Our point of sale software gives a lot of flexibility for sending invoices, statements and reports by email. All are very quick and easy to produce. The main formats people use are Word and PDF to send documents.

There are some points you should be aware of in your selection.

If you are sending to someone else and you do not wish them to change it, then the best format is PDF. Some advantages are that you will have fewer problems in your the other person reading the document. Unlike Word, PDF looks the same on all computers. The PDF format is trusted, many for example will be reluctant to accept a word document because of the danger of virus being transported in Word.  PDF is free to read and is widely available. The PDF gives you a professional look.

Word and Excel, I would only use if I wanted the other party to have the ability to change the information. Sometimes your clients have a legitimate reason for wanting to change it so its good you can provide it. The problem here can be is that different versions of Word change the look of the document. This is one of the reasons why professional writers complain that Word is unstable. I have seen professional invoices in Word looking messy and unprofessional as the look changed.

As such unless someone specifies Word or Excel, I recommend you use PDF option in our software.

This is an EFTPOS problem that we have been working with a few EFTPOS providers recently without a solution yet available.

Imagine a customer goes to pay for a transaction with EFTPOS or Credit. He swipes the EFTPOS terminal, and the transaction is rejected. The EFTPOS terminal gives a beep, but it is not a loud beep. Sometimes the customer just assumed that it went through, picks up his goods and goes.

The operator on our system, unless they are carefully paying attention to the screen might miss for a few seconds that the transaction has not got through yet and by the time someone in the store reacts the customer is up the street and gone.

The staff at the counter need to pay close attention to the screen.

What we have done is on behalf of our clients submitted a request that the beep needs to be made louder and/or the terminal needs to do something dramatic to show that the transaction has NOT been accepted.

Amazingly few retailers do, in our point of sale software our clients have their business information immediately, does yours? Do you have to go into another system to get some of it?

Every retailer needs to know what they are selling each month:  what are their best sellers and where the money is coming from in their shop? 

What are your top ten sellers yesterday? As a rule of thumb in retail, yesterdays 70% of the top ten sellers yesterday will be top sellers today? Do you have enough stock today? 

If you cannot measure it, you cannot fix it.

Retailing today is about information.

Have you ever wondered why when you go to some shops they ask you if you want an email receipt after they have printed out for you a receipt? It is not saving paper as they have already printed it.

It is marketing, something you can do too.

Here are some figures that show the marketing potential 

• While open rates are at a staggering 70.90%, Mailchimp’s newsletters were measured at 17.19%.
• The engagement rate is 8.93%, compared to 2.70% for regular emails.
• The Average Attention Span is 185% higher than regular Emails

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People do read these emails.

Why not send an email receipt and include a marketing notice together with the receipt to advertise specials, discounts, upcoming events or other messages?

Here are some more advantages 

• Receipts do not get lost.
• It helps you gather customer email addresses so allowing you to contact them with email and hopefully gain visits and purchases.
• It puts your shop in front of the customer again when they read their emails.

There seems some confusion over when a receipt must be issued. So I decided to check on behalf of our clients.

In some places eg Victoria under consumer law it states that a receipt must be issued if the transaction is over $75 EX GST, which is where people are getting confused.

So if someone purchased $80 worth of goods in Victoria, the merchant would probably be okay under Victorian consumer law not to issue a receipt.

However, if they purchased the same $80 worth of goods in QLD, the merchant is required under their consumer law to issue a receipt as it is over $75. 

However, in all of Australia, the retailer under ACCC is required on all sales over $75 to issue a receipt

So I think that our software is correct.

You need to issue a receipt if someone purchases over $75.

Another point to consider here is that regardless of the amount, all state consumer laws and the ACCC agree that a receipt must be issued on any transaction if the customer demands one. 

I hope this clears up the confusion.

A client's point of sale server went down yesterday night. Everything as such stopped. No technician was available. Today a technician came along and stated it would be a few days before it can be fixed.

However, to fix the immediate problem, we do not need their computers to work. As they were doing cloud backup, we were able to get their information from a cloud backup. Then we installed a point of sale system on a temporary computer, that we have here. Put their information on and we will be able to send them in a few hours a working system.

This is a dramatic example of how useful a free cloud backup can be.

Here are some more reasons to look at a cloud backup 

1. Automatic once set up it requires minimal human intervention.

2. Storing your information offsite is always the best, what if the shop burnt down tomorrow?

Disadvantages

1. Cost, they are dearer then USB sticks. Internet costs can be high. Electricity costs can mount up.

2. Security, when you use the cloud what you are doing is using someone else's computer who knows what happens to your data in these locations.

Note: Unless you get an expensive plan on your cloud backup, generally cloud will not protect you from Ransomware attacks whereas USB backups will protect you from ransomware.

EFTPOS,Our point of sale software is designed to handle all types of payment fast. You can set up fully customised buttons to accept a wide variety of different payment methods, eg cash, EFTPOS, cheques, bank deposit, etc.

You can even accept split payments, where some go with one payment type and the rest with other types all simply and securely.

We also allow you to accept Part Payment, Advance payments and Overpayments.

One point that some people have asked is can they refuse to accept in some payment methods in some circumstances. The answer appears to be YES as long as it is specified before the debt is incurred. For example, if you have a sign that we accept EFTPOS and I go to pay to pay with EFTPOS you must receive it unless you explicitly state the conditions that you will not allow it e.g. for Lotto payments. The sole exception is cash. You must clearly say in advance if you do not want to accept cash.

But this is a legal problem, not a software issue. 

These payment types are set up with rules in the Dissection maintenance, where you can set up exactly as you require it for single touch transactions including surcharges.

Now is your last chance to get your stock levels right.

Fortunately, with our point of sale software, you have both real-time reporting and low-stock alerts to warn you when the stock is running low. This is to keep your stock levels at your ideal level.

However, running out of stock now can severely impact your bottom line and do untold damage to your customers’ view on you.

Good news:

We have a unique report that gives you an immediate way of checking your current situation.

In the Cash register report, call up the GMROI (see the selection highlighted) in your point of sale software in the reports here.

You can select the list of options you want, and I suggest you review them later.

I recommend doing this by department for a first run.

Then you will get a report like this.

As you can see, the items are all listed.

Let’s look at it in detail:

What we are looking for are items with low on-hand figures, decent sales, and reasonable ROI%. ROI% is the return on investment; it is one of the best ways to determine the value of your stock items to your business. It is calculated as (unit sold) x (Profit) / (Average stock cost), and the industry average is about 3.2, but as you can see here, there are many items above and below it.

Now it is up to you

 People go to a lot of trouble and expense to make their shop and front counter. Sometimes what you see on the front counter an old computer screen like this one.

It is firstly taking up a lot of room on the most valuable and best spot in your shop, that space should and could be used far better. A monitor can often, for example, be raised on a stand, so take up no room on the front counter and be better positioned for the cashier too

More importantly, it is making a wrong impression to your customers on your business. With such an ancient monitor what are they thinking of your software and technology? 

I would suggest getting a monitor that is modern, stylish and sleek. This will enhance your shop and move the old one to the back where no-one sees it.

Here is an idea get a monitor in colour, now that makes a bold statement about your shop, matches your shop colours and a cool talking point.

In modern retail, most of the time taken to process a transaction is independent of the point of sale software.

If you think about it, every customer when being processed today should be greeted with a friendly smile, hellos exchanged, they are processed, the cash or EFTPOS is handled, goodbyes are said, and they go. The industry standard to do this is about 40 seconds a transaction plus about three seconds for each item to scanned and rung up.  So if they want to buy four things, the time taken is expected to be about 40 seconds plus four items in their basket at 3 seconds each so its about 52 seconds. 

Very little of this time is actually due to the POS software slowing down the transaction.

Of course, the trouble that retailers have is if the queues start to get big, then people walk out. What annoys retailers is when they see people dumping their proposed purchases and leave.  What is even worse people then often avoid shops that they know has long queues and do not come back.  So they hellos and goodbyes get a bit quicker, the processing gets rushed. 

To see what is happening now with our system, I took about 20,000 cash register transactions from a client with actually a slow machine but in a busy shop and measured their results.  

The average speed of a transaction was about 36 seconds a sale which is what I expected as our clients tend to have low numbers in their baskets and they are almost all in high volume pressure environments.

Here is what the graph looks like 

As you can see in a pinch, our clients are doing transactions much less than 36 seconds as you can see here in seconds.

So it is not the computer, but on an average, I think our clients should budget about 36 seconds plus or minus. 

One idea that does work well in practice is to introduce a single queue, and have many cash register serving that queue. Although there are still waiting, people do prefer it.  If you have access to Mythbusters shows checkout S16E05 which has an experiment on this, the conclusion was even if this method is slower, people prefer it as it appears fairer. For a discussion on the subject click here,

Currently, 2018 Christmas retails sales are expected to grow 2.9% this year. According to the well-known comparison site, finder.com.au Australians are expecting to spend $1325 each on average on Christmas. “people expect to spend on average $464 each on presents, $444 on travel, $131 on alcohol, $122 on food and $61 on decorations,”

Are you part of it?

Do you have the right stock NOW in your shop? Another important question is do you actually have the stock you think you do? It is easy to forget what you have.

What I do suggest is you look at your mirror marketing reports.

Go to Register Reports marked in green.

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

What the report will tell you is what was sold in a previous period last year but has not been sold in this period. What you are trying to do is mirror your success last year.

Now in brown, you will see that there is a lot of flexibility for your reports there is also an integrated traffic analysis available too but let's keep it simple for the time being.

Now you will get a report with what you sold over the period, but you are not selling in your current period. What you find is I am sure worth investigating.

After that please redo this report for other years besides last year.

If you find goods missing, you need to hurry as we have less then 20 days left.

We are sending out tonight automatic emergency upgrade for the afterpay software. It will not solve all the current problems, but it will answer those that we can address.

So all our clients should be fixed tonight and tomorrow morning at the latest.

Currently, our advice is to ignore the message to upgrade for the time being and continue as before as it appears that Afterpay still has some issues. We are working with them on this.

Studies in the US, which I believe are valid here, show that 45% of all shopping traffic in brick-and-mortar shops during the Christmas season occurs in the following ten days. 

1. Friday, November 23 – Black Friday (Today - Less important than in the US but rapidly growing)
2. Saturday, November 24
3. Saturday, December 1
4. Saturday, December 8
5. Saturday, December 15
6. Friday, December 21
7. Saturday, December 22 – Super Saturday
8. Sunday, December 23
9. Wednesday, December 26
10. Saturday, December 29

Peak shopper times are between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Looking at the list, it seems like much Saturday work is coming up.

These days, you need to plan and have your rosters, stock and signage right.

Warning

It is also a good idea to have someone special do security on those days; I believe that many of the security problems in retail can be solved by having a grandmother greet everyone who comes into the shop.

Amazon Australia as I expected has not done well, the problem is not that our retailers are inefficient or not tech-savvy but our overpriced, undependable and slow delivery services which are holding us back in e-commerce plus our small comparative market. 

So now Amazon has done a backflip and will sell Aussies Amazon stocked and sold products from the US. I expect soon that the 3rd party sellers on Amazon will be released soon.

What happens with the costs of delivery to the Australian consumer from Amazon overseas sites will be interesting. Will they keep the Prime subs which allowed free postage over $49 from the US store?

For Australian retailers, the opening of the Amazon sites overseas is going to increase competition, and the two immediate issues are they need to look at their e-commerce and their delivery options.

Where we are unique in our market space is that our point of sale software is a unified commerce solution which brings together both of these issues into one platform in your POS system. Pieced together systems, that our competitors offer cost more money and lead to problems as different systems both in use, training and the need to talk to each other. Plus there is no long-term as who knows what the individual and separate parts are going.

Only our unified system gives you long-term as well as a day-to-day business solution. Click here for more details

A "booster bag" or "magic bag" has been used by professional shoplifters for years to beat security detectors. 

Although you can buy them, which does present a problem that the bags look legit if empty as a rule, shoplifters prefer to make their own. What you do is take a bag although a pocket in pants can be used too, put metal foil inside and so shield the security tag from the detectors in the gate. Using it often they can put something in a bag and walk out of a shop.

One shoplifter just got caught using one by one of our clients. What he noticed was someone walking in with a larger sized bag from a well known retail shop, but it appeared to be empty which did not look right. So he watched the person and noticed as the person was passing out, the bag was not empty. When he examined the bag later, he saw that it was lined with aluminium foil.

If you want to know more click here.

If you find them, you know you have a serious security problem.

It is said that "The devil is in the detail."

In retail, its the item that sells not the category or the department! 

A supplier rep is coming to see you, no doubt they are a friendly person. They have been briefed, they have an excellent overview of the market for their product, the odds are they know how their stock is moving in your store better then you do and they know your shops potential for their product better than you but they also have an agenda to get you to sell more of their product.

So what you need to be is briefed too and with a point of sale software, you can and should be able to look at this supplier's range in your shop and see exactly to the item level what is selling. How fast their items are selling? Which items are making the money?  So you can determine which of their items are worth investing.

Your stock performance report helps to answer such questions. 

What I will do here is take you through a review on one such report and what you can learn from this report.

Go to register reports>Suppliers>Suppliers sales trend, see the arrow in green

There are the ad-hoc, excel and OpenOffice import which please ignore for the time being although I do suggest later using it to produce summary reports.

Now the options, I picked are here.

I picked an arbitrary supplier FAS. Again ignore the extra options for now and press view report. 

Here’s how it goes:

Look at the arrow in red, you have 19 of this item now, but you never sell any of these items. It is a worry.

Conversely look at the item in blue, you have none in the shop, and you have sold heaps of these items, what gives here?

Now in green what you will see is that one of the stock items is in negative. This is not a good sign as it shows your stock quantities are not entirely right. 

It all comes down to this

By looking at these items in detail, you can see which items are selling well. You can bring up this with the rep as you now have a clearer idea of what you need and what to order. 

In retail getting customers to come more often to the shop is vital.

Questions:

Why do some customers come often and others do not?

Have you thought about this tried to figure out why some come a lot?

If you know, maybe you can use this information to get more people to come to your shop. Well, let us do that!

In your point of sale software and go into register reports>customers

There you will find a report "Top customers"

Now click on that report (see the arrow in green)

Now put in the dates you are looking at, I suggest at least a year and if you like a minimum spend.

See where the green arrow is highlighting. Change the sort order by visits.

This will give you a report with a grouping of your customers based on how often they buy from you. Now chew over why these people are coming, what are you doing right to get them to come?

Now let’s dig deeper

There are many other orders e.g. a listing by people that buy a lot you can use in this report, all which have their own story too. So there is plenty to chew over here.

Are you prepared for Christmas?

 We are now to the start of this year's festive season, have you checked to make sure that everything technically works? 

Here is an interesting question to ask yourself, what will be the cost to your business if you suffer a Point of Sale outage on this holiday? 

If you want to deliver the level of service that your customers demand, check that your computer system is working correctly now!

Black Friday is considered to be the official start the Christmas shopping retail season. In the US it is one of the busiest retail days of the year. Its importance in Australia is growing as you can see here.

There is every indication that this year will exceed last year so almost all significant retailers Australia are doing something by offering the public some good specials and most will have extended trading hours to take advantage of the increased traffic on that day.

Also what we are seeing is the marketing groups are pushing their members for submissions for the day.

If you are part of Zip, you need to have your submissions in by this Friday, 9 November. One advantage of Zip as a marketing group is that its membership is free.

Note I would not worry about Cyber Monday, it is more for software companies like us in Australia, rather retailers.

If you have not done anything yet, I do suggest that you do give serious thought about doing something at least put a few signs up and put something on your receipts. 

Christmas is coming, it is less than two months away and I was talking to a few clients who do a lot of laybys, their laybys are down, way down on last year. 

I decided to check with google trends, as to what the Australian market thinks.

It is clear that a market shift is underway.  The figure is even bigger for "Buy now, pay later" model as I could not include zip because zip is a common term used for other things so it is fair to say that this yellow line should be twice that height. 

I decided to just look at the layby by itself and got this.

The green line is the trend and you will notice that it is straight down. 

How are your laybys doing? Believe me, if you are doing well with them you are an exception.

If you are counting on using laybys this year, I doubt there will not be much. The closer it gets to Christmas, the worse it is going to get as laybys need time to work and the time is running out.

Every store needs now a "Buy now, pay later" option, it does not need time, you can pick when you want to use it, you are under no obligation and it costs you nothing to have it. Plus these, in general, are very good customers to get.

We have arranged a very good offer from Zip for our clients, which includes a good rate, marketing information and signs as an introductory with no obligation to try it out. I suggest you look into it. Click here  if you want more details.

Note the recent announcement from one of our competitors that they are going to offer zip and afterpay too as well as oxipay, confirms that their customers are reporting the same thing and have similar needs to our clients.