Discount coupons are when you offer your customer a concession off the next purchase, based on the current purchase, a typical figure often mentioned is half the profit. It works in the sense that it increases sales but in practice often, the retailer discovers that the profit goes down. In Toowoomba newsagency, they did an extensive calculation similar to the one that I did and the result is that the owner decided to stop using discount coupons. The analysis is showing all its done is produced a large number of bargain hunters.

What is at the moment proving to be a major problem, is that they have educated their customers with discount coupons and have decided to get rid of them, a lot of customers are getting upset. Switching them to a rewards program is proving to be a difficult sell even though the rewards program is much better.

I think one lesson is clear if you decide on a discount coupon program, and it does not work; it is very hard to make an exit strategy.

Our video security systems are now the largest in our market space; I have listed here some good reasons for this, but today I want to talk about one of the latest enhancements that no-one in our market space has anything like this now.

Here is a person who steps into a room, note the computer identifies them with a code name as a male, who is not smiling. It can of course tell much more information.

Here are a sample of some more details, but there are 100s of pieces of information it can determine about the person.

Once they are in the computer, they can be named, although in practice, it is often person X. To this person can be issued four levels of warning.

1) A warning that they came to the back office, say a salesman Peter is here.

2) If you are not in the shop, an SMS can be sent to you that he has arrived.

3) That a VIP customer is here, that saves money on VIP cards.

4) Every register and the back office can be notified that a banned person (say a known shoplifter) has entered the shop with a message.

This is really advanced technology, which will fundamentally change in a few years retailing.

Let me know if you want to know more.

Recently, we have been testing a new pricing strategy in our software in some sites. It comes out of an article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology here.

New research shows that prices that take longer to say seems more to consumers, for example, 99 cents takes longer to say then 1. As such 99 cents seems bigger than one. The same effect is $4,999.99 then 5000. The dollar sign, commas and cents all add to the length. This is because as we read the price, we pronounce it in our brain.

So what we are doing is trying on some test sites, instead of pricing $4.99 our software makes it 5. $0.99 becomes 1. As to make it shorter even the dollar symbol is dropped even though it does not look so nice.

When I have some results, which are soon, I will let you know how this option works in practice.

Note according to the article the effect appears with the number 7 as it is the only number with two syllables as such it should not be used. 77 has four syllables; 80 has only two. As such 97 cents should never be used, make it 96 or 98 cents, better is a dollar and better still is one.

If you are interested let me know.

In an industry rocked recently by one very expensive court case Nextra Australia Pty Limited v Mark Timothy Fletcher we now have another one. The ink wholesaler Tonnex has gone into liquidation following an unsuccessful court battle against Dynamic Supplies. After losing the appeal, the liquidator stated that the directors decided that they could not cover the cost order and damages against them, so they went into voluntary liquidation.

What is amazing is that they did go to court as they were offered an opportunity to avoid it.
 

Are these expensive court cases worth it?

I spoke to the liquidator today, thinking that someone had brought it but was told that the assets were sold, so it is gone. I was stunned as they were a long-term major supplier that we had dealt with for years with offices in many states.
If you need to discuss alternate ink suppliers, please call.

Although my clients running our paypal interface are reporting very poor results, it appears that there are soon going to be more players in the market besides the existing banks such as Facebook. With Facebook massive user base of almost 9 million in Australia, it certainly has a great user base and with the increasing shift to mobile transactions (card less) it is particularly well-positioned to offer mobile payments. They are not alone Apple, Google and Amazon are all developing electronic wallets for Australia that will let consumers pay for goods and services with their phones, rather than use a card.

Whatever happens whether they make a major chunk of the Australian market, it is clear now that mobile phone will replace the credit/debit card. What you need to do is make sure that your EFTpos machine can handle these mobile payments.

What is happening is that the barcode extension of Vogue Australia still is incorrect! It is correct in the printed number so many have missed it but when you scan in the barcode, you will see that the bar code is incorrect.

This is what is happening.

This is the sales history by issue of Vogue Australia note almost everything is in May. The reason for this will be apparent shortly.

Now an October Vogue Australia is sold.

Here is now the history of the sale of Vogue Australia by issue.

See how it's gone into May; this is because of the errors in the barcode, see the yellow marking.

Besides mucking up your history, it may be mucking up your return figures.

I suggest that you check first your history of May's sales of Vogue Australia and then your returns.

Note this error would not occur if you use in house barcodes or magazines delivered.

What happened is a user of our software did not use the schedule and as such sent off an SMS to his client that a magazine had arrived in. This waked his client at a ridiculous hour in the morning. One of the staff members of the shop, a few hours later got an earful from the client.

Our client discussed this with us a few hours after that. I decided, firstly, to check whether our client had broken the law, and I believe that he had not (although I note here I am not lawyers) as the

ACMA states "...There are currently no requirements which dictate the timing for such alerts, as such it is not necessary that providers have systems in place to send the alerts at specific times. 

So unfortunately, if you wish to  receive usage alerts you may experience the alerts at inconvenient times...".

However, we all agreed that his client had a legitimate complaint and we decided to pass it on as a warning to others.

If you are using SMS messaging try sending it at a reasonable time, you may find this useful as a guide.

According to the Wikipedia

A card not present transaction (CNP, MO/TO, Mail Order / Telephone Order, MOTOEC) is a payment card transaction made where the cardholder does not or can not physically present the card for a merchant's visual examination at the time that an order is given and payment effected, such as for mail-order transactions by mail or fax, or over the telephone or Internet.Card not present transactions are a major route for credit card fraud, because it is difficult for a merchant to verify that the actual cardholder is indeed authorizing a purchase.

This issue has cropped up, and I confess at present we are only about 80% of understanding it.

Many of you offer a Western Union money service to your clients. Some of you are using your EFTpos to service this account to say debit a client's credit card for the payment. If you do use EFTpos in this way, essentially you are breaking your merchant service contract, which explicitly prevents merchants from accepting (motto) payments that are not in exchange for goods or services. In this case, the EFTpos terminal is accepting a card payment, for the funds to be redirected to Western Union.

If this is your standard business practise, then it should not be.

Customers who want to send money via Western Union should use cash.

A work around would be to do a cash out on the EFTpos and then do the Western Union transaction. However, you may need to check with your EFTpos provider over the fees for doing this. Note on Tyro EFTpos, cash outs are free. This may not be true on your system.

We are currently require a new helpdesk support person. We are for this position, particularly interested in someone who is a people's person who is good at handling calls. Details are available here.

Here is our video.

We offer free training to all our clients in our offices. Unlike others, to us, it’s all about making your training sessions as easy for you as possible. In our main offices, we have several training rooms, each station in the training room boasts a screen plus a large centre monitor so participants can easily see what they need to do at a glance. What we like to do is invite participants to bring their particular data to the session, so we can show them on their own data. It makes it more relevant to the participants.

For a successful session, we think it’s important that people feel comfortable and relaxed. So our training rooms have large windows to let natural light flow in. Overall it makes for a rather pleasant experience and its free.

To make a booking or find out more, please contract us.

Had a question come up about it was surprised when I discovered that one of our clients does not use it.

Visa payWave is the latest in contactless technology. What it allows you to do is for transactions under $100, for a customer to just wave their Visa card in front of an EFTPOS reader and go and there's no need for a signature or pin. Currently the supermarket group Coles reports that over half of all its credit-card transactions are now made using this contactless payment method. It must be really hurting EFTpos.

The advantages are

- It saves time at the counter because it is faster.
- It’s more convenient as people do not need to carry cash.
- The card doesn’t leave the clients hand at checkout.
- You don’t have separate papers for people to sign anything.

One point you should be aware of is that all PayWave/Pass goes through the Visa or Mastercard network and are treated as a credit transaction no matter what card is actually linked to. As such you the merchant is subject to Visa/Mastercard fees.

Since such a high percentage of customers are using it, I do suggest that you do look into it. I would suggest if you do not have it to check with your EFTpos supplier, here is a picture of what such a unit looks like from tyro.

Download tyro flyer Download

This problem is one we inherited rather than created. What happened is over the years, we have upgraded many people from other systems to ours, unfortunately one of our major competitors used Windows Server 2003. As such now we have many Windows Servers 2003. What Microsoft is going to dump like windows XP now, they will be stopping support on Windows Server 2003 next year. They will stop the stop security updates which besides creating several technical issues also creates a legal issue if data is breached.

They will also stop technical updates. Already we can see Windows XP is no longer a viable solution for mobile devices like tablets, smartphones, and notebooks. So will it be for Windows Server 2003.

You now need to consider seriously moving your business off of Windows Server 2003.

The following newspaper prices will be updated automatically by scripting for those on you that have to do it manually as you are on DOS, please note these.

The Monday to Friday edition of the Age will change from $2.30 to $2.50 GST inclusive scheduled from Monday 29th of September 
The Saturday edition of the Age will change from $3.30 to $3.50 GST inclusive scheduled from Saturday 4th of October 
The Sunday edition of the Age will change from $2.80 to $3.00 GST inclusive from Sunday 5th of October 
The Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $3.30 to $3.50 GST inclusive from Saturday 4th of October 
The Monday to Friday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $2.30 to $2.50 GST inclusive from Monday 29th of September 
The Monday to Friday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald FNNSW will change from $2.50 to $2.70 GST inclusive from Monday 29th of September 
The Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald FNNSW will change from $3.50 to $3.70 GST inclusive from Saturday 4th of October

There seems to be a lot of interest again in this newsagency case since Lexology, the major legal site for the world's leading commercial law firms, published a new article on this case Nextra Australia v Fletcher.

The article is available here in the orginal, but I noticed that it is widely circulated in such publications like the Franchise Bulletin here. This is actually where most newsagents are reading it.

What the is saying is that if you do run a social media even in only personally it may have a *commercial* character and as such breach Australian Consumer Law. If you do have a personal Facebook page, blog or twitter account, or if you are thinking about starting one, it is worth reading this article.
 

The Lottery Retailer of the Year was also our client Nightingales Pharmacy & Newsagency, website is here.

Its nice when people write to say this to you.

Hi Bernard,

Thank you for your email. We were very excited to be the Lotterywest winner here in W.A..

We appreciate the role that POS solutions has in our business and the effort that your team put in to ensure that our system is running smoothly (and to answer our many queries). Phil is my contact when I have questions and he fantastic, and I know that the other members of the support team are excellent, too.

Kind Regards,

Simone Jackson

Nightingales Pharmacy and Newsagency - Kalamunda

 

 

 

 

 

Say you want to add a comment that will print on the receipt on the sale of specific stock items, you can do it.

In stock maintenance, pressing the Notes button (near bottom right), for a stock item. This will bring up the stock notes box. Put a note in here starting with "^" and it will appear on the receipt.

For example, say you put in ^Next week, this item will not be available. This message will appear at the bottom of the receipt.

In what was apparently a very good night at the ANF WA Newsagent of the Year Awards at the Pan Pacific Hotel Perth, several of our clients took at the top awards.

We were pleased that out of three awards open to our clients, POS Solution clients took two, note we may have got all three but we are not sure.

Central News Bunburg was the winner of the Retail Newsagent of the Year, face book site is here to wish them congratulations.

The Lottery Retailer of the Year was also our client Nightingales Pharmacy & Newsagency, website is here.

I think the judges picked well as both of these are well run businesses with proactive change-embracing people backed by a team of high quality employees who support the business and its goals. Recognition for their good work is well deserved in each situation.

If you still one of those that are having problems with importing Hallmark invoices using XChangeIT, please follow these steps to set it up.

1. From the Main Menu, go to Stock Systems
2. Then select XChangeIT.
3. Click on the Advanced tab.
4. In the Service Provider drop down box, select XChangeIT.
5. In the Supplier drop down box, select Hallmark.
6. Click the Find button.
7. In the Partner Code box put in HM
8. Click OK.

If you have some queries about your GST and you want to check it, why it does not seem to be right, what you can do is audit the figures on a daily, weekly, monthly or whatever is required to try to find where the error.

You will find it in here

Cash register> Register reports > Sales > GST Summary for a given period

This is an extremely detailed report showing the GST information based on the selected period.

What I find it particularly useful is in tracking down errors. For example, say I see a GST figure in the BAS that looks off. Using this report I can break it down to two sections of one and a half months each, then see which one looks wrong. Then I take that one that looks wrong and split it into two sections, check them and so on till I find the day of the error.

Give it a shot and see how you go.

Also, there are many other reports there too to help our clients do better.

Years ago we first introduced to our clients the ability to SMS their clients' messages. It works well, when a client orders say a particular magazine, when the magazine arrives in the store an SMS is sent to the client that it is now available for pickup. The SMS costs are fairly small, depending on the quantity purchased 7.5 to 10 cents an SMS. What I have noticed is that over the years, interest in SMS has fallen as email has become more important as a messaging tool. Still, many of our clients have continued with SMS although it is dearer for a combination of reasons such as it is faster to get the message across, people tend to read their messages much more than email and an SMS does not get lost in spam filters. So there is still a need for it.

I contacted our current supplier recently to see if I could get a cheaper SMS for my clients and was bluntly told that the deal our clients have now is a pretty good deal AS IS and that it was probably about the cheapest out considering the volumes they purchase. However, another SMS provider offered to give our clients cheaper an SMS, if we could supply them with an order of 10,000 a month. What I would like to know who would like to join such an offer? So I said we will see how much interest there is in cheaper SMS?

If you are interested, please let me know the quantity per month you would like?