One point that surprised me when I went to the New Retail ’19 conference which is considered  Australia’s largest retail gathering was directed I think at the medium to large retailers was the importance that these people saw in the Chinese market. 

What became apparent is that almost every Australian retailers there is looking at this market, now are you?

Currently, Chinese students, tourists and residents are responsible for up to two-thirds of luxury retail sales in Sydney and Melbourne in some places like Far North Queensland even more.

Here are some more figures:

There are about 165,000 students of Chinese descent coming to Australia a year (31%), 17% of them have family investments in Australia and their total economic contribution in Australia is over $7 billion dollars. 

There are about 28,000 migrants of Chinese descent coming to Australia a year (16%)

Australians of Chinese descent make up about 5.6% of the population. 

And here is the big one, there are 1,425,800 Chinese tourists every year in Australia (15.5%), and they are big buyers almost twice as big as the average. Today Chinese tourists in Australia spend 26.5% of the tourist trade. In the retail sector, they spend about $2,500 each.

I think every retailer should have a China strategy?

Here is something you can do immediately, put up a welcome sign in Chinese like this one in your shop.

Then why not walk around your area and see what retailers are marketing to this market.

Westpac has offered our clients, particularly if they are with Westpac, some exciting news. For the next few weeks, they are offering six months of free EFTPOS fees.  For a grade A, integrated EFTPOS system its an extremely good offer.

As this promotion is only running for a few weeks - if you are interested, I suggest you get onto it ASAP. 

Click here for details.

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.

Microsoft antivirus no longer supports XP, AVG anti-virus no longer supports XP, AVAST no longer supports XP,  etc. Most no longer support Windows 7 either. 

As such some of our clients, of our point of sale software are running into a problem that old versions of windows are no longer supported and now it appears that most of the antivirus companies are not supporting XP either.  This leaves them open to most viruses and ransomware. 

For these users, I am recommending

Details here

It is a free product for commercial use, it has no licenses, no expiration and no hidden fees. It is also a first-class product which runs on just about any computer and is fast. 

Order tracking allows your customers to know where their order from you are at any time from when you shipped it till when it is delivered. There are many reasons for that, for example, the customer wants to know

• Has their order been sent?
• Where is their order right now?
• When is it expected to be delivered?
• Has it been delivered?

The last point sounds a bit weird, but we have had clients that tell us that customers have rung them up querying when an order arrives that has already been delivered.

So one service that is getting very popular is that we can provide our clients who use delivery agents a tracking service where your customers can monitor the progress of their delivery from your shop.

What happens is that you send your client an email which its appearance can be customised to match your shop. In this email is a tracking ID and widget. This takes them to a web page.

This web page looks very professional. It is optimised so if they are looking at it for computer desktop, a tablet or mobile it will look good. They can read this page in a vast number of languages which is great if you are dealing with tourist.

Using this you and your customer can track the progress of the goods that you are sending them. 

You can also add advertising to the tracking page which is great as people who are interested in where their goods do read the tracking documentation.

There is a cost associated with this service but it is well worth if you use a lot of delivery agents to deliver goods from your store.

The other benefit is that you get a rating of how each delivery agent is doing plus you can track the items too.

If you are interested let me know.

As far as I know, we are the only ones in our market space to provide such a service integrated if you are thinking of a website, its a must.

I attended yesterday, the New Retail ’19 which is Australia’s largest retail gathering. It brought together over 2500 retail leaders and learners for a three immersive day to explore omnichannel retail, fulfilment strategy and partnerships. Some of the stuff was an eye-opener, and it is going to take me a while to digest much of it. 

The first point I wish to discuss is the margins required for e-commerce with some real data supplied at the show. I will explain it point by point to give you a professional appreciation of how these people think plus give you a feel of how it works and what sort of product you require.

What happened was a company decided to advertise a product using keywords in Google advertising. These are the advertisements that you see on the top, left and bottom of the screen when you look up something up in google. So they put in an advertisement into Google. This is the result

They entered the raw figures, and they derived the calculated values.

Impressions: This is the number of times that the advertisement was shown.  In this case, it was shown over 2 million times.

Clicks: Is the number of times that someone went to the advertisement. 

Click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of how many times the advertisement is clicked compared to how many times it is shown. This is very important as if it is low, then Google shows your advertisement less, so even if you are prepared to pay, Google will not show it. What Google says is that your advertisement is less relevant to their users' requests, so they will give their users more relevant information. 

Cost per click (CPC): This is how much this person pays every time someone clicks the advertisement.  

Marketing costs: Is the amount that was paid for the advertisement.

Orders: This is the number of orders the company got 

Revenue: This is how much the orders added up to, I am not sure if this includes shipping costs and other products that they sold.

Effective revenue share (ERS): This is the line I wanted to get to. It is the cost of the advertising divided by revenue. In this case, it was 19.17%. 

The point here is that this particular item, putting aside all other costs, requires 19.17% of the revenue to pay for the Google advertisement. That does not include many other costs, e.g., website, storage, etc. You need to pick your product.

With your point of sale software, there are two schools of thought about direct integration.

The first school is entirely against it.  The problem that they see is that anyone in the shop can use the point of sale software, as such their accounting system can be mucked up by anyone in the shop. What they prefer is that they take the results from the accounting system, manually review it and then and only then enter in the information into the system.  If you are like me and have an accounting background, it is a powerful point. For example, a payment on electricity might be over two months and if its a month late being paid its actually three months ago. Every entry into your ledger does involve some thought. The other issue is an error is made for example a sales was put in incorrectly, then it goes directly into the books, and they really do not like that. If the business changes, then it is easier to change if it is done manually.

The second love direct integration. Generally, they see the time saved as far more important, It would be lovely to have a proper set of books going but they feel they lack both the expertise and time to do it beside the accountant can do the details, for what they want and need this is not so important. They want their BAS,  their cash flow, a general idea of how they are going, and they want to give the accountant consolidated figures as they do not have to pay for the accountant's bookkeepers charges too. 

For these people, direct integration with our point of sale software to an accounting program like MYOB (by far the most popular with our clients), Quickbooks and Xero can dramatically increase their business overall efficiency.

This would be the arguments

) Entering information manually is time-consuming and after all, in business, time is money. Even an hour a week is a substantial saving.

) They can save a lot of mucking around as once their program is set to direct integrate, it is automatic. They do not need an expert to get the information into the accounting program. The less contact with the accounting program the better.

) Yes errors are coming but the manual way also has errors, human error. For example, 191 can be accidentally entered as 119 and then it is very hard to find.

) Results are available instantly. This permits quick analyzation. It nice to be able to look at your books daily and get a real feel where your business is heading.

Overall I tend to think in most SMBs something is better than nothing so unless you have someone that really knows their accounting, I would say that a direct integration is better.

Make your own mind up as with our system you can choose manual, integrated or both as we can limit the information being sent into your accounting program. Then if you want integration let us know.

Antivirus software does slow down your point of sale system, fortunately, there are a few things you can do.

The problem

Antivirus software are made to work all the time in the background where they do take up processing power, so slowing you down. Sometimes they slow down a system so much that the computer is unusable and there is no pattern to it, on some computers some software runs fast and on others it runs slow.

Firstly we do not recommend any antivirus software that is not reviewed on these two sites av-comparatives and av-test we would recommend that you only use these antivirus software packages. As there is a lot there, it is hardly much of a limitation.  

The first point to do is to test whether it is the antivirus software that is slowing you down as there are many other causes for slow speed. Try turning off the antivirus software for a while and see what speeds you are getting. Just be careful while the antivirus software is not running.

If you are sure its the antivirus software, you may want to try this 

) Try a different antivirus software, in my experience, this is the quickest and easiest, as a rule, Avast and Microsoft Defender are generally the fastest on slow machines. If you are running XP, please do not use Microsoft Defender. You will find large variations in speed on different computers so you will need to find the software you are comfortable with, that runs fast.

) Do not run more than one antivirus software at any time.  

) Try and limit as much as possible running your antivirus software at night when you are not using it.

) Most antivirus software have settings that are worth going through, you may need to go through these settings.  Okay, you may reduce your security a little but at least you can work on your computer. Unfortunately, they are all different so we cannot go through them here in detail.

) If all fails, ask the antivirus company, most have forums where the public can ask questions and they all have a support team.

Currently, I estimate that every month we have at least one point of sale client having issues regarding Ransomware and unfortunately many of our customers are falling victim to Ransomware attacks. We have had three (3) such attacks this week.

Our support manager Phil has put together step by step notes for you.

What it does

This form of attack encrypts all of your data and prevents you from using your computer unless you pay a fee. If this happens to be your server then this means your shop will not be able to trade.

What to do

Your only other option is to reformat your server and restore from a backup.

However, in many cases, we are finding that despite our best efforts there are no backups available as they too have been encrypted.

What can you do about it?

Your choice of Operating System

Firstly you should think about the version of Windows you use in your store. Windows 10 has a lot of features built in that make it much harder for Ransomware to take hold of your system.

If you are not running Windows 10 in your store, especially on your server and the computers you use to connect to the internet, then you should consider upgrading these as soon as possible.

While not as good, if you must or insist on running Windows 7, you should at least ensure that all Windows Updates have been installed. Windows Update includes many security patches, some of which may stop Ransomware from taking hold of your system.

In Windows 7, Click the Start button and in the run (or search box) type “windows update” and then press enter.

Click on the Check for updates and install updates button.

Windows Update may want you to restart your computer at some point and you should do so.

Remember that if this is your server then your shop will not be able to trade while your server is restarting.

When you have restarted, repeat the above process until there are no more updates to install.

If you are running Windows XP, then you are leaving yourself wide open to attacks from Ransomware. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP in April 2014, so for five years there has not been any security updates for this operating system.  There is little you can do apart from replacing the computer with one that has Windows 10 as its operating system.

Make sure you have a backup

Ransomware attacks are happening, and as much as you may try to prevent them, it may happen to you. If it does, you either have to pay up and encourage these criminals to continue their actions or have someone reformat and reinstall your computer system.

Reformatting and in reinstalling the operating system is the easy part. What nobody can replace is the data. Your customers, stock, sales history etc.

To protect yourself and ensure you will be able to replace this, you should be taking a regular backup copy of your data and remove it from your network so that Ransomware cannot access it.

I will deal with Posbrowser, but you should also find out how to do the same with your other important data such as your accounting and payroll data and any documents you may store on your local hard drive.

Posbrowser uses SQL server. One of the features of SQL server is that you can take online backups.

This means that you can take a backup without having to bring the system offline and stop trading.

So find a time during the day, a regular time. 

Also, find a USB stick. Now go to your server and plug in the USB stick.

Open Posbrowser and from the main menu select System Maintenance / Backup and Restore.

In the “Backup to a location” section click the three dots and navigate to the USB drive you just plugged in and click OK.

Note that if the three dots are greyed out, you are NOT on your server!

Then click the Backup button and the backup will start.

Wait until you see a message telling you the Backup was complete.

If you see any other message, you should contact POS Solutions Support for advice.

When it finishes,

DO NOT JUST TAKE OUT THE USB STICK – REMEMBER TO EJECT IT SAFELY.

This is the only way you can ensure that the backup has been written to the USB stick correctly.

If you want to be double sure, after you have removed the USB stick, you can insert it again and restore the backup to your training system via the “Restore to Training” tab in the Backup and Restore document.

When you have removed the USB drive, place it in a safe place, and DO NOT put it into a computer again until you are ready to do another backup of your system.  Don’t let Ransomware have a chance to get access to it.

Even if this backup is a couple of days old, because you are not in on the weekend, it is a lot better than having nothing at all.

You should take the time and make an effort to protect the most valuable part of your business – your data.

Years ago here because of the importance to many of my clients, I used to analysis newspaper sales. In those days the newspaper companies ruled a large slice of Australia's retail stores. Milk bars, newsagents, lotto agencies and small supermarkets would go into a panic after a threat of a newspaper rep to cut off their newspapers as newspapers brought in a significant number of customers every day to them. Well, those days are long gone. 

The latest report by the Audited Media Association of Australia, for the last half of 2018, reported most major newspapers publications fell around 10% about the same decline like last year and slightly higher on what I reported here five years ago.

See the latest figures for the decline in newspapers here. 

The figures are worse then they look as electronic subscriptions are included which have less profit then printed copies and as the newspapers' financial paying readers who I suspect are now almost all 50+ go, so will the printed newspapers in Australia. 

In retrospect, I am sure that much could have been done better by the newspaper companies, for this I blame personally poor management and the editors. 

Although I liked very much the people personally in News Corp and thought they were really trying to help, I always felt that they needed solid modern marketing professional help which they never got till it was too late.  

When I went to meeting at Fairfax and News Corp which was frequent to discuss circulation. I and I think almost everyone at the meeting would leave thinking that we were talking to a brick wall. It did not matter what anyone said, as nothing was appeared to being listened too and nothing was being acted on. Here is some example from submissions that we put in:

-When the newspaper companies were talking about getting on subscriptions, we pointed out that the only result would be that people paying full price for newspapers would get used to paying only a discounted subscription. Once they got used to paying a discounted price, it would be impossible to get them to pay full price again. We were right because that is what happened.

-Our research showed that many people were buying newspapers just to do the crosswords, so we suggested changing the crossword every edition. Great idea I was told by the News Corp, nobody got back to us about our research and nothing was done.

-We offered to link the computers across Australia to their computers to improve handling of newspapers. Again nothing was done till years later.

-We pointed out that many of the newer statistical software programs and mathematical methods could be used to calculate potential demand sales better, yet nothing was done.

-We pointed out that as smaller companies were dropping unprofitable circulation, so a marketing opportunity was being opened for the larger newspapers that were still serving those areas. The local newspaper sellers should then be armed with leaflets with an offer to promote the other newspapers again nothing was done.

-When we pointed out that repeatably the newspaper companies were making changes that were difficult or impossible for the newspaper sellers to do, no-one listened. The changes would come, and there was no way it could be done. As a result, the public is getting one message from the newspapers advertisement and when they went to collect it was a different message.

Soon we and others just stop making suggestions as nothing was done which is probably what the newspaper companies management preferred although I am sure the shareholder and newspaper sellers lost millions of dollars as a result.

As a person who has been involved in newspapers in Australia all my life it is very sad and overall I doubt that much could be done for newspapers. The newspaper companies although they were huge then and their product was popular was already on a decline for 30 years as electronic media was taking even then a large chunk, and the recent development of the internet speed up this decline.

Recently Touch, a major supplier of electronic services in our market space announced it was dropping XP. This is the last major supplier left that was using XP. The reason is just that there are not enough users of XP to justify the cost of supporting it.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Windows Version Market Share

As you can see in Australia, it has dropped from almost 60% in 2010 to 1% usage. 1% cannot pay for much which is the problem here. The other problem is that most computer suppliers of hardware and software have long dropped XP. I know that one of our competitors is now telling to all its XP users that they have to upgrade and are planning soon an increase in support fees to those that people that stay on Windows XP. 

We are not advocating the use of Windows XP now.  Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP, it has limited support by antivirus software and so is an insecure and out-of-date operating 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

Remember when we all had desks like this.

Each page costs a calculation for a laser printer a few years ago estimated that an average cost was between $0.05 to $0.08 and went up to $0.12 to $0.15 for a page if a colour printer was used. These costs have not dropped.

If you have to print the delivery lists daily, use our Point of Sale software to email to the deliver's mobile, over the year this alone has saved our clients hundreds of dollars a year.

Often  I have seen people print a massive report when all they need is the final summary on the last page. Why not print the report to the view screen and then printout only the last page?

As rarely do you need the massive report printed, use our system document storage.

A tip

Make or use your existing Gmail or Hotmail account for digital storage. You set up its filter to put the documents to put it automatically into an appropriate directory so it does not bother you.

Now if you feel that you need to print a report for audit purposes, email the report to this email address. That way you have a copy, that you can access anytime you want it. Here are some added benefit these records date and times so supplying proof of when you ran this report if required. Plus are more secure and it also saves on filing cabinets. You also have the benefit of its search engine on your documents when you are trying to find something.

Why printout heaps of statements at the end of the month? Get your clients' email addresses and send it out by email, saves as well on mailing costs and gives you a marketing list too. Here is another tip, send a copy of the emails sent to your storage email address as well. 

Of course, one of the best advantages of going paperless besides cost is on the environment. 

I think you may find this interesting. I decided to make a table of the top ten sales department of the major supermarkets in Australia in 2018 and 2017 and then compare it. Sales are in billions of dollars. What I found quite surprising was the way they broke up their departments.

It is interesting that the big increases are in the products in the fridge.

I would be interested in hearing how your sales went in those departments.

I spoke yesterday about good cameras, today the issue came up about skimmers which turned out to be an excellent example of why I do believe that all businesses need good cameras.

A skimming device

These come in many types and are widely available on the web. What a skimming device is, is an electronic device used by criminals that generally are put on an EFTPOS reader to read (skim) the information off on the magnetic strip of a credit card and then to capture the PIN number.

The idea is that a criminal comes to your shop, in a few seconds installs a skimmer then returns in a few days to your shop and retrieves the skimmer with your customers' credit card details on it.

Skimmers have been regularly caught around Australia.

Cameras

These people would never be caught without decent cameras.

Take a look, I think you will find it interesting. Two guys come into the shop, the guy in front distracts the cash operator, now look at the guy in the white shirt installing a skimmer. He took about three (3) seconds to install the skimmer.

Here is a discussion about the incident.

What to do.

I always give a test pull on any EFTPOS reader before I use it.

My suggestion to everyone is to put a marker all around the EFTPOS reader with texture, this can help as a skimmer would need to cover the mark and be in your handwriting, always have a camera on your EFTPOS unit and try to monitor it at all times. If something looks off, call your EFTPOS provider immediately.

What is saving retail now are security cameras from shoplifting, it seems to be the only evidence that the courts are accepting. However, have a read here on monitoring and the law if you have or intend to have cameras.

For retailers, the best security systems are those that are directly connected to your point of sale software. With such a system if for example, a customer said, I gave you a $50 and you gave me change from $20, well you just press a button on the cash register, find the transaction and playback it back. Every till should have one.

However, there are many more places to cover than the till for example the shop itself, the front and exit of the shop, the back room and some parts outside. For these often you need wireless security cameras.

They have one great advantage that they are easy to move around. However unlike wired security cameras, wireless security camera are funny things, you install in one shop a few and they work perfectly, you put the same cameras into a similar shop and it is nothing but trouble so we have to pull them out and replace them.

Here are some points

Map out your requirements on paper.

Do it carefully as I assure you that paper will get a lot of use. Try to draw it to scale if possible.

Now, put on the paper where you feel the cameras should go, generally, to save cost people follow the power points as much as possible. 

Now measure the range of these camera positions to your camera base. You will need to know the range before you can buy the camera.  What you also need to determine where you will need a narrow vision and where you need a wide-angle camera.  If you are not sure the salesman can tell you what cameras they have for such range and angles.

If you are in an area of a lot of WIFI you need to make sure that it will operate in these areas. I have seen WIFI security cameras fail in shopping centres.

Camera requirements

You want cameras that are easy to install and setup. Over their lifetime, you are going to want to move them around. This, after all, is the point of having them wireless.

Most important it is easy to change the Date and Time, you do not want to have to try to explain to a judge why the alleged robbery took place at this time but why your camera showing a different time. If you are in an area that has daylight savings you, make sure your camera has daylight savings enabled and check to make sure it does automatically adjust the cameras time. 

I would say 1080p should be the standard resolution that you should use. With prices today there is little savings going much lower and often you need that extra resolution. Remember a shoplifter can be out of your shop in seconds and you need often to make an instant decision. 

Check how good the motion cameras sensor is, you do not want lags.

Make sure the camera got decent night vision, you do not want anything that looks grainy. Some of these cameras have a function that I love when it is dark a red light like a gun shines out, it helps to deter undesirables as they can see the cameras are working.

Final note

Much of the camera software supplied by the security companies are full of bugs. I would not count on it despite what the specifications say. 

How much to budget?

Impossible to say for the $800 they spent it was much for what they need, others that spent $20,000 will sigh and say that it was not enough.

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

Something goes wrong in the computer and attached to it say was a point of sale receipt printer which although old worked well and now suddenly it no longer works. This is happening with all versions of windows although the problem is much worse on the old versions of windows.

Here is why:

Your old printer works through a driver which is a software package written by the manufacturer of your printer. This driver then talks to Windows. As windows updates, these drivers often need changing however there are several issues.

1) Manufacturers of printers often no longer update the drivers required to get the older printers to work with the latest Windows updates. After say five (5) years they just stop doing it. Their view is that you need to get a new printer.

2) Sometimes the manufacturers of the printer, just have not got around to fixing the driver. It can take time before their users notify them of a problem, before they can verify it, before their programmers can write a fix, before it can check the changes and then time before it can be released. In the meantime your printer is unusable.

3) If your brand is obscure, it may not be trusted by Microsoft so Microsoft does not support it and distribute it. 

However, now there is a new problem.

Microsoft will start excluding printers from the upgrade process.

Microsoft is moving to a new standard in printers "Mopria" and is dropping support for many of the old printers. This is stated as due to lack of space which is true but I am sure it is partly that Microsoft has had enough of supporting the old stuff.

If you have an old printer that is not working here are three tips that might work.

1) Try using advanced setup

2) Try installing the printer manually from the manufacturer's website.

3) Try installing a printer driver for a printer that is similar to yours. Generally, you will not get all the functions but you may get the functions you need.

Failing that get a new printer. 

The picture above is of old printers that worked being prepared to go to the tip.