Here are some tips on how to deal with customers with disabilities

There are a lot of people with disabilities. For example, mental health condition, mobility impairment, they are very short, have dementia, etc. 

If you think of it, we are talking a sizable percentage of the community.

It can be hard to deal with such people in retail. 

Well, there are many changes to everyone, there are many restrictions on us because of COVID-19.

In Victoria, the big one is that people can only shop 5 km from home. What can they do, nothing but stay strong? There are plenty with worse problems now then this restriction.

If you want to know your feeder area for the shop now in Victoria, there are many sites out there that can help you.

Our Melbourne office will close tonight 
Our Interstate offices will remain open

I got asked what time should people be closing the shop, as I was not too sure, I decided to see what others are doing last night. 

After looking at a few shops, I decided that this sign looked fair and reasonable. Also, they are a big company, so I am sure they have checked it out. 

So this would be our recommendation.

I have spoken about click and collect a few times here over the past years. 

If you have not already done so, this is why you should look at Click and Collect!

Near me is a small strip shopping centre. I walked down the shopping centre what I discovered that every single shop in my centre had a sign in their window advertising their click and collect service. Looking at the cars coming and going, I could see it was in use. Some of the shops, its the only business they can have. 

We are all used to scenes like this, at the trade shows!

Years ago, people meet at trade shows as they went from stand to stand. They introduced themselves and exchanged information about current products. They saw new trends, learnt about coming innovations. They were fun for both the public and the trade people to go too. 

I'm afraid I have to disagree with this video.

This shock of COVID-19 is leading to structural changes in the economy, but his arguments are well expressed. So although it is off-topic, this is something for you to think.

We all know people that are doing it tough. Government handouts are no substitute for a job. In Australia, 37,000 deaths in the US would be about 2,800 people.

Anyway look at the video and make your mind up and please let me know what you think.

Consumers look at many factors when buying food, including where a product produced and what is inside of it. If you need to put on your label, CoOL (Country of Origin Label) , Ingredients and Nutrition Table

Check out this label, which I have marked with blue and green arrows to highlight this information.

Freight makes up about 9% of the Australian economy. That does not include much of the last mile delivery costs.

The problem of deliveries delays is something we all have experienced and talked about here. 

What is also shocking is the increase in the cost of freight. If you are in a low margin industry like ours and many of you are, it does not take much of an increase to destroy your margin. 

Q: Improve traffic in your shop? 

A: Google.

Coronavirus has increased internet usage. Not surprising as many people right now are stuck at home. They are using google to find the goods and services they need close by them? They are not going out! How many of them are seeing your shop online?

We can have you on a website now. 

Imagine I want to get some toys for my kids. I cannot go to my regular supplier, so I go into google and search. 

Dear valued client,

Boy have things change, but we are open and trading as usual

The past few days have been tough for many businesses in Melbourne like us and we are all here feeling the pain that has come with the implementation of Stage 4 restrictions. 

If you have not yet, look into using Social Media marketing!

Today more then ever, every business needs social media marketing. Few are going to walk past your shop now. So many of our clients now every day do something on their Facebook company page. It is their main communication method. Today in business using social marketing has never been more important. Vital, I would say.

No business can ignore social media as part of its marketing mix.

Checkout statistics for social media in Australia

Why identifying your top-selling items and you can do with this information!

Well, who knows what sells well today! It is all different then it was! With COVID-19, your experience now works against you.

What you need to do is look at today, see what worked and try to figure out why it worked. We can help you with this, and it is easy to do in our point-of-sale system.

Go to Register reports

We are confident that we are giving you our users, the best CRM for your business free. So I was pleased that salesforce who are the number one in this filed invited us to attend their conference on their CRMs yesterday. I checked them out.

Click here if you wish to see some of the talks here.

A tip to speed up searches, unlike many of our competitors, we built our software from scratch, so we are in the best position to optimise it!

One adorable function we offer is that we put in a search engine in various sections.

For example, in the creditor (suppliers) section.

Say you want to find a supplier of goods, but you are not sure of the name.

Not to worry, use our software's inbuilt search engine. Here is how you do it.

Go to the main menu and then select in Creditor > Maintenance.

Years ago, one of our clients came down with multiple sclerosis. It was a shocker to us all. Never would we have thought that this guy would get it. There was nothing wrong with him, except for his movements. He could, in theory, still work the computer at the shop. So we were asked to help. 

We immediately investigated the voice control software which his carer decided on Dragon. Then made many changes to our software to help. It was a limited help. It was not easy for him to use all the controls he required.

The preliminary retail trade figures have been released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). It shows that Australian retail turnover rose 3.3 per cent in July 2020, seasonally adjusted. Interestingly turnover rose 12.2 per cent when compared to July 2019.  This is true in all states and territories except of course Victoria.

As governments all over Australia are put financial relief measures for SMB businesses impacted/closed by the COVID-19 restrictions.

Yet many of my clients are not able to get anything.

What do you say?

I have a client who has a dog training school. Well, it is closed, and somehow for some reason, they are not eligible.

A client a beautician has been closed down.

How can we sign and witness documents in a pandemic? This is getting to be a real problem in this pandemic.

Business must go on, and documents must be signed. How do we do this as many of us often now are not near a printer or fax?

This is what I do. I convert the electronic document to be signed into a pdf. Then I use a free website, pdfescape

I import the pdf to that site.

This came up a few days ago, and what it has done is mucked up a shop's sales history file about profit.

Say the retail item cost is $10.00 and it costs you $5.00

What happens is you may decide to do a sales promotion in your shop, and it looks like this.

Here every pack sold means that each item sells at $6.66 and they cost you $5 each. So you have made $1.66 profit on each item. 

Today, your monitor and computer come with a large number of settings. These can tweak your screen to make it look better for you. Many of these controls are standard such as brightness, contrast and colour. Many are quite advanced, and even experts have trouble understanding them.

So I get this question a lot, how to improve the screen.