Well, Victoria today joined most of Australia except NSW by banning single-use plastic bags today in retail.

This ban affects small business only as the larger retailers have long stopped plastic bags here. 

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PS Good luck and happy punting, we wish you a happy Melbourne Cup day.

Today, a customer display is something that anyone with a Point-of-Sale should consider. 

Here are some advantages and some points to consider if you are thinking of getting one.

The advantages are:

- That your customers like to see what you are charging them and appreciate you being transparent as they can see that they are being charged fairly as they can see what is happening now. This inspires confidence among your customer and in practice, can boost customer loyalty. 

Most of your suppliers have large numbers of items on catalogue. I would say a typical small client of ours would be selling actively over a year selling over 43,000 lines. That is a lot of work if you order once a week to handle it. Just do a calculation on how much it costs you now to order stock?

Those that do not computerise it, tend to do much of the ordering on gut feel and memory.

Zippay can now be directly integrated into our Westpac EFTPOS link. 

This may be useful for those that sell product through Amazon in particular as Amazon now accepts Zip.

The big plus, with zip is that by using it you are giving your customers the power to pay later interest-free with little risk to you. 

I used to go to a supplier of mine frequently, and this quote was on their wall. I liked it so much that I took a copy and put it my wall in our office and now for almost 40 years, I have read it every day I come to work. Mahatma Gandhi was a very wise man.

Well, now we are currently putting together our annual support survey for 2019. We have done it every year for 38 years. Boy, 2019 year has gone quick.

I was listening to a video newsletter. In this video what the presenter did was did an interview with a small business owner who owns and runs a successful lotto agency in Dandenong. 

We are entering now the holiday season, the next major one in the rank is on the 29 November, Black Friday which as you can see from google trends now has overtaken in interest in Australia Fathers day. It is a shopping holiday,

As you can see from the graph, Black Friday in blue has overtaken in Australia interest Fathers Day.

Product bundling is probably the most successful and common marketing tool in business today. Ours is one of the few retail packages that does it really well, I have noticed. So please follow the logic and the solution below.

You go to buy a TV cable plan. It will have a set of channels and access to some loyalty club all with one price. Another example would be if you go a restaurant and get a special price if you buy a full meal. In both cases, if you add the items up and you will find it cheaper to take the bundle.

What Tabcorp have done is made changes to their system. here are some FAQs.

What is the purpose of the changes?

So you can differentiate between lotto card paid tickets and non-lotto paid tickets. The only way to do was for each lotto product to have two different barcodes depending on how it is sold.

Will, it involves us in any more work?

Absolutely not!

The method we suggest is mirror marketing which is a proven method to make a check on your existing stock lines for the coming day, a week etc.

Here is a step by step method for doing it.

Go to Register Reports marked in green.
 

Now select in stock, "Stock Sold During Period(a) Not Sold in Period(b)"

Yesterday a client contacted us which experiencing an outage on their internet. There is nothing that anyone can do now. I had a client that registered himself with the Ombudsman complaining about the problems on the NBN and was told he was number 30,000 on the list.

The ACCC measurements here are interesting.
 

A big challenge with online selling now is called the last mile problem.

It is easy to sell the product online, it can be delivered to an address at a cost, but is there a person at that address to accept it. This is needed as if I am sending a $500 item, I do not want to leave it on a door.

Using shopping seasons is a very successful marketing method; for example, the bank Tyro referred me to a study of the Australian holiday Click Frenzy here. Even for a minor hioliday, it is impressive. 

In our marketplace, probably the most important source of information on technological views is our yearly survey which we have been doing for over 30 years. This year we decided to add a question on eCommerce websites.

Although it is early days yet into the survey, it makes interesting reading.

Here are the results.

We are now coming to the official start of the Christmas holiday period. I hope you are ready.

Among other things, you will need to measure your shop to see how it went for you.

Here are two KPIs that I recommend you use in your shop as an absolute minimum for shop management.

Foot traffic

This is a tip. What I have noticed in many companies, that what you will see in the back is a KPI board. This is filled out regularly and shows relevant details for the people that work there that management is particularly interested in everyone following. In a factory, I saw a board listing is the number of accidents. In a collect house, I saw one listing the amount of money collected this month.

In point of sale touch screens are faster to use than conventual screens. Windows 10 is made for touch.

I find it more natural to use. Rather than look at the screen, I look for the appropriate button on the keyboard then I touch the spot on the screen.

I want to do a particular function like "School booklist", I look for that on the screen, once I see it, I press it.

Sometimes, I get inspired when I talk to my clients about what they do in their shop.

Frequently, I hear from newsagents that their traditional markets are down and how it is affecting their businesses. Well, Nextra Sunbury is a newsagency, one of many nextra shops.

Well, it is Black Friday, and many of our suppliers are looking at today is the last chance they have to move the retail point of sale equipment this year before the Christmas freeze comes, so they are coming up with good offers. 

Here is today's offer we have got today a good price reduction on handheld scanners, this discount we are passing on to our clients. If you are interested in a handheld scanner Symbol LS2208, let us know now.