The POS Software Blog
News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.
A fun and engaging sing on the footpath in front of your shop can attract people to your business. It can challenge people to consider your business beyond what the shingle above your door may say. The more creative the sign the better.
Go all out creative. Have fun. Be colourful. Shop that shopping with you will be fun. People want fun.
Here are a couple of signs we have seen recently that we love:
Fishing and outdoors retailers run specialty retail businesses for with specialty software is key. Tower Systems has many retailers using its fishing and outdoors software already. That is set to grow with new software just released.
This latest software bring to market new facilities developed with successful retailers, delivering more in-store management and marketing options through which independent retailers can grow more valuable businesses.
Here are some of the benefits fishing and outdoors retail business owners can expect from using the Tower Systems retail channel specific software:
Subscriptions are a terrific way for small business retailers to provide shoppers with consistent engagement for products and services that are required on a regular basis.
Tower Systems offers a flexible yet powerful subscription facility in its POS software.
Using our subscription facilities as retailer can schedule to ensure products are kept aside for a customer on a regular cycle. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or whenever the desired product becomes available.
The goods can be kept aside with a unique barcode on the product along with the customer name – providing a level of professional service and attention that is key to further cementing the customer relationship.
Thee customer is advised by email or text message when the subscription item is ready to be collected.
The subscription can be charged to a store account or paid on collection. customers can also pre-pay. Payment information is included on the barcode label for the customer to better handle the collection.
The subscription can be setup for an in-store collection or for delivery to a customer address, with delivery done by the business or by a delivery partner of the business.
The subscription can be created by one customer as a gift for another customer.
The software tracks the number of subscriptions for an item. This helps store management for forward planning an dealing with the supplier of subscription items.
Some product subscriptions are given to the retail business by the manufacturer with the retailer being the local fulfilment centre. Our POS software handles this situation too.
There are many variations on subscription scenarios too. Handling these many subscription options has become a key feature of the Tower Systems POS software as it has evolved in managing subscriptions in retail over many years for many of the company’s 3,500+ small business retail customers.
Also, customers can have multiple subscriptions with different rules and criteria too. See, the flexibility layers and layers to offer a valuable, powerful yet easy to use tool for almost any type of retail business.
So, when it comes to managing subscriptions in retail and doing this through your POS software, Tower Systems ms has software ready to go in this area.
Tower Systems continues to help independent small business retailers reduce the possibility of impact from a crypto locket attack.
The help and service from Tower Systems is preventative as well as recovery focussed should the prevention advice be ignored.
In the Tower newsletter, regular weekly email and other communications the company ensures its thousands of small business retail customers has the information they need to properly an thoroughly deal with an attack.
The assistance from the company starts with the preventative, in the form of plain English computer use advice.
Here is a copy of the rent advice widely circulated by Tower Systems to its POS software customers:
COMPUTER USE POLICY
This is advice we suggest a retailer ives to all employees. It has been written for that purpose.
If you use our cloud backup service, recovering from a crypto locker is easier. Regardless, backing up every day in any method gives you a faster and lower cost recovery option. We offer a professional cloud based backup service. We use it ourselves and are happy to recommend it to our customers.
Meet Ben: he is skilled in retail and this is reflected on our constantly evolving small business POS software. Ben is another Tower Systems advantage.
ANZAC Day is an important day of commemoration. We are closed today. Any customers needing help with urgent issues can call our after hours numbers.
Play vinyl in-store. We saw this recently and loved it.
Years ago we launched our free live weekly training workshops. We use the professional WebEx platform and offer access at no cost to our customers.
With voice engagement over the phone (we pay for the call) and visual through any computer anywhere, this is a terrific way to learn more about out software.
That we continue the sessions weekly shows our commitment and that we believe actions speak louder than words.
This session is an example of sessions customers love – we set out to shock with what software users don’t know. It usually works.
We take our engagement with the Shopify e-commerce platform seriously here at Tower Systems. We link our POS software directly and seamlessly.
One way we stay ahead in our knowledge and strategy is by directly working with the folks at Shopify, being aware of developments and future plans.
Two of our leadership team are at Unite 2017, the Shopify international partner conference, which is on in San Francisco this week.
This is providing to be a valuable experience not only in terms of our Shopify knowledge but from the networking with other e-commerce practitioners as we share ideas, accomplishments and future plans.
We are grateful for the opportunity to be here and to learn so we can better serve our customers.
In our Tower Systems POS software we have several facilities you can leverage to help community groups in your local area. These are easy to use and valuable to leverage as you pitch your business as a go-to business helping local groups.
Community is everything to small business. Here at Tower Systems we get that and have encoded in our software tools that help you better serve and connect.
Ask us how, we’d be glad to show you.
Our small business POS software customers are doing the fast dynamic searching facility in our self-serve knowledge base. As you type the knowledge base is listing suggested answers to the query. these could be articles, videos or step-by-step guides. Help is there at your fingertips, as you type. Instantly. No old-school searches. This is genuinely dynamic and directly connected to best-practice peer-reviewed advice.
It’s Easter Monday, a public holiday, time to think about ideas for what’s next in retail. We offer as inspiration these two photos of the front and back of a terrific display in a baby shop we saw recently at The Grove in Los Angeles. We hope the photos present ideas for you.
While our offices are closed for the Easter break, until Tuesday April 18 at 7am, our after hours numbers are available for help with urgent matters.
This post is published by Tower Systems. We think our approach and our software is more appropriate to small business retailers than Vend. However, we have a conflict of interest. Just as Vend has a conflict of interest when they say what they say.
Okay, that’s out of the way.
We have switched plenty of retailers from the Vend software to the Tower Systems POS software. here is what we think makes our solution better, based on what we have learned from these customers.
This list is by no means complete. It highlights the top differences on which you can rely from Tower over a relationship with Vend.
When we say we’re here to help, we meant it through our software our help desk our sales team and our management team.
Serving more than 3,500 small business retailers we are connected and committed to serve the specialist retailers we commit to through our specialist retail software for a range of retail channels.
Here at Tower Systems we are proud to offer a seamless POS software Xero accounting link.
Developed for specialty retail channels, the Tower Systems Xero link delivers seamless integration for jewellers, garden centres, bike shops, gift shops, homewares stores, toy shops, garden centres, produce stores, fishing and outdoors business and more.
The Xero POS software link is best-practice and backed by our own in-house CPA who manages our own retailer businesses where we use the Xero link ourselves. yes, as a POS software company we walk in your shoes.
Represented by Xero on their website as a partner is valuable for Tower Systems and important to our customers and sales prospects. We achieved this a couple of years ago by working with xero and delivering on the requirements they have.
Xero does not allow all POS software companies who ask in as a development partner.
We help our customers migrate to Xero from other accounting software through a free data conversion service.
In addition to our POS software integration with Xero, we use Xero for the retail businesses we own and operate – using the experience to provide us with personal knowledge and experience that we can lev erase in the support were provide to our customers.
We also offer a list of Xero skilled accountants on whom small business retailers can rely for Xero accounting services. We update this list regularly based on information provided by accountants to us.
As employers, as retailers and as small business owners, mental health issues are often not far away from any small business retailer. The challenges confronting our newsagency businesses add to the challenges already there.
Sometimes, we don’t know we are experiencing a mental health challenge while other times it’s obvious and on show for all to see.
How we confront mental health challenges is important for us, our business and those presenting with issues.
While we are not trained professionals in the area, our years of working with small business owners confronted by challenges to their mental health have helped us develop some guiding principles.
Your GP is an excellent person to speak with. Explain to them how you feel and how this impacts on your life. Ask them to prepare a Mental Health Treatment Plan. This is a government recognised plan. It can usually be prepared in a single double visit to the GP. This plan is the trigger to you gaining Medicare supported access to a psychologist for an initial number of visits, which can be extended depending on your situation.
Some people can feel a visit to a GP or psychologist is not warranted in their situation. While the medical professionals are the best to determine this, there are other resources you could explore:
Beyond Blue has published Business In Mind, a useful resource for small businesses on issues relating to mental health in the workplace. This is a good starting point for learning more. In the resource there are links to other resources that can help.
Finding mental health resources for small business owners dealing with mental health issues is not as easy as it is finding resources for managing the workplace for better mental health. It’s tough running any business and sometimes things can feel overwhelming. This is where networking can help as a first step, talking with others.
Small business retailers feeling challenges within themselves need to treat themselves as employees and use the resources available such as:
We at Tower Systems will help in any way possible.
Tower Systems has moved to the next phase of its professional website development services for small business retailers with the launch of a package of web sales fulfilment tools.
The latest enhancements extend the best-practice approach by the Tower Systems web development team and deliver wonderful website initiatives for websites developed in Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce. These three platforms account for around 75% of all e-commerce sites.
Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce, coupled with the Tower Systems retail management software creates a powerful high street and online retail solution for small business retailers.
Tower Systems is proud to be using world renowned platforms and enhancing these with the latest in fulfilment facilities.
Just about every day recently we hear a story of wonderful customer engagement with our POS software and services we provide.
Today we have a story about a customer who drove for twelve hours for the free training we provided at a recent face to face user meeting. They did this to tap into the training, to learn more about the software, ask questions and help plan the next steps for their business through the software and services we provide.
The commitment of a twelve hour drive is extraordinary. We are grateful for this.
We learnt so much from such a unique and remotely located businesses. Plus we were able to add value by training them in parts of the software they had time to investigate. It was a terrific joint experience.
This story shows the commitment of a good POS software / user relationship, how both parties benefit and respect each other through time and others commitments.
Here at Tower Systems we love the passion of our customers. Our commitment is to serve and help…
In addition to linking our POS softer direct to magento and Shopify based websites, Tower Systems links to WooCommerce sites.
The latest integration is another example of Tower Systems delivering best practice integrations to best practice products.
When it comes to websites for small business retailers or any business for that matter, the best solution is one that has been proved around there world. Locally developed content management systems are not good for business websites as there are maintenance challenges.
WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento represent around 80% of ecommerce sites globally. There is no need to go beyond these three.
Tower Systems is grateful to the three ecommerce platform businesses for their encouragement and support of our moves in this space. Their encouragement has helped us do this good work in the interested of our small business customers.
As part of the continuous evolution of our online presence, we released enhancements to our website several weeks ago including new inspirational images.
Too often we see POS software4 companies focussing on technology ahead of people. Our view here at Tower Systems is that people come first as they are the focus of all we do through our software and the services we provide support in the software.
Th feedback from our customers following the latest evolution has been terrific. Thank you!
This photo shows a group from our Perth POS software user meeting late last week. Like all our sessions we had a good group of retail businesses represented. This works well as people learn from each other.
The latest round of face to face POS software user meetings have provided us excellent feedback on the latest software update and insights into next steps as well as wonderful learning opportunities for customers ho attended.
Offering these face to face user meetings its a genuine point of difference for us.
That we continue to offer the sessions today speaks to us honouring our commitment to our customers as well as our focus on providing personal customer service.
Too many POS software companies hide from their customers and make contact difficult. We don’t. We embrace are real human to human contact. The face to face user meetings are a good example of this and our commitment.
We appreciate the support form our customers and support for face to face training and engagement.
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