If anyone is paying by EFTPOS/credit card in your shop make sure that you get a photo of the customer. It may help.

What has happened to one of my clients is that last month as they were doing a credit transaction from a potential customer. The shopping assistant noticed that was doing the sale it looked suspicious, the amount was very high, the person had just grabbed a few items without thinking, was acting funny and seemed to be moving to try to avoid the cameras. So he told the person to wait for a second as he needs authorisation from the bank, which he did not need but it just did not look right. The person immediately ran out of the store leaving the card behind. The card turned out to be stolen.

There are some Gift Cards / Vouchers that are excluded from the new changes. Note the part I have put a red box on.

I would think that our discount vouchers are part of our customer loyalty program. Our suggested customer loyalty program does collect names and email addresses and other details so it is a fact that a customer loyalty program exists.

Also, most of our clients do not use it all the time so for most, it is a temporary marketing promotion. However, if you run it all the time, I suggest that you frequently change the details eg frequently change the percentage and so the amounts so that it is not a *permanent* promotion eg Mothers Day season special X% off, St Patricks season special Y% off, etc.

Following discussions, we have had with several people, we are currently changing our software. This will be released in an emergency patch going out tonight that will allow you to make changes to make it clear to your clients that these vouchers are part of your customer loyalty program. Details will go out in our newsletter shortly.

Is now available in our system.

This is because in the last year, "buy now and pay later" payment type has just taken off in retail. Just walk through any shopping centre now and you will see shops displaying signs for AfterPay and ZipPay which by far are the largest players in this market. As most customers who use such cards tend to have both, I think it is important that all retailers should have at least one of these payment types on offer.

The big advantage to the retailer with ZipPay compared to Afterpay is the costs. ZipPay is almost half the cost, the cost is about 2% to 4%. Since it takes only a short time to get it, a person could literally walk into your shop, get a zippay in a minute and you can get confirmation the payment is accepted and then you get paid by 4 pm that day at no risk to yourself.

Note it cost nothing to get it and if you do not use it, it cost nothing and it does open up a large market.

As far as the public is concerned here is the graph of public interest in ZipPay according to google trends in the last 12 months in Australia. As you can see it has grown by 3 times. The recent drop is because the Christmas period is over.

If you want it integrated into your point of sale software let us know.

Well, it is October, and if the world moves as in previous years, many of my clients will do a major part of their trade this year in the next two months. So it is time to start thinking of what to adorn your shop for the holiday season. Please do not leave it too late. Furthermore, among your many other tasks, you will need now to start planning your stock ordering. This is something our point of sale can help you with. You will also need to look into your staff levels again something our point of sale can help you with all this; I be talking about these soon including monitoring with shadow marketing.

Overall, the economy now is moving forward but only marginally.

This is what it looks like now on 4 Oct 2017.

The way it looked a year ago in Oct 2016, when it was better

Still it is in the black, and the world economy is continuing to only slowly recover, even so it would be nice if we got some decent exports going.

There are signs that do appear to show that the yearly growing interest in Christmas trend is continuing up. You can see that this year 2017 is higher than 2016, which is higher than 2015. The public mood seems positive.

Measured interest using Data Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)."

Last year, what I noticed after an analysis of the selling season for Christmas was that in recent years, it has gotten longer. If this continues and I cannot see why it would not, we can expect a Christmas season from mid-December to late January about a 6-7-week period.

Also now, it is important to check that all the equipment you propose to use over the Christmas period is working? This is particularly true of some of the old POS machines that people bring out of the cupboard at present. Please check them to make sure it all works? Furthermore, check the cables. Equally important that your Internet connections are where you need it? I suggest you try it all out now.

Believe me, you do not want anything not working over the coming season. If something goes wrong now, it will not be good for the shop and it may cost, for example computer engineers are often on holidays and those left are on double rates.

Flash sales is a sale offered with very little notice for a short time, and it is extremely easy to set up on our point of sale software.

It can be an extremely effective way to quickly unload extra stock. For example, a sandwich bar, has at 2:00pm excess sandwitches. Rather then chuck them, it turns a negative into a positive by suddenly offering a great buy on sandwitches.Another example I have seen is a shop that suffered a fire needed to clearout most of the items in the shop because who wants the stock that been partly burnt and full of smoke. While the shoppers could see the shop had suffered a fire, they grabbed the bargains.

Properly used flash sales can be a great opportunity promote the shop.

This is also where it pays to have a functional VIP loyalty program as flash sale can be promoted with a personalised email offer. This way, you are as well rewarding the loyalty of those people that shop in your shop.

* A flash sale should be simple. You are not on a flash sale going to get much interest in buy six coffees, and the next is free.
* It should be of short duration. Its purpose is to get rid of limited excess stock.
* Your offer should stand out. If its not much of an offer what is the point of it?
* Promote as much as possible with signs, Facebook and your VIP loyalty program
* Be unexpected, you do not want to be too predictable, for example, if people learn that your sandwiches at 2:00pm are very cheaper, many full paying customers will delay their purchase until after 2:00pm

The latest copy of the most highly regarded review of Australian loyalty programs is now out. If you do not want to pay for it, I suggest that you grab a copy of the executive summary which is free and well worth a read for a retailer.

Overall what it shows is that loyalty marketing is fast growing in Australia in acceptance. Far as some have suggested that Australians are getting tired of it, the reality is that it is growing at a massive rate.

Today the average Australian is more involved is retail loyalty programs then ever before (5% up), and the number that they are active membership has grown by 10% from 2016 to 2017.

Not only that but most Australians now accept the need for loyalty programs.

At 64%, its almost something that is required by a modern business.

I think once you read this report, you will see that a modern shop should have a proper loyalty program, not just a simple but what ends out as a very expensive discount voucher system that so many use.

Our users are very lucky as our point of sale software has an extensive loyalty program system inbuilt which can handle one shop or hundreds of shops several large chains such as Nextra and Lucky Charm use it exclusively for there loyalty programs.

While you are reading this report, what I also do suggest that you grab a copy here which is also well worth a read too.

A successful retail business depends greatly on having the right product, at the right price, at the right time. Ideally, they want to have the threshold inventory quantity which is the minimum amount of stock required because of our point of sale software, our clients can track stock levels. Threshold levels can be monitored and stock orders implemented.

However, sometimes, what happens is for some reason suppliers offer our retailers special prices for bulk orders. Sometimes they are once off, but sometimes they are ongoing offers. A typical offer here maybe be "Buy a pallet load and the price is reduced by X%"

Now our POS system can help you monitor these bulk offers.

If you go to the stock system.

Now in maintenance, under suppliers, you can set these bulk quantities by a range of different criteria. See in green the Bulk discount offer, I referred to. What is a very idea to put for these items the offers from several different to suppliers to allow you to determine the best price for these bulk buys?

If you do such bulk purchases, then I do suggest going through this part of our system.

The ability to control your stock, in our point of sale software is considered particularly strong. So this week's webinar is taking you through some tips and tricks for controlling your stock dissections, departments, family and classes.

If you have any questions about your stock control while watching you can ask them via the comments here or on the video.

The webinar is now available.

Looking at google trends it does appear that there is a growing interest in Halloween by the Australian consumer.

This is a graph of October over the last four years, blue=2013, red=2014, yellow=2015, green=2016. As you can see its going up, I think it's because more schools now are making special activities for Halloween.

So while talking to our clients about how to get the reports to show them how to find the sales they did over this period last year, to find out possible good sellers for this holiday, which often tends to be sweets, treat bags, Halloween dolls, masks and capes, I started thinking about what sort of POS software could we offer some of the creatures of this night in their shops.

Dracula would need a good stock ordering and stocktake system to keep his bloodstock in order in his shop. We have plenty of pharmacists, so I am sure we would have little trouble in getting his stock system right.

Frankenstein certainly has an image problem, no-one wants to come near him, so he would require our email and SMS marketing system to attract people to come into his shop. We have what is considered the best VIP system in our market space, so he would have little problems in getting it going.

The Mummy wants time with this beautiful girl, so he needs a decent roistering system, so he can make sure he is in the shop when she is scheduled.

The Invisible Man could use a focus automatic ordering system because he is always losing his bandages, and he needs to keep spare bandages in stock.

And Zombies needs a retail traffic analysis report, so they can be there when the shop is busy.

PS If you are wondering who that picture is, it's actually me, done with an android app, The Walking Dead Dead Yourself which lets you take fun pictures of yourself as a zombie.

The reality is that many suppliers do not offer EDI invoicing even though EDI invoicing saves you a lot of time. The problem is increased if you order frequently to save resources, but the problem is the increase in management costs in controlling a large number of orders.



Our system provides a solution to this problem by giving you an automated stock control system which can run either manually with its replenish or Min/Max systems or the completely automatic focus ordering system. It also creates an electronic order that can be printed, faxed or sent by email. It can then create an EDI file that when the goods arrive can like any other EDI invoice be adjusted and imported after you check the supply when the stock arrives. There is no need to enter all that stock anymore. This will save you considerable time and resources.



If the fully automatic ordering system is adopted what the point-of-sale system will do is consider the ordering cycle (designed to reduce carry costs), the purchasing cost and lowest order quantities to produce the maximum profit for the minimum outlay in your store. This is unique to our system unlike the many manual systems out there, which end out in getting you to place orders that are larger than your immediate needs so tending to increase purchasing costs and produce overstock, which requires discounts on sales to get rid of extra stock.

Overall it releases resources, which allows you to respond to unexpected market opportunities. This will also reduce the number of stockouts on many items and its associated costs leading to increases in your clients' satisfaction.

 

If you want to learn more, please contact us, as only we offer at present focus ordering in our marketplace.

One software company, I know well has recently released a statement that because they do not hold credit card numbers in their software that their clients have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. Well, it might get them off the hook if a potential court case starts, but it is certainly not the *whole* truth.

Firstly let's start off by saying that such data breaches are extremely serious as I wrote here of a study by Experian, showed that 60% of small to medium business closed down within six months after such a data breach. Much of this, I think must be because the banks, MasterCard and Visa looking into recovering their monies go for the retailer and then there are fines and legal costs too.

Now what is happening is a relatively new class of viruses called PoS RAM Scraper Malware has been created by hackers to specifically target retail shops and its huge. The reason why retail shops are simple, there is a lot of credit card details going through the POS system.

Here is a map of PunkeyPOS found by a well-known antivirus company in June this year. What it shows is the places where they found it.

You can read more details here on what they found here.

What can be done?
 

You may want to have a chat with your credit card provider however here are some tips, I would recommend.

1) Be careful where you and your staff go on the net. If you must go to these sites, use a computer that is not on your POS system.

2) Make sure you have a virus protector that is maintained. Let me warn you here that there is no best antivirus out there, they all have pluses and minuses. Note the window defender in windows 10, I think is very good and its free to all businesses.

3) Update your windows software with the latest patches.

4) A firewall would be good. I would recommend setting up your firewall on the machine that does EFTPOS to stop access to almost all the net. The other advantage to doing this is that your employees will surf less on your time. I think the free Windows firewall is good. Fairly easy to use. It passes all inbound tests (both stealth and open port) and does not have any popup alerts which can be a real pain. Also, it is not likely to conflict with your other programs. Plus most techs know it.

If all of this does not work at least you can have a good argument in court that you did try your best.