I decided to do a google trend analysis of lottoland since 2016

As you can see Lottoland is only a tiny percentage minority of the public interest.

I then decided to do a big data examination of lotto agencies profit and found that Lottoland had no effective effect on lotto agency sales. There was what we call drift in some agencies up and down which is what you expect from random chance but overall nothing since Lottoland appeared. It made sense to me as there are so many ways that the public today can gamble that Lottoland is unlikely to make much effect here. Where it will make an impact is where Tatts wants to go online, but this issue of online with Lottoland vs Tatts is not a Lotto agencies concern.

Here are some issues that I think a lotto agency should be concerned with:

-The commissions from Tatts Group Lotteries

-Growing shop fit costs

-The growth of online lotto sales from which they are excluded from.

-The consequences of Tatts Group Lotteries having no effective competition.

- Tatts have not kept up the prizes. If they are going to be a monopoly, I would want something directly comparable to these to market.

If you want something to think about delivery, have a read of this. {link has been removed}

On the plus side, it would be great for many people if a 22 kg could be loaded directly into the car. As long as they are at work, the delivery window of 4 hours is adequate.

This is the part I find scary; they do not need a key to get into a customer’s car.

Warning Gordon and Gotch sent out DD2 files Thursday last week that have 5 digit supplier codes in them. There is a strong possibility depending on when you process your magazine in the next few days that it may have the old 5 digit code in them. All I can say is be careful.

Also, we do recommend that you do not send any returns tomorrow (Tuesday) as it is not clear as to exactly when GG will be changing their system. However, sales and returns information sent on Wednesday should be okay with the new 10 digit supplier codes.

We are in constant touch with Gordon and Gotch, and we will keep you posted if we become aware of any more problems as they develop.

If you can't measure shoplifting, then all you have is an opinion. Do you are going with it, is it getting worse, is what you are doing helps, etc. NO.

I was told about this at a retail security convention and here are some ideas that I picked up that I think you will find interesting.

Today with the internet, the problem of shoplifting is getting much worse. 20 years ago a shoplifter often had great difficulty in selling his stolen wares, and when he went to a fence, he was lucky to get a quarter of the value, today on eBay he can sell almost anything and get nearly all of the retail value. Plus the laws are not a tough so its no wonder that shoplifting is going up.

Here are some tips.

Patroling the shop

Security cameras and tags etc are good but a shoplifter with a booster bag can walk through your electronic bars with no alarm going off. A simple way they can test your security is they steal a tag and nothing else, then they put the tag in the bag and walk out. If the alarm goes off and they are asked to show their bag, the tag is so small it will probably be missed as no-one is looking for a tag, what they are looking for is stock. If you do find the tag, they can just say they were going to buy something, put it in the bag and then changed their mind, put the item back and the tag must have fallen out. Yeah it just magically was cut off the item.

So with all the security technology, there is nothing better than having staff walk around the shop offering to help your clients, besides being excellent customer service it is disrupting a potential shoplifter.

Compare your perpetual sales to your actual sales.

It is not hard for your accountant (or you) to know the value by a department of what you purchased (PURCHASED) had in the shop at the start of last financial year (Start) and what you had at the end of the last financial year (END). Then take off what was lost (LOST). Now divide by the margin (MARGIN%)

The theoretical (generally called perpetual) sales = ((PURCHASED)+(START)-(END)-(LOST))/(1-MARGIN%)

Now compare this figure with what your total report in your point of sale has.

That is your TOTAL theft problem. This is your starting point as it includes much more than just shoplifting.

In practice, if you do not know a figure, just take an educated estimate. What I suggest is that you work with a range, e.g. if MARGIN% is somewhere between 23% and 25% then do the calculation for 23% and then do it again for 25% to give you a feel of the problem. This method tends to work better than just averaging.

For example, I did a calculation with a client, and we determined that the problem was at the most about $4,000 which my client then decided was about as good as its going to get so we stopped there.

Continuous stocktakes

A shop stock should be counted regularly. The shop can be split into manageable sections, then each part which should be about equal in work in counting can be done when a person is available. Please read here for details

www.possolutions.com.au/blog/staff-stock-theft-know-your-enemy

Doing this will tell you where most of your theft is happening. It also allows you to check your retail inventory systems. As a general rule, it was suggested that each shop should be counted every quarter. Some people count high-risk departments like the tobacco stand at the end of every shift. Doing it freqently makes it possible to review your security tapes to try to pinpoint how, who and when the theft occurred.

Staff security

Often this is a joke, with everyone in the shop knowing the manager's password. But it does not have to be like that, with a bit of care a proper staff security system can be set up.

Grandmother in the front

The speaker at the show thought highly of this idea. Have grandmother stand in front of the shop and warmly greet everyone that comes in. It seems to shame a few people into being honest.

Use cards

From a theft point of view, cash is always a problem as tracking cash can be difficult.

A free book

Well, there has been an increase in the Australian public for this holiday. I can vouch that we gained out of it. It saw that one of our competitors copied us and made a Black Friday Sale too. That was probably for them a sound business decision.

There is an interesting article on Australian retailers and Black Friday in this edition of Inside Retail.

I suggest that next year, all our clients seriously consider making such a sale.

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available for importing into your POS software.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

Its for their Let's GROW seminar which is a FREE 2 hour seminar for retailers.

It will be held in Sydney on the August 10 - Limited seats. For more info and booking details please click here

{link has been removed}

Here is one of their tips, there will be six more at the talk.

Tip 2 of 7/ Ask every customer to buy something additional from you.

It costs you nothing to ask - this script converted 24.8% of customers to say 'yes'!
The store has been doing it every day for over 16 months.

Click on this youtube here for some more tips

There were no surprises this quarter as the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show more of the same slide for the print circulation both in newspapers and magazines.

Note how Herald Sun and Mercury are amazingly less than the rest.

It is however, fair to say print newpaper sales are losing sales fairly consistently no matter what the publisher or region. Digital has certainly not made up the difference as you can read here.

Weekly magazines are dropping even faster as you can read here

Here are five retail tips, which I hope are of use.

1) Customers are more attracted to stock in the middle of a shelf, then they the tend to look at the right side and lastly on the left side.

So put your best sellers in the middle of the shelf, make your way to the right and then fill up the left with the losers.

2) People aren’t very good at judging changes in size so when you make something bigger, people underestimate how much more it is. This happens because, when we estimate the size of an object, we tend to add instead of multiplying the changes in size.

Read more here.
So make the stock longer or taller rather than rounded.

3) Cooler temperatures indoors leads people to making more emotional decisions.

This could explain why expensive shops always seem to have their air-conditioning turned up.

4) People spend more money in shops with blue interiors over shops with orange.

Read more here.

The article also goes into soft lighting, which can help too.

5) Merchandise behind glass or in hard-to-reach places do not sell as well as stock, which is more accessible. People like to touch.

Read more here.
This, however, will be a real problem if that stock item is frequently stolen.

As I said, I hope this help.

POS Solutions is participating in a new national study of "Study of Australian Leadership" (SAL). This study is being conducted by the Australian Government Department and the University of Melbourne.

It is a huge study and we were quite proud that we were selected to help in this study. What the Australian government and Melbourne University are trying to understand current and future challenges facing Australian organisations, and the capacity of our leaders to meet these challenges.

It's not the only study we are involved in the present with the universities; we are also helping with one on Australian software, and we have been recently in another study to help handicapped people in the workforce.

We feel as well as ultimately improving our community, these studies also help us all to connect to the larger world.

This download is now in standard format and available for you.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

A few people on Friday asked us about setting up a rewards program using our software in their store. We are trying to help as much as we can.

I would suggest to everyone if you are interested in setting up a rewards program to do the following steps.

1) If you are a member of a group contact them first. Most of these groups have a marketing officer who can help you. If they do not they can certainly put you on to someone who can. These people have been around, and they know a lot of people.

2) Your software provider can advise you on what your software can do. You have already paid for your software so you may as well get as much out of it as you can. They should also be able to put you on to people that use their software that have set up such programs.

3) There are professional organisations that can advise you. The two that I recommend are:

News to Business. These people have been involved in small business loyalty marketing for fifteen years. I have been to some of their lectures, and I know many other people who have too and nobody ever said that they did not learn much for them.. He also has some free videos on his site that should give you some good ideas.

If you are in WA, I recommend Jurek Leon, he talks often on the business shows on TV, he presents to newsagent groups, Lotterywest and shopping centres. He has a free newsletter which are well worth subscribing. I read it every month.

Both of these people have a track record of success in this field over many years.

I got asked today about rewardle

I know of it, but I have never seen it in our market space except in cafes. What happens is that many cafes have a rewards card, generally, something like buy nine coffees and the tenth is free. So when you come in and buy your coffee, they stamp your card. When the card is filled you get your free coffee. The problem is that consumers complain that sometimes the cards have not been stamped often because they did not bring in their coupon. Because rewardle comes with a card and an app on a smartphone, the consumer can have their sale recorded using their smartphone, and because it is being counted by a third party, the count is verified. Also, their points are safe, even if they lose their phone, as the points are stored in the cloud. This is the basic as there are several other reward programs that rewardle can handle.

I better say here that one reason I have not had much contact with rewardle is that our software already does all this and much more.

So how much does rewardle cost a merchant, I am not sure but in the back of my head, I think its $49/month for a small shop. I could be wrong about that.

I have noticed the rating on the google app is not highly rated at 3.4. As a rule of thumb, I rarely would touch an app with less than a rating of 4.

Furthermore, it has few reviews only 419, you can read the reviews on google play. The users' views seem to be very mixed on this product.

One point I would certainly recommend is before going into any agreement you check what happens if, for any reason, you terminate your use of the Rewardle Platform, in particular, on whether you and/or your clients still have access to their point score.

Also if you are seriously looking into this, another product to check out is eCoffeeCard

I hope this helps.

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available for download.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available

For this and other supplier files please visit here

I do not know why but in less than five days a new Artwrap catalogue file arrived, if you downloaded recently the latest copy, I suggest you update to this version ASAP.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

A few people have enquired as to how PayPal works.
 
Several of my clients AS IS use PayPal now. It works fine and for anyone who wants to do anything serious on the web, it's a must. For many people that is enough.
 
Nevertheless, we are always looking forward to making things better and expand our software so for well for over a year we have had several discussions with PayPal about their smart phone system that would be integrated into our software direct.
 
Firstly, PayPal Merchant rate is 2% flat.  That has to be notified to the customer before purchase or absorbed for reasons that will become clear shortly.
 
From the merchant perspective, PayPal would be another payment type. It has the advantage that the customer does not need to be anywhere near the card reader.  That is why it is particularly of interest to people in the hospitality industry as people do not have to get up to order.
Here is a video of a well-known  bakery using it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do4yp_pGnLg

If you are interested in proceeding, please let me know.

For the last six months since we had issues with Network and their week 1 so we have requested that the magazine distributors use the same week number. Now it appears that GG have agreed to standardised on the ISO week standard.

As a result of this, GG will change their week one. This will make the GG week one consistent with the Network and IPS week 1 and will make life easier in the long run. As an added benefit, it will align the return week numbers with most diaries, the Australian government and businesses too.

The ISO standard defines week one as the week that contains the first Thursday of the year.