John Wanamaker is credited with the saying that "Half the money, I spend advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half".

This is a common problem in business. We go to a lot of trouble and money making some advertisements. We sell some goods now the question asked is did the advertisements have much to do with it? It can be very hard to tell.

For example, I have a client that sells about 12 of an item a week but sales from what we can see regularly range from 10 to 20 every week. There was a big promotion on the goods, they got into the spirit of things by doing a display, and they sold about 18 items. This is well over average but based on this it is difficult to determine whether the promotion and their presentation helped or not. See they had weeks when they sold more without doing anything.

One practical tip is to try to measure as much as possible the success of a promotion.

For example in the advertisement put in a rarely used phone number and/or email address. For example both Outlook.com and Gmail support disposable addresses without needing to register them first which is perfect for this work. Another tip which often works well is to ask people. 

Often all people want is an idea, that some interest was generated. 

The next point is that if you know that they did respond to your promotion how do you mark it into your system. Our point of sale software has a very advanced system for doing this. What you need to do is enter into the POS system a Promotion ID.

Firstly you need a Promotion ID here are some tips:

- Make a unique ID for each different promotion. This will allow you to distinguish each promotion. Don’t reuse or recycle these IDs for different promotions. If you feel you must use the same ID  add a date or year after it, eg add Feb2019, if it ran in Feb 2019.  

- Once you make an ID, don't change it. 

- Do not use spaces, it can be confusing, e.g. a person was looking at Jan  2019, and it sometimes worked, and sometimes it did not. What we found was the ID was Jan 2019 (One space no, two spaces which he sometimes used)

Now go here to Detailed Transaction Entry see red arrow, click on the image below for more details.

Now you see the Promotion ID. 

Enter the appropriate code when putting in the sales.

Now you can monitor the transactions. This may help you to alleviate the nagging feeling in the back of your mind over whether you are getting value for your advertising

In your point of sale software in the menu, you will find a series of reports under the heading Customers. 

Now start dividing your customers into four groups.

I recommend that you go through these to find the one that you like. At the very least generate a “sales by customer” report. This will allow you to identify your top customers as well as those who are not engaging with you.

The next point to do is to look at the profits you are making from your customers.

Those with low turnover you do not see much so there is little you can do here with them in the short term, so the analysis concentrates on those with the high turnover.

For this analysis, the ones you are most interested in are those circled in green, the ones that are a low profit but have a significant turnover with you. If you think about it those in the green circle, you see regularly, but they are not worth much to you. Generally, its because they are buying low margin items. 

These people are prepared to spend money in your shop which is positive, but the challenge here is to get them to buy higher margin items. 

Is your product mix correct for these people? What do they want?

Recently we have seen great deals on EFTPOS being made available for our clients. Now by the nature of how EFTPOS works, it is easy to determine its costs to your shop but have you ever asked yourself what the cost of cash is? These costs are often hidden. 

The problem is that cash handling is very labour intensive. The big cost is that it requires the most expensive employees in the shop to prepare the float, balance the count and transport cash back and forwards from the bank, which of course means that these employees are not available for profitable customer-facing transactions. 

If you are interested, I think you will find this interesting report. They estimate that it costs about 4.7% of the takings which is I think on the low side. They do however have a spreadsheet so you can use it to determine your figures. Please add a few other items like security cameras and safes to determine your figures. Then let me know.

A point that surprised me when I went to the New Retail ’19 conference which is considered  Australia’s largest retail gathering was the importance of parcel delivery in retail today. here were some figures.

In 2017/8 there was a 10% increase in the number of parcels being shipped by Australia Post. To give you a feel of how many parcels are now being shipped, Australia population is 20 million and everyday Australia Post ships out 1.3 million parcels. Australia Post is the largest but by no means the only parcel deliverer in Australia. 

What I found particularly interesting was this chart by Australia Post of weight by percentage

up to (KG)         Percentage

2                          66%

5                          19%

10                          7%

25                          7%

25 kg +                  2%

As you can see the high number of very light parcels shows that it is not because the public cannot carry it. It is convenience. 

I think that this highlighted the growing demand by the modern-day consumer who wants fast and flexible delivery plus if you have any plans of going online then delivery is a necessity.

Delivery is something you must consider. 

I found this article very interesting about the state of counterfeiting in Australian dollars. 

I tend to agree with the writer that small business with small profit margins is most at risk, how much for example does a lotto dealer have to do to make up of accepting one counterfeit $100 dollar. 

The problem is now getting worse as the counterfeiter have now solved the problem of duplicating the polymer note. What did surprise me is that the problem is so high in Western Australia! 

The main problem that SMB retailers face is if one of their staff has access to counterfeit dollars, and say they can buy it at 70% of face value. They then can replace say six $50  in the till every day with the counterfeit stuff. It is almost impossible to find out as no retailer checks what goes out only what comes in. 

Anyway, have a read here, and I would love to hear your comments.

Omni-channel retailing is now all the buzz in retail, a recent example I spoke about here was from Tabcorp which in their  Retailer_Information_Pack_Tatts in their future marketing plans show this diagram to show how much extra business they get from a retail customer if they can get him to go online too.

Figures although not as large as this is being quoted for Omnichannel retailing from other sources. Our clients through their websites are showing significant increases too although again not as big as this. Still, it is a decent increase, and so we are seeing a steady movement with our clients moving online.

What we are moving into the older multichannel retailing which many of my competitors still sell, where you keep using their point of sale software for the shop and something else for an online shop to the newer Omnichannel marketing where you have one software system, and it handles both.

The advantage of this from the retailers perspective is that your information in this omnichannel approach is in one spot, not two or three different systems, eg you do not have one customer three times in each system, you do not have a stock order three times, you do not have to do your pricing three times, etc.  Plus you do not have to do a lot of work to match up information in two or three different systems which is quite difficult as different systems behave differently.

This is why a truly unified commerce system like ours which has the POS software and the website in one system is much better. Using it you can track financials along with stock, sales, customer, etc. all the pieces of retail all in one system.  It’s the next step in retail technology.

Contact here our experts to discover how our unified commerce retail platform, can help you deliver the customer experience of tomorrow.

Our point of sale software has an extremely powerful layby system, which many of our clients use. It does everything in laybys.

One problem that came up a few days ago was a customer took a layby from one of our clients. They then paid a deposit, over the next two weeks they came and paid off a bit more. A few days ago they came to make a final payment and to pick up their product.

The problem started when they looked at the item and then claimed that this was not the item they had agreed to purchase. What they wanted was a different model which was much dearer. An argument started. As it a good customer and retailer did not want any trouble, in the end, they refunded the total amount paid and left it at that. Not that I think they had much choice, in fact, they may have been lucky as the customer could have claimed that the retailer changed the terms and demanded the newer model.

My tip If you are going to offer your clients layby, which I am not sure is a good idea now when products like Zip are available to make sure the product’s is packed in front of the customer preferably in a sealed bag with our label stuck on to the bag. This will reduce the problem.

You can know how you are doing financially with daily figures from your point of sale software.

This will show you some of the most crucial retail KPIs to give you a detailed insight into your shop. These insights provide you with better business decisions and let you know exactly how you are doing.

Go to cash register reports

Select in sales

Dissection Sales /Profitability for a given period

Now run this report for the day

Quantity some call it a customers vote. What it shows is what people are coming into your shop to buy. As a rule, the higher, the better. Some people consider this KPI to be the most important stock one as it is it what brings people into your shop.

Gross profit is why the shop exists.

What is also important here is to check that your margins are right, as if they are lower or higher then expected then there is something wrong.

Lastly, I highlighted the last row. This shows you the problems with your scanning. 

This report now available makes quite interesting reading.

The most common type of credit card fraud occurs is called *Card-not-present fraud* and makes up about 87.5% of all payment card frauds. Sometimes the card company will not reimburse you for this type of fraud, so it is worth being aware of the problem.

Here are two examples but there are many more.

1) Someone buys and then quotes a valid card detail either online, by telephone or mail order and then later the owner of the card, calls and says "Hey what is this about?" I would suggest that if you take over the phone credit card details, you do so only with customers you have dealt with before,

2) I have heard of a merchant that got burnt when a person used a card in the shop that for some reason did not when he did a swipe work. The merchant then manually entered in the card details. Only later did the merchant discover that the card was counterfeit. In this case, I would suggest that you have a policy in the shop that if a card does not work, ask the customer for a different payment method or card but do not enter the card number manually.

Some queries on yesterday post, it is mandatory for a business to issue a receipt if requested by the client.

It is an ACCC requirement that all receipts must include the following {link removed}

    * Your business name and either the ABN/ACN number
    * The date of supply of the goods
    * Information on the product or service supplied
    * The price of the item provided

These do not have to be issued by the shop POS system but generally, are, and it looks much more professional if you do issue them through your system. Today many people prefer emailed receipts which our system can be programmed to email directly to your clients. We suggest if you have a customer's email that you automatically email them a receipt. This speeds up the processing and saves paper use. It can also be a very good marketing tool, here is an idea.

Many of the management functions in your point of sale software such as voiding a transaction, changing prices and stock quantities should only be accessed by senior management. 

To protect these functions, the best, the quickest and easiest method now available are fingerprint scanners.

Here are more advantages of fingerprint scanners.

1) They are the only identification system in use now in retail that can verify with near certainty the identity of an individual. Security on passwords can be dubious as people who work with you may know your passwords, but they certainly do not have your fingerprints. Unlike ID cards and passwords, people cannot steal them to gain access to areas of your software where they should not go.

2) It is often much more convenient, people walk around with their fingers, they often do not walk around with their employee ID cards.

3) Saves money and time as you no longer have to issue ID cards, which often tend to get forgotten, lost or stolen. In fact, you can stop producing such ID cards.

The old Afterpay T2 platform was turned off today. If you are intending to use Afterpay Touch, you need to ensure that you are now on the new system.

A major problem with setting up sales targets is that 

1) If they are too high soon, no one pays attention

2) If they are too low, then its no challenge, what people tend to do here is once they make the budget to stop.

What you need are sales targets that are challenging and believable?

Well, our clients have an automatic system that can do that now. It is the focus number. It will give you a reasonably good idea of what sort of movement you can expect from every item in your shop. It is a weekly budget.

Here is how you set it up.

It is easy to set up, and use for details click here.

With effective software, you can assess your stock sales better. You can see what you did right and what you did wrong this week.

For details on how to do this, please, click here

A good point of sale stock management system keeps count of goods and reorders supplies when levels get low.

This is important as scenes like this of out of stock hurt in the short-term your sales but in the long-term your reputation.

What more sophisticated systems like ours can do is track the stock location. What it does is knowing the existing levels from your stocktake, it then adds the stock that is coming in, takes off what is sold, takes into account what is on order, uses its AI in our software to calculate the optimum amount to reorder based on performance history and seasonal sales.

If you notice on this example it actually decided to reduce the amount of stock being held.

Of course, good stock management can reduce your capital tied up in unnecessary stock and is also a legal requirement too and is part of every business financial reporting responsibility in Australia. 

As far as I know, we are the only ones in our market space to offer such a product.

The question often raised is, do I have the right stock NOW in my shop.

Well, it is a good question now that Valentine's Day is tomorrow and in this 11th hour, it is an excellent question to ask. 

Firstly how does Valentine's Day look this year?

Well according to google

I checked the public interest from 2016 to 2019 (in blue) shows a slight drop but nothing dramatic, however, unlike other years, attention is more uniform across all states. What I find particularly interesting is that the public still do not know what to buy and that includes women looking at what they should buy their guys.

Now we have established that we are looking at something similar to what we are used to, we can use the mirror marketing functions in our point of sale software. This works if you have a similar situation to previous years although I have my doubts whether Russell Zimmerman, Executive Director of the ARA  [link was removed] is right that it will exceed last year

Still, Valentine's Day is a good example to show mirror marketing as it requires specialised stock and the BIG question now is, do you have the right stock? 

Go to Register Reports marked in green.

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

Now out pops this.

Select the report what was sold in a previous period (a) last year but has not been sold in a period (b). 

This is an old database, so I used old dates, but you should use 1/2/2018 to 28/2/2018 as (a) and 01/2/2019 and 28/2/2019 as (b).

Now in brown, you will see that there is a lot more option but let's keep it simple here. 

Now you will get a report with what you sold over the period (a), but you are not selling in your current period (b). Why is the question for you to investigate now?

What to do in future

I suggest you run this at the start of every month because once you get to know it, you will find mirror marketing very useful and if you do this you will miss almost no marketing season.

I noticed this is what one of our clients Nextra Forum West has done

You cannot afford to have a potential customer struggle to pay. Customers today have a wide option of payment types which they want to use. For example today I went into a shop, and I did not have my wallet on me. If the merchant could not accept payment from the mobile phone, I could not have bought anything. If a business does not take Bpay or direct deposit, I have a lot of trouble paying those bills. 

A modern point of sale system requires a wide range of payment types.

There are some points you need to consider when adopting a new payment type.

Potential market - For example, if you deal a lot with Chinese people from China, then Alipay is something they would use.

Risk – for example, cash is always a problem also there are significant risks of mistakes. EFTPOS on MOTO mode can have serious risk problems. We had a client, who told us that he thinks when making a payment, a client of their surreptitiously switched the payment from standard to EFTPOS MOTO, then when the bill came in disputed the charges,

Service fees – for example, EFTPOS and credit card providers often charge service fees.

Transaction costs – each payment type has its unique charges. Note it may be better to pay the fees than lose the sale. 

Privacy – cash and soon bitcoin would be preferred by many I am sure in a bong shop. 

Firstly make sure its compatible with our point of sale software. Some are not, some are partly and some are fully compatible. You need to check first.

What is good about these scanners are they are easy to move around, place and then use. The big plus is that they are cheap.

What they are excellent for, is doing returns of goods where it is convenient to use them. So if you need them, they are very handy.

Just do not count on them lasting a long time. Say their life expectancy is 50,000 scans and you expect to do 100 scans a day then the scanner is good for about two years. Note for a cheap scanner that might be acceptable.

Here are some tips about buying these scanners

I suggest that you get automatic sensing, it will give you a free hand.

Check the balance of the unit some of them need to be nailed down to use because they keep falling over which defeats the purpose of getting these scanners.

What I recommend is that once in place you put a rubber band on the scanner to hold them in the stand, just in case. 

As generally, they are not good scanners, they will often do the job if your barcodes are clear, not reflective paper and dry. I would suggest you will have problems on say wet cans of drink. 

Of course, like any scanner, you need to learn how to hold it with the best angle and distance.  No getting around that.

You need to check the screen always that the items have the scanned as sometimes they miss.

Check what technical support is on offer. If something goes wrong who can you call?

What retailers need to do is identify the stock that their customers want and can see when they come into the shop.

If the customer does not see it, then many will not buy it.

What you need is your hot stock in a prominent display that shows off this product so that your customers know exactly where to go to find it.

Let us find them  

Go to your cash register reports

Select Top N Stock sales for a given period

Now select a reasonable and ask for a report by profit.

This gives you a list of your most profitable items.

Check stock levels

Now, the first point is to look through the list to make sure that you have sufficient stock on hand (SOH). The big question here is do you have highly profitable items but no stock?

Review items

Check these items to see what makes them so great, could be the position or is it the item. Check to see if they are in the best position? Are they adequately displayed? Maybe they should be in more than one location. As a rule double the size of the display in retail is said to increase sales by 50%. A good item with double the display will probably sell more than a good stock and a marginal one. 

Another possibility is to make them a bit more noticeable to your shoppers by moving them at the entrance or the checkout counter, where they can produce more.   

Position stock

Now start rearranging. The most profitable items should be front and noticeable.

Try it out

Dramatic improvements in sales can be made by using technology to improve your performance.

When ringing up items in your point of sale software, what you can do is modify quickly the amounts being charged up or down by using the discounts and surcharge buttons. 

Note that the discounts can be set up to be preset so its one button handling.

If in the process of changing the prices you much it up and just want to start again, a quick way of changing the prices back is to press F7 button here or click the spot marked by the red arrow here and it zeroes off all the discounts instantly and does let you try again.
 

Often dead stock comes into the shop because someone has accidentally ordered it. If it gets in, what it will do is take up space, hurt your cash flow and not pay any of the rent. This is how you can mark stock so that you and others do not accidentally order it.

In your point of sale software go to the stock maintenance, and/or stock received.

Now edit the item, see image below.

See where the red arrow is pointing too, mark it as discontinued.

From now on it will show it as NOT WANTED. If by some chance it does come into the shop, our point of sale software will put it on a list to be instantly returned.