This is a marketing tip that may give you some ideas. I was reading this article here.

Where the writer makes some excellent points, which are well worth a quick read. One point that she makes that makes a lot of sense.

There are plenty of holidays already in the US the National calendar recognizes 1,100 annual holidays, ...He adds that his site doesn’t even cover all the holidays in existence. So although "you may think: Wait a tick, aren't there already a gazillion holidays? And isn’t it weird—possibly off-putting—to just coin a new one?"

Well, this point makes lots of sense.

"Therein lies the beauty of made-up holidays: There's no competition."

Here are some ideas.

What about making an annual shop or branch founding birthday sale, we are now XX years in business. Some of my clients could make a 100 years of serving the community sale.

There is no reason why a trade organisation could not make a national newsagent day, a national pharmacist day or a national pet shop day. I am sure some suppliers would be interested in helping out with some good deal for customers.

In response to the number of newsagents switching to POS Solutions for their newsagency software we are scheduling help for former Tower Systems users. We have specialists on our team who understand both systems and can make it easier for former Tower System users to settle into our software and thereby feel comfortable sooner with the switch. Several former Tower newsagents users will be on hand to help.

Serving possibily the largest number of newsagents today, certainly the best. POS Solutions is well resourced to help newsagents switch from other software – we have plenty of newsagent customers keen to help too.

This issue came up because some are now pushing Xero cloud accounting, although to be fair many of my clients use MYOB and Quickbooks on the cloud too. What it is a model where you do not own the software, you have a subscription and every month you pay a fee generally fixed to use it.

We are now investigating cloud accounting further and have had several discussions with among others with the CBA bank. CBA seems keen on Xero and hasdone a lot of work with them. If anyone wants to try Xero cloud, I do have thanks to the CBA bank a free two-month trial. Note there are some conditions.

Now I see several advantages, the two big pluses claimed with cloud accountancy areas is as long as you have a decent internet connection, you can access your financial system anywhere. Say your accountant had a query, and he is in his office; you are in the shop, and your partner is at home all can log on the same accounts together. In reality, I am not so sure that this benefit is as useful to my clients. In all my years of business, I have never needed such a facility, mainly all three accountants I have used have their own tax system. All they want from me is in writing several standard reports which they key into their tax programs. They have sound legal reasons for doing that. When they ask me a question, I like to examine my books, check the figures in our accountancy system and check the paperwork before I commit myself.

The other advantage claimed is that you can try the software out at nominal cost. If you do not like it, you can go elsewhere with little loss. In reality, most accountancy software comes with a demo version you can try to, nor those that I have seen that adopt a cloud accountancy system have never told me that they saved a lot by going to cloud accounting. Generally, the costs are comparable, for example, quickbooks is about $400, on a cloud a similar system is $21/month plus optional extras on a yearly plan.

However, what does disturb me is the data? This is a problem that is holding us up from moving into cloud accounting. When I asked Xero how long do you keep the data if someone stops paying. I was told by one representative one year and when I had further questions and asked again another told me five. This did not give me much confidence, as in Australia, we require seven years from lodgment. Quickbooks they said seven years, that it can still be accessed in read only reports, as they do not cut you off and if someone re-subscribe they can keep using it as usual. Furthermore, a user you can actually get a physical data file and store it themselves. I liked that answer much better.

Now where is our data hosted, just in case there is any legal problem over data (Australian laws are very strict on data rights) Xero told me that they hosted overseas, while Quickbooks told me that they host in Australia. MYOB hosts abroad too. To me that was another bad mark against Xero and MYOB cloud as I like the protection of Australian law. The thought of maybe having to go to a foreign court with different laws for my data does not please me.

The next point is who owns the data. It is not so simple with cloud. Say two partners own a business; the first is the administrator of the accountancy program, if the second wants a copy of the data they may find that they are not considered the owner and get locked out. This actually has happened. It is not a problem if you own the software as all the second partner does is take a backup.

If you want to read up on an actual case of someone who had problems with cloud accounting. click here "My $20,000 mistake"

Today substantial numbers of Australian retailers are issuing and selling their own pre-paid gift cards. This market is thought to be worth at least $1 billion a year, and it is growing at 20% per annum. What makes it, particularly profitable to retailers is that a large number will not be claimed.

In general, Australians seem to love these gift cards as their recipients can pick their own gift. I know from personal experience. I could not figure out what to buy my niece. So I brought her a $100 gift voucher and gave it to her, with the words "Its no longer my problem what you want it's your problem."

Many of my clients now use our point-of-sale system to sell their own gift cards. It's a simple function on the main menu. Press a few buttons and out prints a gift voucher.

Nor is it hard to advertise, all you need is a simple sign to remind your customers that you have them. Note if you have a website or facebook page, I suggest you put it up there too.

The most popular gift card denomination is $25 followed by $50.

Here are some tips that people use that sell gift cards.

1) Entice buyers with a bonus say 10% to use for themselves. So what you do here is for a $50 gift voucher, you issue a bonus offer of $5.

2) Rather than give charity money, give them a gift voucher to entice them to shop with you.

I think you will find most gift card buyers, and recipients good customers some studies show they buy about 30% more with the gift card.

Marketing your own gift cards adds another opportunity for shoppers to buy and our system can do it for you.
 

Update: here is an interesting article that among other points discuss one of my clients use of gift voucher (link removed).

After the interest in the previous offer, there is now a new offer on XENTA terminals, they have a good reputation as they are a very practical. As you can see they have the built-in privacy shield and a clear display. They look nice and professional too on the counter. I am not certain how many are available, but I know there is not a lot.

These terminals were $25 a month, but they are now available for $5 making it ideal for those needing cheap EFTPOS.

Click here to findout more

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

For this and other supplier files please visit here

In the cash register, direct edit allows you to directly change the price, the description, the quantity and to set discounts by simply touching the details you want to change.

For example, to change the description of an item in the cash register, click or touch the description of an item, then a description override window will appear. Edit the description and click OK to return to the register. The description is changed.

For more details on what direct edit can do please click here.

There is a lot of interest currently in the latest offer exclusive now to POS Solutions clients, which included for $5 a month terminal non-tap and go terminal. This is because of the increased fees of the new pay wave terminals.

What happened is that we were invited being a foundation partner with Tyro since 15 September 2005, we went to see Tyro about partly about their new terminals. See here. They are very impressive. What I like, in particular, is the increased speed and the improved remote support.

We were quite stunned how fast tyro has grown; they now do well over 12,000 merchants and have an annual transactional volume of then more $6. 5B from nothing that is impressive.

While we were there we noticed a few of the non-tap and go terminals. We quickly jumped on them as we knew that many of our clients were complaining about the cost of the wave function as every transaction on the pay wave is a credit card transaction. This greatly increases the cost to the merchant of EFTPOS so much so that many try not to use pay wave. What we asked is if these terminals could be allocated to our clients who feel the EFTPOS transaction costs are getting out of hand. I was quite stunned and pleased when the cost came down to $5 a month. I believe that we now have 30 allocated although a few have already been snapped up. It's a great deal for our clients. The big plus of these terminals is that they can be fully integrated so making them ideal for a second terminal is someone needs them too.

If you are interested in finding out more, please click here.

One user pointed out another use for emailing receipts rather than printing it.

6) It saves time when a customer rings up to get a receipt for tax reasons, he can find and send it immediately.

Discount vouchers is something we came up in long ago. It came from our book shop clients who used it, and then we decided to introduce it to other clients.

Classically the problem is that some days are slow, and you may want to issue discount vouchers in an attempt to get them moving. A common example is a pub that has a slow period so it makes a happy hour, to encourage people to come then.

It is easy to do in our point-of-sale system.

Go to the Main Menu and select System Maintenance.
In this, menu find the System Setup page and select it.
Once the page is open select the Loyalty tab.
The value you are going to set is called the Redemption value per point option see where it is circled in red.

0.0002 used here effectively turning it off except if someone buys big, which is an excellent idea, if some buys big, it's good to encourage the big spender back.

If you want to turn it off completely, simply change it to zero and save.

On the days when you need to drum up business change it say to 0.10.

Looking at the latest ABC circulation figures with data mining, for some reason, in NSW, about 12,000 copies more than it should be for Saturday. I do not know why Saturday papers did surprising well in NSW, but they did. If someone wants to explain it, I would be pleased to find out.

June to September 2014 quarter saw print down everywhere, and it is clear that digital is not replacing it in large enough quantities to make up the difference.

The quarter saw a decline overall on this quarter to the same quarter last year a year of 9.8 per cent on weekdays and 11.10 per cent on weekends which is almost the same as the previous quarter.

Weekly magazines did not do well either despite the Australian economy doing reasonably well in this period.

For more details click here and here.

Our point-of-sale systems give you the power to email a receipt to your customer rather than print it.

Here are five unique advantages that you might have missed.

1) Receipts do not get lost.
2) You can include a marketing notice together with the receipt to advertise specials, discounts, upcoming events, superdraws or other messages.
3) It puts your shop in front of the customer again when they read their emails.
4) It saves paper. Okay it's not much but it all adds up.
5) It helps you gather customer email addresses so allowing you to contact them with email and hopefully gain visits and purchases.

In order to help our clients it would be greatly appreciated if you could supply us with a current email address, we can contact you on. It makes it much easier to contract you if we need to.

This is something that has us thinking, according to modern retail research here, discount prices are much more effective if in red.

For an example check out these two identical prices one in black and the other in red, I see the red one, which do you think is more effective?

Interestingly the effect was much more apparent with men then with women as this graph shows.

So if you want to make your discounted prices more effective, I would suggest using a red marking pen not black.

Note: If you are interested and there is sufficient demand, we could get a run of red labels printed, which could, then be printed from the computer.

After some of the discussion on my previous post on GMROI, I thought I would expand on what it is and how it is used.

In modern retail, GMROI is one of the most important and commonly used measurements in use. As I showed it is easy for you to get from our point-of-sale system. So there is no reason not to use it unless you do not have your stock figures correct, in which case it is not going to work.

What GMROI does it calculates the total return on every dollar invested in a particular stock item or stock category.

What it does is measure your stock’s total sales, gross margin, sales, stock turns and investment.

The calculation is.

GMROI = ($Gross Profit)/($Sale) x ($Sale)/($Ave inventory at cost)

The trick is once you get the report from our system is to compare the figures. You look at the top ones and check whether you have been understocking them, similarly your bottom ones maybe you are overstocking.

Then look at your retail space and what you want to do is give more space to the higher GMROI products (the 20% of items) and reduce the lower GMROI products (the 80% that just sits there).

Some people want to do it by category but the problem, here is that at the category level, the low and high GMROI products get averaged out, and it is very difficult to see anything.

Note one point I will add is your stock carry costs which would be such items as rent, transport, damage, shop theft, insurance, taxes, etc probably about 25% extra. So for every dollar invested in stock, you need about 1.25 dollars is the return – of which one dollar is for the stock while the remaining 25 cents is for overheads.So on an item a GMROI should be more 1.25 otherwise you are losing.

This saves a lot of time.

Currently most Newsagents when they send their returns via XChangeIT, they receive an acknowledgement email back.

POS Solutions, GG and XChangeIT have started tests to have this information come back from the distributors, via XChangeIT and straight back into our point of sale system.

You can now tell what returns have been sent, what returns have been accepted and all from within point of sale system.

We are excited about these developments and at present are the only POS vendor to bring our customers this much needed tool to help them audit their returns much faster.

This was done yesterday morning at Clayton Newsagency.

GMROII is one of the best ways to determine how valuable your stock items are to your business. It is used everywhere.

What it determines is how much profit you make for your investment for each item in your stock.

Usually the equation is (unit sold) x (Profit)/ (Average stock cost)

As a rule of the thumb in retail, you need about 3.2.

Say we have two items A & B and we want to determine which is better.

Now item A sells 20 items a year at $2 profit, and you had six items generally in the shop that cost you $6.

The GMROII= 20 units x $2 profit /(6 on hand x $6 cost) = 1.1 which is pretty bad.

Item B, which sold 30 items a year at $1.5 profit, and you had five items generally in the shop that cost you $1.
The GMROII= 30 units x $1.5 profit /(5 on hand x $1 cost) = 9.0 which is very good.

In GMROII terms, Item B clearly is a better product.

To do these calculations with our point of sale software is easy although it does not quite do it the same because our system has exact figures.

Now click on the selection highlighted in the reports here.

Select the list of options you want, initially I suggest you run a year, although there is no reason why you cannot run say last year's holiday season to see what best sold. It is best to do it by department. A common use is to organise magazines shelves' so the best magazines are in the top positions.

Then you will get a report like this.

As you can see the items are all listed.

One problem with GMROII, I had better warn you of is that items that you frequently run out of appear better than they are, this is because your stock holdings are artifically low. Another problem is that some stock which you sell little has a terrific GMROII figure, that is why we include sales and holding figures to tell you about these items.

Still with all its problems GMROII is considered one of the best tools in retailing.

Like always we need some intelligence when using it.

Christmas is ariving and the first of the catalogues for Chritmas is starting to arrive.

So the latest Ancol Christmas Promotion 2014 file is now available for download here.

For this and other supplier files please visit here