down, no-one noticed the small underlining trend. What the owner did pay attention to was the industry news that sales were badly down and simply assumed their shop was similarly affected. He told me that they were thinking of reducing our book department because the sales were dropping so much?

When I told him, he was only. 5% down his immediate reaction was "Is that all, It cannot be so small? Nevertheless, if so where is the 17% increase in profit?"

So then we looked at the margins on the books sold every week over the year, but although you do not see much, a data mining program picks up that they are up overall about 6%.

Still 6% margin increase with a .5% decrease is not going to give you a profit increase of 17.8%, so what is going on? The data mining pops up; the unit price is up 7.8%.

Then the owner clicked. He started to excitedly to say to me, yes because of the changes in the book market place, we do sell more of the dearer books now.

It was an interesting exercise and shows that a person behind the counter can actually get false signals. Part of the reason it was missed was because it is a small department in a shop with sales of about $100 a day on average.

The shop owner now intends to do a complete change in marketing and increase its book department somewhat.

What is does show is the need of analysis in the backoffice just running on gut feel is not enough?

A lot of people tend to forget that unlike most other suppliers in our business channels we do return much to the channels.

Here is a letter from the ANF thanking us for our support in the WA awards.

Dear Bernard & Zac
Thank you so much for your wonderful support of the ANF WA Awards for Excellence held
recently at the 5 star Pan Pacific Hotel Perth. The night saw the crowning of some of our
best newsagents and employees! Special guests at this year’s Awards included the
Member for Wanneroo; Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Commerce Mr Paul
Miles MLA, Special advisor to the Premier, Mr John Hammond, Board Member of
Lotterywest Dr Maria Harries, and VP of Global Marketing & Executive Director of Buzd,
Glenn Weiland.

Zac and Bernard, as you know, nights like these are not possible without support such as
yours and we truly thank you for your dedication to the industry.

....

Our 2015 ANF WA Retail Newsagent of the Year, Central News Bunbury, is a proud POS
Solutions user and an excellent ambassador for you in WA.

To read more and see photos of the events and a full list of winners please click here for more details.