With good data, incredible good things can happen.

* You can order the right quantities.

* Top sale items can be determined and pushed.

* Department sales figures and trends can be identified.

*You are in control and it shows

But what happens when your data goes bad?

* You do not know what is happening

* You order incorrectly

* Are not positioning your stock correctly

* It reflects poorly on your business.

Your business needs good (accurate) data.

PS Also, keep in mind that data can go bad very quickly, and once it's wrong, it can be a big job to fix.

Many retailers use CRM; our clients have a great one for free.

Although I have not seen any of our clients report any significant customer churn. I have checked our CRM, I can find little sign there yet the figures now coming out from other suppliers of CRM are saying that companies have noticed that "customers are leaving at extraordinary rates." We all expected this as the COVID crisis was a prolonged crisis. This was long enough to change the public's habits. With the reopening, people are now coming out. As the old patterns are just memories, we are now looking at something new. We are trying new shops, restaurants, doing new things, etc.

Meeting the danger

This customer relationship emergency needs to be met with a return to nuts and bolts. We need to review our customer relationship. The problem is not that people's needs have changed, but they are now exploring.

I would also suggest you look into your CRM system.

There is a "Great Reassessment" across society.

With COVID, we had to stop training in our training rooms. We switched to Zoom meetings for training. 

Well, now we are running them in-house again. So you can have free training in our training offices now. In it, we teach you and your staff what they need to know and give them pointers on what the system can do to maximise their productivity.

If you prefer, you can still use Zoom.

I think you will find that our training is both comprehensive and focused.

This will allow you free, to have a better product as you will get better use of your software.
 

Many of our clients have contacted us needing help due to the floods in North-East Australia now.

One of our clients sent us this photo of the flood in Lismore NSW; check it out. Same place a few days later.

It seems impossible that so much water can build up that deep across so much land. So I decided to check it out to see if it was legit. Click here so you can see what it looked like before the flood. That is a lot of water.

It's mind-blowing.  

It will take time to know the full extent of the loss, but I am sure that many have lost everything.

One big plus of DTI format receipts is that I briefly discussed a few days ago is its ability to email receipts. This is part of its flexibility.

Email receipts have a phenomenal readership.

* Open rates are about 75%.

* People look at email receipts more, about 14.8 seconds, which is 185% higher than what they spend on an average email.

More figures are available here. I am sure if you look at them you will be impressed.

There are many other big pluses. About 70% of people will give you their email address to get a receipt. You have a great excuse to harvest email addresses.

If you are sending them out, it would be best to include: 

* Thank you note

It has to be brief. A one-liner, for example, say, "Thank you for your purchase and your support of local business," 

Social Media

Your address in Facebook for them to checkout with a note, "Check us out on Facebook." 

Promotional content

Consider adding about 30% extra for promotional content for your business. They have brought from you, why not see if they will buy more.

Follow up

What has proven successful is sending these people a follow-up a few days later with a thank you message with a promotion.

Try it.

It is all free; what is stopping you?

What is commonly done is to measure a customer's spending in a loyalty program in a retail shop. Then compare these figures to the average customer.

I am sceptical.

The spend is not profit.

Yet many so-called retail experts quote this as a critical measure of how successful the loyalty program is as they rarely get profit figures. So this is the best they can do.

The other issue is that one supposes that members of your loyalty programs are already spending more in your shop. So, in most cases, they are spending more with you already. The extra problem here is that they do it to gain more rewards in their purchases, so you are often discounting your products to people who are buying them anyway.

If you are running a loyalty/VIP program in your shop, here are some KPIs; I recommend looking into them.

In my experience, even vague figures are better than none.

Budget

A professional marketer will budget a loyalty program's cost at 1% of sales. Sometimes they will take it to 2%, but it is too much to do anything higher without the suppliers' help. If you are doing a million turnover in your shop, you are looking at about $10,000 cost maximum. 

You need to know whether you are getting $10,000 back in profit.

Membership

Examine your membership. How big is it? Is it growing or declining? Where are the members coming from? Existing customers or new customers? If it's existing customers, then your program is dubious.

To determine this, you need names.

Are you just giving a discount to existing customers?

Email list

The email addresses are said to be worth 2%. If you are not collecting these email addresses, your loyalty program is down 2%. In today's market, you must communicate with your customers. You have to find a way to get your customers to come back. This is the key to profitability.

Usage

How many are using it, and at what frequency?

Member spending vs. non-member spending

The primary purpose of a loyalty program is to get you more customers and get them to spend more. Is it? So do not just check the sales totals but also the basket size, profitability, etc.

Pre-membership vs post-membership spending

What do you need to know that it is working?

The figures can be gotten here.

​Use your data, not the seat of your pants.

This is the best way of issuing receipts through your client's bank account using DTI. It is also cheaper as you do not have to print paper receipts.

This is what it looks like.

This receipt has your logo and the sales details of the transaction required by law.

It is now the most advanced receipt format (DTI) available to retailers!

One significant advantage is that, with DTI, your customers can see their receipt in their bank account. So a verified copy of the receipt is always available to them. This saves you time.

Some other advantages would be

* You do not have to print the receipt.

* Free SMS or email sending of receipts

Forgery and misuse.

It is much harder. For example, a person grabs a receipt from a rubbish bin and tried to claim it in your shop. They now need to show how come this receipt is not from their account. If they want to argue well you have a verified copy of the receipt from a bank-approved secured server stating who purchased it.  

Let us know if you want to try DTI, free?

In your POS software

Go to Sales-Register > Dissection Companion Sales by Period.

Besides telling you sales totals for a department, it can tell you so much more.

Try looking for is an abnormally high number of products for other stuff that sells well with that department. It is beneficial as it can help you select a product to display near a department prominently. This is a well-known method of increasing incremental sales that all majors use.

What you do is take an item that sells well with that department and place it in that department's area. There is nothing wrong with a good seller having a few spots in the shop. 

As you can see here (green arrow), there are quite a few extra sales that could be made by moving some other companies' chocolates close to Darrel Lea Chocolates. Darrel Lea may not like it but ....

Another great use is more long-term. If grouped by department, you can get a feel of where you should position the display for the department. As you can see here by the green arrow, the books should be close to the stationery.

You may be able to pick up a few extra sales if people looking at your book can see your stationery too. 

Why not try it now?

Look at a few departments and see if you can get a few ideas. It will only take a few minutes tops.

Talking to one of my clients, we discussed how people get burned by giving credit to a terrible risk. So it brought up whether there is any way of getting someone's credit score to determine risk.

A credit score is what credit bureaus calculate based on your credit history information. This gives them a feel of how likely the people are to be reasonable risks. One problem is that these scores frequently change over time.

One general rule often stated by credit officers that is misleading is that, on average, women have higher credit scores than men. That is true, but the difference is minimal. In practice, there is no difference.

Without a paid account with a credit bureau, I have no idea how to get this score. As a person who had such an account, I doubt you would find it helpful if you did have it. It's a lot of trouble to use, the number of bad debts is fortunately small, and the costs are more than the value unless you are big. Plus, there are three major credit bureaus in Australia. I have no idea which one is the best, but I know that all the big four banks in Australia tend to check credit reports from all of them. So to do it properly, you need three accounts.

Yet, here is a tip, I can tell you how to get your score for free.

If you go to Equifax, you can download a copy of your credit history once per year for free.

Many people choose to pay for a regular report or alert service but if you want regular reports on your credit score for free, I recommend these people.

* GetCreditScore which uses Equifax data.

* CreditSavvy uses experian data.

* CreditSimple uses illion data.

You will need your Medicare card and a car license or passport to open an account.

The best thing to do is to try all three and see which one works best for you. Some of these will email you regularly with your score if you request it.

See how you go.

Agency business is when you handle a product as an agent. There are many such products, for example, lotto, post office, newspapers, etc.

A typical SMB retailer would have been an agent for many different products in the past.

Today, critics would complain that this agency's work has low margins, which is often true. Plus, if the agency has a winning product, they will often tend to lower commissions and increase handling costs.

But, I would argue that the key to a modern retail store is to get the people in the door. One point is that a good agency often can bring in people. This is no small matter. Today, a typical major is happy to pay $30 in advertising costs to attract a prospective customer. If it works and they get them in your shop, how much is that worth to you to get a potential paying customer in your shop. How much in advertising do you or people in businesses like yours pay to get them in the door? As an agent, you pay nothing, and if they buy, you will make a slight profit, plus have a chance at extra sales.

Of course, the big question here is will they buy more? Yes, some products, like mobile rechargers, generally do tend to bring in good customers. Many, however, do not.

I recommend if you handle these products by checking your companion reports in your POS software.

This will tell you what sells with a product.

Go to Register reports.

Go to reports > Sales register > Stock Sales companion sales by period 

In options, put in, say, last financial year and put in the product. 

Now out pops up a report which will give you a listing of all the items that were sold with this item. It is worth examining this list. By rearranging your stock arrangements, you may get more sales. 

Then at the end, there will be a total profit. Now the question is, how much of that profit would you have made anyway, with or without that profit. That is something you have to decide. 

An analyst like me, as a first-level approximation in the absence of any other information, would probably say

1. Some would have brought the extras anyway.
2. Some would never have come. This is partly due to the large advertising campaigns many agencies pay.

So I would say 50% of this profit would be lost plus the profit on the agency work.

If you can do a better estimate, let me know. Big Data can help but you will need to ask us to help you there as few can do it in-house.

You now have a start on how useful that agency is to your business.

Many of you are now getting updated price lists. Every day someone is telling me that they are suffering from the scarcity of some goods. No shortage of reasons, I have noticed for the holdups.

It’s affected manufacturers and suppliers of Australian goods spanning electronic devices, smart home technology, medical devices, and manufacturing equipment. Distributors, installers, repairers, and others have all suffered from the flow-on effect of the shortages. Potentially, producers in these industries will also be hit:

Go into your in your POS.Software and you will find it is easy to do.

If you go into stock pricing (see the red arrow), you will find a bulk price on the menu item.

As suppliers now, they tend to use sections rather than update all their prices. You will need to select from a wide range of filters.

I find it very useful to use the partial stock name to specify only items with part of the name in the title. For example, only items with *pens* in the description.

Now select what you are going to update. In this case, it's retail price. But you can also change wholesale costs, business costs, website prices, or whatever. There is a lot of flexibility there.

Then select how your price will be updated by markup, by a percentage increase, or by an absolute number. You can set them all to be the same price, etc.

You can save a lot of time here.

The High Court has recently confirmed that if your business has a Facebook page, you are responsible for the libellous comments people make on your shop's Facebook page. 

The High Court stated here recently that

Fairfax could not be considered "passive and unwitting victims of Facebook's functionality" as they operated the Facebook page for their own commercial and financial interests, and invited users to leave comments on the Facebook page. Instead, the media organisations must "bear the legal consequences" of doing so.

This confirms our early remarks that if you have a business Facebook page, you must turn off comments, as many do, or actively monitor posts and comments by your Facebook users.

Here are some actionable tips if you decide to allow comments.

Go to your business page.

Then press Settings on the bottom left.

Now you will get a page with the settings.

Here are our suggestions.

Visitor Posts: - Only you can post.

Post and Story Sharing: - Disabled.

Tagging Ability: - Off

Content moderation: - add any problematic words. There is no point in making your problems worse. Besides, I doubt your customers will appreciate people using these words. Keep adding to the list as required.

Profanity filter: - Turn on.

Remember, if such comments appear, please go to your Facebook page ASAP and delete them.

Overseas reports are reporting that shoplifting as a result of COVID has skyrocketed. Although no figures have come forward for Australia now, as we tend to get these only after the stocktakes in the mid-year. It is almost certainly true now in Australia too.

Unfortunately, it does not take much to turn a slight increase in shoplifting into a crisis. Depending on your margins, a 1.4% stock shrinkage could amount to a 20% loss in profits.

Much of the problem now, I am sure, is because most shops are desperately keeping staff to a minimum to hold off cost pressures that are forcing prices up in an attempt to combat surging inflation and supply chain disruptions.

Consider a check of some of your shop to give you a feel of how you are affected. This is easy to do; follow the documentation on stocktaking in your point of sale software. Fortunately, we did increase the flexibility of the stocktaking procedures last year, so making it easier. What you do is divide some parts of your shop into several small areas. The size of the area is that one person can do in two hours. Keeping the locations to manageable size means it can be stopped and started as the shop trading conditions change.

This will give an exact figure in your discrepancy reports. These are invaluable for examining your shoplifting problem.

This will enable you to make informed business decisions.

For people not using Tyro, you can get 12 months’ free EFTPOS machine rental for up to two machines if you apply by March 31st, 2022. That is a pretty good offer, all right.

If you want to learn more, please click here.

It comes with full integration, too, which means rather than having a separate unit independent of the point of sale, this integrates the EFTPOS into your point of sale software. One big plus is that it reduces operator errors by eliminating double data entries and re-keying errors from manual entries on the EFTPOS. So no more accidentally keying into the EFTPOS terminal $20 instead of $50.

It also improves speed. As you can see, a Tyro Efpos (dark blue) takes just a fraction over a second on any day of the week. This is the fastest EFTPOS I have come across.

If you do not have it, I suggest you try it out. 

It will give you a seamless transaction process, speedy payments, and easy reconciliation!

If you want to learn more, please click here.

For full terms and conditions, click here.

We now have stock for those waiting for their advanced weight scales and are sending them out now.

For those considering looking at a scale, check out the CL3000 series.

It is an excellent entry-level label printing scale that is easy to use. It can work both integrated into your POS software or stand-alone. It can hold up to 10,000 different products, has many label options, and its printing speed is fast.

Here are some details.

You will be impressed with what it can do.

Over the past two years, trade shows have stopped with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many have tried virtual shows with limited success.  It is hard on a virtual show as an item can look very different in your hand compared to the photo. The photo is selected by a supplier and is what they want you to see. Plus you cannot touch or feel the item.

Thankfully, now trade shows are starting up again. 

These have been a great way to see new products and variants of existing products in the past. Plus, they are an excellent way for you to meet suppliers that do not deal with you directly.

Here are some tips from a guy who has been to heaps of these shows if you are going.

1) There is no better way to find new suppliers. Make sure you pick up their cards.  Do not count on them contracting you afterwards.

2) With existing suppliers, it is often a terrific opportunity to meet the senior people in these organisations.

3) Many places have minimum orders. Unless you are prepared to buy big, the odds are many places will not deal with you. Before you start, tell them your budget on these products and be ready to walk out if the answer is no.

4) Prices are generally on the high side. Do not expect to find bargains. Consider purchases at these trade shows for seeder stocks.

5) Know your products well, your requirements and your price points.

6) Look for new things, that is mainly why you are there.

7) The last day tends to be when the smaller traders are looking to get rid of the stock they brought, especially for the show.  They would rather sell it than carry it out. If you are going to pick up bargains at the fair, that is the day.

In the enduring back-and-forth among suppliers and retailers, although suppliers are vital for your business. But like everything things are continuously changing. What you need to know is just what are you getting from the relationship. It will make I am sure fascinating reading.

What you are looking for is a supplier that is giving you plenty of sales and profits.

Go to register sales reports and then go to "Sales comparison by supplier"

I recommend for this report that you use the previous year and compare it to this year, then compare 2019 to now. Because of COVID, one expects that it is now a mix of these.

For the initial run, although often misleading, use percentage.

Then a report like this pops up.

Try it now, it only takes a second.

It is Valentine's Day, and the gifting season is in full swing, estimates are that total sales today will be $415 million.

But do not forget the last-minute shopper. They are not small or minor in terms of trade. The problem these people have now is that they cannot order online. They need something now, and you are local.

The odds are they are in your area looking for ideas, want to spend now, and want an instant solution. 

Here are some actionable tips you can use right now.

* Put a sign on the window, so this person knows you have something. It does not need to be flashy.

* Make a featured area with items that would be suitable and make it easy to find.

If you are not sure what to offer on that day, look at what sold well last year. It will give you some ideas.

This is easy to do in your POS system.

Go to the Register reports.

Now select "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period".

Select last year on February 14, 2021

Out will come the top sellers for that day, they sold that day, why not this year?

* Review, remember this guy is flexible as they have little idea of what to buy.

* Offer gift wrap

* Have appropriate greeting cards on offer if possible.

Final note: Some of this stock will lose much if you do not sell it today, so watch your stock levels.

As you can see, the layout is functional. It is your dashboard to your business.

It is adjustable.

It is easy to set up the way you need to remove unnecessary distractions.

It is fast, super fast.

Stock that doesn't sell is alluded to as dead stock. This stock takes up space in the shop and storeroom, where it is often neglected. It usually costs money to get rid of it. The best solution is not to get it in the first place.

This is not easy. The truth is that no one wants this dead stock. Everyone is trying to get rid of it, and if you are not careful, your suppliers will often try to get rid of it by shipping it to you.

Here we will discuss how your POS software can help you to stop getting more of this stock.

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

Now edit the item. See the image below.

See where the red arrow is pointing. Mark it here as discontinued.

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