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.

For those people who use Touch Networks, we are now rolling out the lastest upgrade. One of the key and immediate benefits will be that you will be able to easily and quickly process the latest Transurban barcoded products for Citylink and Govia. This will generate additional revenue and foot traffic.

If it goes to schedule we hope to have Eastlink Tolling providing similar benefits in 2016.

The biggest problem with iPads in retail is that people staff, and customers steal them. As such what you need is some way of protecting them. Here are some cases for iPads, I saw in Denmark to do this.

We have had a client that had the cable holding the iPad ripped out, so it certainly not a complete cure.

The other problem is they can still be dropped. When this happens the glass in the front sometimes cracks. Unfortunately, this is not covered under warranty. The problem is that the iPads are extremely difficult to fix. I consider this to be a major design flaw which I am sure is deliberate.

If you do intend to use an iPad in the shop (something I system allows) I recommend you copy the serial number and keep it in a safe place. You will find it at the back of the iPad. Use that one not the one in the box.

Group selling can be one of the most effective ways to generate traffic in your store and generate sales. With our software you can set specials in your store such as multiples of one item for a discounted price, multiple items combined for an advertised price or buy some and get one free so say you could set up a bakers dozen so when your customers buy 12 they can get one free. Here is where you do it.

However, that of course is only the start of what you can do with it once you set up the rules; you could, for example, set up a rule so if customer buys say 5 of a range of stock they could get a different product either at a discount or gift from a selected range of stock. It is extremely flexible.

If you like you can set it up so the customer can buy many separate times and when they reach the desired level. they get the benefit. In a program, particularly effective in coffee shops of ours, people can buy over time 12 coffees, and they will receive the 13th item free. If you want to you can make it more complex still such as “Get 12 coffees and get 20% off 13th coffee between 2pm - 3pm Weekdays and 5% on Weekends between March & June; Valid only if you bring in your physical barcode card”

Well, our clients went on a roll, and took most of the awards in ANF WA Awards for Excellence, which is some of the most prestigious and sought awards in newsagencies so unsurprisingly, competition was fierce. The interesting point is that out of those competing for the Retail Newsagency of the Year over 70% were our clients.

We’d like to congratulate all the winners on their success, and state how proud we are to being system partners with them, and we are happy that we did play a part in their success. We wish them all the best for the future.

Here is a tempting offer I saw in Croatia.

When I discussed this with one of the staff that I think was one of the owners what he assured me was that the sign worked fine. He went on further to state if your prices are reasonable and fair, do you really need to discount to get customers? This bar was full so it did not look like it did need to offer a discount.

Before running a sale or offering a discount you need to determine what you are doing it, for example, is it to gain new customers, or are you trying to get more out of existing customers, or perhaps you are looking to get rid of excess stock.

Our system can allow you to do all this, for example, to try to get new customers you may try a policy of loss leader by making a few items, particularly cheap (this is what often supermarkets do, their margins are not much different to anyone else, but they do have a $1 milk), if alternately you want to get more out of existing customers, you may need to look at running a loyalty programme to add that personal touch.

Above all, what you need to do is measure, so you can figure out how to improve. Three questions I would recommend you ask yourself are:

1) How much discount are you giving away? Industry figures are for loyalty programs are just under 1% discount for total sales.

2) How much of that discount is new business and how much is existing business you are giving away? If you do not know, I suggest putting in 50% for your initial estimate, half as new business and half as existing business.

3) How much profit is new business and how much is existing business that you are giving away? Again if you do not know, I suggest putting in the 50% for your initial estimate.

Now do your sums.

As the new receipt printers replace the old ones, it does leave the retailer with a problem, what do you do with the aged now superseded receipt printers?

Here is what one enterprising Danish businessman did with there's. They turned it into a ticket machine. Press the button and it gives you a ticket to give you place in line.

Please give me a few days to get back into the routine. As I know there is a big pile of work waiting for me. Three weeks of it plus what will come.

Here are some photos of my trip

Denmark here I am, we all put on weight there.

Love this French cooking

They converted this junk yard into a terrific museum, going through the old cars, bikes, computers, radios, was incredible.

A guy in Bulgaria spent over 15 years carving this; the detail is just incredible
 

The cathedral in Strasbourg

You may recognise this as this if you are interested in cult movies as this is the city of Dubrrovnik where much of the game of thrones is filmed.

There are some big palaces in Europe
.

Hi everyone,

I am taking a short break until the 6th of October.

I am flying to Germany and next off to France, Denmark and making my way to Greece and after that, I am not sure but I want to go north to Serbia but it may not be possible.

I hope to be back rested after my holiday, until then stay beautiful and take care!

Regards,

Bernard

PS: I will be monitoring occasionally my emails, if you need to contact me.

Our point-of-sale system can handle many different types of stock, for example, secured items. These are items that have legal requirements on security.

This is how you enter in these items.

Go to stock maintenance and then catalogue, you will see there are a list of these very specialised item categories.

Going through the others

1) Fragile are for those that are extremely breakable.
2) Those items that require special security.
3) Perishable are those items that have use by dates.
4) Refrigerated for those that need a fridge.
5) Heavy warning are for those items that are weighty and need legally a warning to whoever handles them as there are potential risks.

Touch screens are definitely the future, from windows 8 onwards it is all designed to be used with touch.

I find touch more initiative and faster to use. Here are some points to consider if you are thinking of purchasing a touch screen.

Firstly, check the picture quality. Furthermore, check how bright it is, this part is a matter of personal choice. For example, I have noticed that I prefer it brighter than most people. What I have noticed about touch screens is that the screen often appears to be more reflective then normal screens. There is little anyone can do about this. Sometimes on these screens, I also notice they go a bit blurry for a short time; this blurriness goes quickly away, but I have found no way to stop this.

Now check the number of simultaneous touches the touch screen can have, control alt delete is three yet many touch screens can only handle two touch points.

While you are doing this check the power and control buttons often on a touch screen, these are too easy to accidentally press. Make sure it's not going to be a problem.

In addition, check the stand, a touch screen monitor is different from a standard monitor because it is hands-on. If you are standing you tend to want a touch screen that is leaning backwards slightly, if you are sitting you want one that has a greater inclinations. So check the viewing angles. This is why I prefer the screen to be on a stand to give me wide movement.

Check the cables supplied, some do not supply cables, if they are not supplied there will be an extra cost.

Personally I would recommend using desktop speakers as I do not care much for the integrated speakers in the monitor. The other problem with these integrated speaker if use in a business situation the software keeps making these noises beep, beeps, beep, which can get quite irritating.

Because monitors do last a while whatever windows version you are using now, you also need to make sure that it will work with Windows 10.

Hope this helps.

Out-of-stock is very broad and is defined as happening if the customer when they come into a shop and cannot get the stock, they came to get.

I was reading a new study of the retail industry of how much is currently being lost by these stock-outs it makes quite shocking reading. According to this IHL’s research here out-of-stocks losses total £419.9bn billion in lost revenue annually for retailers and the leading causes are:

1) The stock is not in the shop (£157.7bn)
2) The customer could not find anyone to help them ( £80bn)
3) Staff could not find stock (£45.1bn)
4) Price/offer did not match advertising (£49.1bn)
5) For everything else the loss was £87.1bn

Now taking out number (5) because we have no details and number (4) is a supplier issue which the retailer cannot do anything about which should not happen but does all too often. A typical reason for (4) is that a supplier spends a great deal of money on advertising, and the retailer does not know about it in time and/or does know but does not get the correct stock.

We can say that (1) not having sufficient stock is only about half of the problem and its either a shop problem because they have not ordered enough for various reasons or a supplier issue as they have not sent enough stock. The other half of the problem (2) and (3) is probably the shop layout and/or staff knowledge and training.

Now in my experience its not so much shop layout, which is logical and fine but that over time as stock gets moved around people do not know or cannot figure out where the stock is hiding.

As such most of this can be solved if people used the stock location. Then all they need do is call up the stock item and see its location. This location can be added quickly to any stock item or added in bulk when doing a stocktake by telling the point-of-sale system to update the location, click on image below for more details.

By this simple procedure, the part we can solve of the out-of-stock problem is solved.

One of my clients had an old windows tablet sitting around doing nothing.

So what they did was connected a scanner to it, linked it by wifi to the Tyro unit and their main receipt printer and are now using it at their merchandise counter as an extra workstation.

Here are a couple of pictures.

Although it is a cheap tablet with 2 Gb RAM running Windows 8, it works perfectly. It is also mobile, which can be really useful in the shop.

This is a great example of how flexible our point-of-sale system is!

According to the 2013 Global Security Report by Trustwave, 71% of small business owners were victims of a data breach. The report blames it on the fact that they are the least equipped to protect themselves. This is what makes them attractive to hacker.

What is particularly scary for small to medium size business in the US is that according to a study by Experian, 60% of them closed down within 6 months after a data breach.

41 percent were due to malicious or criminal attacks, employee negligence caused 33% and system glitches 26%. I am not so sure the employees were that negligent.

Now many people mistakenly believe that because MasterCard and Visa take responsibily for the debt that they are okay. Not true. What happens in these situations is that banks will look into recovering their monies at the retailer and generally this is what they do with fines, and legal costs

Say you had a data breach and it did go to court. What is a judge going to say if he is told, you had an XP machine, the eftpos unit was old, you had no anti virus program, no formal written Internet security policy etc.

Here are some measures you could take to reduce the risk would be

Make sure you have a current eftpos unit. Ring up your supplier and make sure that it is, if they say it is okay, write the details of the conversant in your diary.

Make sure you use an antivirus software and it is up todate. My favourite is Avast which is free.

Make sure your window software is up today. Really you should not be running now anything earlier then Win7 in a business.

Do not treat passwords as a joke. Here is a very good site to test your password. You want something at least strong. Change your passwords regularly, this is particularly true of passwords used to dial in.

Be carefull were you surf on the net. You want to go to these sites do it on a non business machine.

Explain to everone in your business how important it is that the information you have is kept confidential. Then write in your diary that you did this.

The fault for a security breach, can be severe. At the very least, a retailer can be cut off eftpos. Finally, there are also your customers who trusted you. What are they going to think if they find out about it?

Yesterday night, two people rang me up to ask my thoughts about workflow software. I was quite stunned by this as I doubted it was that suitable for them.

This type of software is something that either you will use a lot; some organisations just live by it, or you will drop it ASAP. Generally, it is used by reasonably sized organisations and it is particularly useful if there are many tasks that are standard, complex, messy and involve a lot of people but there is no reason why smaller ones could not use it successfully.

What it is, is in any organisation, there are many tasks that are repetitive and need to be done. What workflow management allows them to do is automate the scheduling and roistering of these tasks.

What you do is set up what are called rules to be triggered when something happens say among 6,000,000 other tasks that need to be done tomorrow we are expecting a supply of greeting cards to arrive. Once this workflow software processes these 6,000,000 tasks, it sends emails and/or SMSs to the appropriate people telling them what needs to be done. Among these tasks will be the cards that are expected will need processing. As people do these tasks they tick it off in the workflow software. This can trigger more rules that notify others what they need to do. Now say, for example, someone counting the cards finds that some are short supplied. They then make a new trigger that alerts the person responsible for putting the claim about what has happened.

What people love is that while all this is happening, everyone knows what they need to do, if they want they can see in the workflow program what is happening and what further needs to be done.

The benefits are.
 

1. It instantly assigns tasks so speeding up the creation of the roster
2. It keeps everyone in the loop
3. Jobs are not forgotten
4. Efficient
5. Standardises working methods

Now if this sounds interesting to you, here is my advice on how to proceed.

You need software that is well-established. You are talking about running your company. If this takes off for you, you need something that will be around in a few years.

The next point is you need to walk before you run. So what you need is a system that has a decent free trial period and/or a free option to try out first before the leap in. What you can count on is that initially, you are going to need a lot of time to get it to work for you.

There are many excellent choices for such software, the two that I recommend you look at are:

1) Zoho which is my favourite.

2) insightly would be my second recommendation.

Both are fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it. Both have free plans. They both can communicate to mobiles. Both have good reporting.

I doubt you would be sorry for either of them.

And of course, let me know how you go.

Mobile phones have really taken off with the Australian public. Almost everyone carries one around.
As a result, SMS marketing has developed as an important new channel.

Although most of our clients use email to notify their clients, including us, there are some advantages to consider in using an SMS instead.

1. SMS has a staggeringly high open rate as compared to email. A good email campaign generally gets you about 20 per cent open rate. SMS messages will get you more than 99%.
2. Not only that but SMS is read within an average of 7 seconds while an email average at about a day often it can be a few days.
3. Lastly, people respond much higher to SMS.

Here is an actual example that occurred with one of my clients. A customer made a special order with them. It took a while to get. However, when the goods arrive in their store, an email was sent to the customer automatically that it is now available for pickup. The problem was that these goods arrived to every other shop at the same time in the area. As the person wanted the goods, they bought it in one of the other shops before they got the email. They then were nice enough to call to say how sorry they were, but they waited long enough and had not heard from the shop. So they got it elsewhere. If the shop had sent an SMS, they probably would have got the sale as the email was sent in the morning before the customer had purchased the goods.

One point I should say is there is a cost, however, with SMS. Depending on the quantity purchased with us, they range from 7.5 to 10 cents an SMS. Which I believe is the cheapest in our market space.

Please let me know if it is not.