Time to do some essential Black Friday Stock Analysis; time is running out! 

With Australian retail sales reaching $6.36 billion during Black Friday 2023 and over 50% of Christmas shopping occurring, early strategic inventory planning will directly impact your bottom line. Use your sales history to see what sells in your shop patterns as your key to maximizing Black Friday 2024 profits.

Maximizing POS Data

Our modern point-of-sale system can give you the information you need to get actionable insights into what sells in your shop in this period. Here is your rapid assessment framework:

Data Collection Process

It is easy and takes 30 seconds.

Go to Register reports.

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

Look at last year, the week before (17-24 November 2023)

Now look at 6-29 November 2023

This will give you your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for sales.

Action Steps for Success

1. Adjust stock levels based on historical trends
2. If necessary, contact suppliers for high-demand items
3. Update display strategies

These reports must be checked to see what looks interesting and, more importantly, if you have enough stock.

Do it and see how you go.

We do not have much time!
 

FAQ: Black Friday Sales Planning Guide

Retail Basics

Q: What is the significance of Black Friday in Australian retail?

A: Black Friday is now Australia's biggest shopping event. It generated over $6.36 billion in retail sales during 2023. It also marks the official start of the Christmas shopping season, with 30-50% of annual Christmas sales occurring during this period. For retailers, it's a critical time.

Q: What are the critical dates for Black Friday 2024?

A: The core Black Friday sales period runs from November 29 to December 2 (Cyber Monday) 2024. However, many Australian retailers begin their promotions earlier in November to capture early shoppers. Plan for:

• Early Bird Sales: Mid-November
• Main Event: November 29
• Cyber Monday: December 2
• Extended Sales: Through early December

Q: Which retailers typically participate?

A: Black Friday has become ubiquitous across Australian retail. Participation includes:

• Major department stores (Myer, David Jones)
• Electronics retailers
• Fashion and apparel brands
• Online marketplaces
• Small and medium local retailers
• Specialty stores

Data Analysis & Planning

Q: What specific POS data should I analyze for Black Friday planning?

A: Focus your analysis on these key metrics:

• Previous year's top sellers (17-24 November 2023)
• Extended period performance (6-29 November 2023)
• Year-over-year growth patterns
• Stock depletion rates
• Average transaction values
• Peak sales times

Q: How can I use historical data to predict 2024 trends?

A: Conduct this three-step analysis:

1. Review last year's performance:
   • Best-selling categories
   • Daily sales patterns
   • Customer purchase behaviours
2. Compare with current market trends
3. Adjust predictions based on economic conditions

Inventory Management

Q: How should I adjust inventory based on historical data? A: Follow these inventory adjustment guidelines:

• Increase top-seller stock by 20-30%
• Reduce slow-moving inventory
• Add new products in successful categories
• Factor in current market conditions
• Set reorder triggers for high-demand items

Q: How can I prepare for supply chain challenges? A: Implement these preventive measures:

• Order high-demand stock early (by early October)
• Establish backup supplier relationships
• Create contingency plans for popular items
• Maintain clear customer communication channels
• Set up stock-level alerts

Sales Strategy

Q: What display strategies work best for Black Friday?

A: Optimize your store layout with:

• High-visibility locations for top sellers
• Clear promotional signage
• Strategic impulse buy placement
• Efficient traffic flow patterns
• Mobile POS stations for peak times

Q: What metrics should I track during the event?

A: Monitor these real-time indicators:

• Sales velocity by item
• Stock levels
• Average transaction value
• Customer flow patterns
• Staff performance
• Return rates

Post-Event Analysis

Q: What analysis should I conduct after Black Friday?

A: Evaluate these key areas:

• Sales performance vs predictions
• Inventory accuracy
• Customer satisfaction metrics
• Marketing effectiveness
• Operational efficiency
• Staff feedback
• Technology performance

Q: How can I improve customer experience based on data?

A: Use your insights to:

• Optimize staffing levels
• Enhance product knowledge training
• Streamline checkout processes
• Improve store layout
• Refine promotional strategies

Implementation Priority

1. Begin data analysis immediately
2. Order inventory by early October
3. Train staff by early November
4. Set up displays one week before
5. Monitor and adjust during the event

Imagine if, in a few minutes, instead of guessing how last year's sales went, you knew this. Sounds like magic, right? Well, that's the power of your modern POS software at your fingertips!

Why Analyse Your Sales?

In the bustling world of retail, staying on top of your sales performance isn't just bright—it's essential.  Knowledge is power. Understanding your sales trends through retail data insights allows you to make smarter decisions and drive your business forward.

Point of sale reporting

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let's quickly spotlight why your POS software is the unsung hero of your shop:

1. Real-time tracking: You need to know what is selling now!
2. Inventory management: Never run out of your bestsellers again.
3. Customer insights: Understand what the customers in your shop want.
4. Data-driven decisions: Make decisions based on data.

The Dissection Comparison Report: Your Retail Crystal Ball

Our point-of-sale software offers a powerful tool called the Dissection Comparison Report. This intelligent feature allows you to compare your sales performance across different periods. It's like having a time machine for your business!

How to Access Your Sales Comparison Report

Follow these simple steps to unlock your retail data insights:

1. Go to the Main Menu
2. Click on Cash Register
3. Select Register Reports
4. Under the Select Report tab, expand the Stock folder
5. Choose "Dissection Family Class Period Sales Comparison"

Comparing Year-on-Year Performance: Your Business Time Machine

Let's dive into how you can use this report to assess your annual performance:

Then you will see this screen. This is what you will get.

1. Set the left side dates:

   • From: 01/07/2022
   • To: 30/06/2023

2. Set the other side dates:

   • From: 01/07/2023
   • To: 30/06/2024

This comparison will show how your business has grown over the past year. It's like searching past photos of your business.

What to Look For in Your Retail Sales Analysis

• Overall sales growth: Has your total revenue increased?
• Top-performing categories: Which product families are your stars?
• Underperforming areas: Where might you need to make changes?
• Seasonal trends: Do certain products shine at specific times of the year?

Zooming in on Quarterly Performance: The Recent Snapshot

To get a more recent snapshot of your business, let's look at the last quarter:

1. Set the left side dates:

   • From: 01/04/2023
   • To: 30/06/2023

2. Set the other side dates:

   • From: 01/04/2024
   • To: 30/06/2024

This comparison is used to spot recent trends. It's like having a magnifying glass for your most recent business performance!

Questions to Ask Yourself for Better Business Insights

• What products or categories have seen considerable growth?
• Are there any surprising declines in sales?
• How do these quarterly results compare to your annual trends?
• Is your inventory management aligned with your sales patterns?

Data-driven retail management

Now that you have the information, here are some tips to turn your retail data into action:

1. Celebrate wins: Did a particular product category smash it out of the park? Give yourself a pat on the back, and consider expanding that line!

2. Investigate dips: If sales dropped in an area, ask yourself why. Was it a change in customer behaviour or perhaps a supply issue? Your POS software can help you dig deeper.

3. Spot opportunities: Are there growing categories you could expand? Use your data to guide new product decisions.

4. Plan: Use these insights to guide your inventory management and marketing efforts. Stock up on what's trending before your competitors do!

5. Customer focus: Look for patterns in what your regulars are buying. Can you create bundles or promotions based on these insights?

6. Staff training: Share these insights with your team. Knowing what's selling can help them provide better customer service.

Business growth strategies

These reports are your numbers – they are your story. Regularly checking your sales performance gives you the knowledge to make intelligent decisions.

Your Action Plan:

1. Log into your POS software today
2. Run your first Dissection Comparison Report
3. Identify one area of improvement and one area of success
4. Make a plan to address the improvement area
5. Share your success with your team to boost morale

Ready to Supercharge Your Retail Success?

Don't let valuable insights slip through your fingers! Your POS software is ready to reveal the secrets of your shop's performance. Why not dive into your Dissection Comparison Report today? You might just uncover the key to your next big business breakthrough!

Finding Needles in Haystacks: Searching Reports in Your POS System

Shifting through lengthy reports searching for one piece of information can be a frustrating time-waster. But your POS system has a powerful tool to help you instantly find the exact data you need among thousands of lines. Let’s explore how to save heaps of time hunting for the critical information in the report.

Our POS Software includes robust search functions that index all text and data in the report. Rather than flipping through the pages, you can type a product name, date, or keyword into the search box.

It will display the matching instance highlighted for you within less than a second. As you can see here, marked with a red arrow, this report they printed was 13,533 pages long. Finding one item can be tricky as there are so many pages. You do not have to search; you get our software search engine to search for you. So I press the search marked with a brown arrow.

Up pops a box shown with a blue arrow. You would typically put in here "Red rose on the heart", but for the sake of showing you the power of this search box, I pressed "heart" and pressed a few times "Find next" till I found the one I was seeking.

Of course, if you know the exact title, this will make searching faster and hide results that are not relevant to you now.

Tailor The Query To Your Needs

Entering more specific search terms will help surface the most relevant entries. In our example, typing "Red rose on the heart" would directly take you to the singular product without dozens of unrelated results about red products or rose items.

You can also filter by various attributes like:

• Date
• Product
• Price
• Sale Amount

Uncovering Hidden Insights In Seconds

Besides eliminating frustration, advanced report search empowers you to unlock hidden insights about your business. Rather than being limited by static reports, you can instantly investigate any detail that crosses your mind.

• What were my top-selling items last Valentine's Day?
• How many gift cards were purchased in December 2021?
• What was the average transaction value for a specific brand last month?

Your answers are waiting at your fingertips!

The key is taking the time to familiarize yourself with the search functions available in your system. A few minutes of experimentation can save you hours over the long run.

Let Your POS System Shoulder The Reporting Burden

Leveraging the built-in tools in your POS solution will help you confidently base decisions on facts rather than gut instinct.

Australia will mark the death of Queen Elizabeth with a public holiday on Thursday, September 22nd 2022. It will be a National Day of Mourning.

She was a remarkable woman who did a great job. An inspiration who, incredibly, was still working at 96 years old!

Like anyone else, I love a day off work, but this unanticipated public holiday is challenging. I had a client who booked a medical appointment well in advance that day, but it was cancelled. As few doctors will open and do not want to pay penalty rates, many more are in the same position. The same is true of many other organisations, debating now whether to stay open or close on that day. The cost of this public holiday for Australia will be in the billions. I wonder if the money could be better spent on a specialised hospital in her name. 

As it is a public holiday, many are now questioning whether it will be worth keeping the business open on this day.

Before you start planning and organising your staff, please research how busy you are likely to be. Look at the last Queen's birthday and a typical Thursday. Here is a video explaining how to do this with your POS System. Please click here.

What you can do in your POS System is set a budget for each department? Now here is a quick way that works well how to calculate such a budget in a typical shop which will take you less than five (5) minutes to do. Of course, no shop is standard, but what do you want for less than five (5) minutes of work.

Divide the shop into nine segments, as I have done above.

Now on the top in black, you will see the scores 3, 2 and 1. This is because, in Australia, people tend to go to the left when they go into a shop, so the left of the shop is more valuable.

Similarly, on the side, you will see the scores 3, 2 and 1 in black. This is because the front of the shop is more valuable than the rear.

Now when you add them up, you will see in red the totals, which is the addition of the top and side scores.

Now, add another 4 to that area segment where most of the front counter is.

If you are setting a budget, you take the total shop budget. Your call whether you do it as profit or sales. Divide by forty (40) and multiple by that segment total, for example: if the shop's budget was $800,000 a year. For the bottom front segment, see green arrow its budget would be $800,000 / 40 x 6 = $120,000

Now there is one caveat: the very front of the shop is used for display and is a decongestion zone where people often walk through without thinking. This part varies so much in different shops that you must make your own value.

The quickest way to proceed is to run a totals report for the past twelve months. Now take your total sales and divide it by 40. Now multiple by its total above for each area segment giving you a figure for each area segment.

Now for each department, look at its area segment and note its figure. If three departments share a segment, divide it by three and use this figure on the report. If a department is in a few areas, add the figures up. Now see how its sales figures compare to these figures. Maybe you have some rearranging to do?

Now here are some key points using this analysis.

1) On the right of the diagram, you will see a thick line in blue. Once people enter your shop, most shoppers will turn to the left. Count the right (4+5+6=15 points) and compare it to the left value (2+3+4= 9 points)—a big difference in score. 

This left side is what we call your power wall, as this is where customers naturally end up. It is where much of a shop's sales occur, so make sure it looks attractive. Style it up. Have your high-margin items there.

You can see why large suppliers, e.g. card companies, want you to put their product on the right side of the shop. They have done this maths too.

2) Why do most retailers prefer the front counter on the left of the shop? The space is less valuable there.

3) Why do many retailers like counters on the back. Well, the area there is less valuable.

Have a go; I am sure you will find these five (5) minutes of work helpful.

While anecdotally, they say that uncertainty around elections causes shoppers to curtail their spending. This is as, during times of uncertainty, we often hear that shoppers are deferring their spending. They are taking a wait-and-see approach. This is true for major items such as real estate and HiFi sets, but in the stuff like food, groceries, petrol, etc., they do not defer. Then once it is over, most of them are happy.,

There have been many studies that show this. I did a data-mining analysis going back to 1982 in Australia with a few of my clients' data and found little. Some minor effect on clothes sales caused by the high ticket items, but nothing else. If anyone wants to see my report, let me know.

The real problem of the elections is that from a business administration, it's a bother. People have to go and vote. This can take some time in some places.

One thing I did notice looking at the polling booths, the one where I usually vote is not open this year, and I have to go to another. So check here first your booth. Put in your desired location. You get a list like this

Then check your closest voting booth.

Data mining in retail

Retail is possibly the most competitive industry. It is a cut-throat competitive market and every edge helps. So retailers struggle to meet customer expectations and sustain their business in an increasingly volatile market. This is where data mining can play a significant role in the retail industry by giving retailers a unique perspective to learn about their customers' behaviour and buying patterns from a computer perspective. 

In many cases, there is no choice as there is nothing but a computer that can tell you the answer to some questions, like if I drop this line, how will it affect the rest of the business. It is relatively easy to estimate how much you make from a line, but it is difficult to say what effect will the loss of this service have on the rest of the shop. Another question might be the effect of the introduction of credit card fees on my business, etc.  

To make it work, though, we need powerful computers. We use this one. It is a beast rated in the top 1% of all computers, and it will often run overnight, doing millions and millions of searches. 

Data mining has proved to be an important tool in identifying helpful information collected over time from your computer's large pool of knowledge.

This is something you will use a lot.

Continuously we get people, e.g. bookkeepers, bankers, etc. asking us for financial figures that are years old. So what people need from their POS Software is to find out what a client or the total clients owed on a nominated date. Say they wanted to know how much your customers owed you on 3/1/2018.

This is often a problem for people with other Point of Sale Systems. They have to keep special backups. Now they have to find the appropriate ones. Then load these backups to get the figures. Once they manage to supply this information as sure as day follows night, they get asked for other figures from other dates. This can be a problem if they have not kept the backups.

Here is a better way for you to do it.

Go to the main menu> Register reports>Customers>Trial Balance.

Now select the date that was, in this case, we want 3/1/2018, so I put this date here.

Now comes out all the details.

If they pick another date for you, no worries put in those dates.

You have saved yourself a lot of work and time.

This tip works in many retail environments, so consider using it in your shop.

What happens is that we all end out with an item that is the last one, and we have decided for some reason not to get it in again. The problem is that this one item often takes up as much room as many items. So we usually have to keep it in that spot until it goes sweating that it will go before it gets too much out of date.

Well, why not make a collection for the last ones left. It does not need to be well presented in the pile as the bargain hunters are willing to work through it. It saves space and often moves the items immediately before we are often stuck with it.

Many industries do this; here is another example used by a card seller.

If you want a list of items in your shop that have only a few left, to get a feel of the size of the problem follow these steps.

Go to register reports > stock titled "Old Stock on hand by Date last received"

I tend to do it in two parts. I check the overall problem in the shop to see the scale of the problem. 

So now, look through the list to get an idea of the extent of the problem.

If you decide that idea is a goer, go back to the report and examine by department to action.

Then let me know how this tip goes for you?

Retail data analysis analyses everything in your business, from sales to stock to your customer data. The AI now makes it better. It is often used to track customer behaviour and traffic, but it can do more for you.

It is not only applicable to large retailers. SMB retailers, like you, can use information collected from your POS systems. Then the significant advantage that you have is that you can move quickly and so react faster.

Retail analytics example

We are using Father's Day as an example so let see how it went for you with this quick and easy method. It will take you less than a minute to do!

Go to Register reports

Now select Sales register > Sales comparison

​

As a first and quick example enter in this:  

Retail analysis report

You will get a very detailed report of what happened on that day for you to review.

Retail data analysis provides the information you need to make informed decisions. This will increase your revenue and profitability.

Note: What does appear to have sold well this Father's Day was decorated Coffee mugs and Whiskey tumblers.