CategoryEthics

Oh wow, look at the huge traffic to my website, aren’t we amazing to achieve this!

We see too many small business retailers fall into the trap of chasing website traffic to achieve a big number. They think traffic is what matters. Okay, it may make one feel good. You can’t bank traffic though. All you can bank is business transacted.

The internet is a transparent place. Plenty of us can see the traffic websites get if we pay to access the price professional data access services. This access to data helps us understand traffic value, not only for our website but for others … for clients for whom we build websites, for competitors, for any website we like.

Business owners should analyse their website traffic carefully, to understand what brings visitors to their website. They need to track the traffic through to transactions for the business as it is these transactions that matter.

A website we were looking at recently achieved a significant spike in traffic. 30% of their traffic is now coming from outside Australia. They only sell to Australia. 66% of their Australian traffic is for keywords they have targeted solely for traffic, keywords that have nothing to do with what they sell.

The first keyword relates to their business accounts for 3% of their total Australian online search traffic. The traffic count itself has not changed in a year.

The website traffic growth they have chased and won appears to have no actual commercial value for the business.

Our advice to local small business retailers is to chase valuable traffic over volume every day. Five visitors spending moment with you is far more important that five hundreds visitors and only one spending with you. While the five hundred may give you bragging rights to anyone who cares to listen, those five hundred visitors do not put food on the table.

Understand what brings people to your website and tune the content of your website to achieve what you want for your business. Tune is a good word here since you can tune your website to achieve what you want.l Anyone can.

Online, slow and steady wins the race when it comes to content curation in pursuit of commercially valuable website traffic. You can bank on it.

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Tower Systems builds beautiful websites, Shopify websites, Big Commerce Websites, connected to POS software, for local small business retailers. Here are some we have delivered recently:

• Needleworx Mackay, https://needleworx.com.au
• The Centre Newsagency, https://thegiftmart.com.au
• Prospect Marketplace News, https://thetassiemart.com.au
• newsXpress Bendigo, https://destinationgifts.com.au
• Ocean Hut Compleat Angler, https://compleatanglernarooma.com.au
• Olivia and Grace (Mount Lawley News), www.oliviaandgrace.com.au
• Berri Plaza News & Photographics, https://www.abbyrosecollective.com.au
• Pittwater Pets, https://pittwaterpets.com.au
• Garden Pets https://finsfangsfeathersfur.com.au

We have built hundreds of live websites for many different retailers. This experience, and the experience with our own websites helps us create there advice we provide in blog posts like this.

It is tiresome reading news reports claiming that businesses and business CEOs want employees to return to the office – often backed by a survey of CEOs.

Sure, some do. But, plenty don’t.

These stories about returning to the office are often vested interest based: landlords wanting their commercial space to be filled, companies wanting the space they have leased to be filled, businesses needing office-based trade to thrive and consultants serving businesses in these situations.

Think about local retailers benefiting from people working from home, regional retailers too. Force people back to the office and they lose the business they have won.

Landlords, property developers and others wanting people to return to the office for selfish reasons need to stop being selfish.

Smart employees of workers who want work from anywhere want their people to work where they are happiest. If that’s home, let them work from home.

Happy employees are valuable to any business.

Journalists and news outlets need to stop being boosters for the selfish demanding people work at the office and not from home.

Families benefit from more time with people able to work from home rather than losing family time to a commute.

Local communities benefit from people working from home shopping more locally and having mor time for local engagement.

Those calling for people to return to the office think their needs are more important than family time or local community time. They are wrong.

At our POS software company, Tower Systems, where people work is up to them. We actually started on this model in 2019, ahead of the pandemic, and then we escalated it to be companywide. We are lucky to be in a business where work location is not an issue.

We hire people we trust, provide them with resources they need and offer as much flexibility as we can in terms of their work situation. We have some team members saving close to twenty hours a week – that’s money in the bank for them.

Sure, we have a small crew in the office, where the job requires it. We support them. We are also grateful that each member of this crew actually prefers to be there, in the office.

Now, we do have a vested interest in all this. We make software for local small business retailers. They benefit from more people who work from home. So, of course we will support work from home from a commercial perspective. But our pitch makes sense right – happy people = productive people = people less likely to look elsewhere = a more successful business.

We think it all comes down to how you view people working in your business. If you see them as a line item on your P&L, a cog in a big machine that serves a P&L result only, you miss the opportunity to see people working in your business as people, families, members of local communities.

We don’t support the calls for people to return to the office and we wish news outlets would stop being used as mouthpieces for the vested interests making these selfish pitches.

A massive competitor of ours, Lightspeed, the HUGE Canadian POS software company, is promoting Lightspeed Payments as being revolutionary, delivering to retailers new benefits. Check out this pitch, which they published recently via Inside Retail.

At the forefront of this transformation, new payment systems are now advancing the way retailers handle transactions and manage their businesses. Instead of manually inputting sales into separate payment terminals after processing them on their point-of-sale (POS), retailers are now increasingly turning to systems that sync their POS with their payment processors, allowing transactions to seamlessly flow between the two platforms. These setups are commonly referred to as integrated payment systems.

There is no advance, no new technology.

Tower Systems has offered integrated payments for more than 15 years.

Lightspeed Payments is new to Lightspeed and so it makes sense that they pitch it a an advance. For them maybe it is an advance, bot not for Tower Systems and plenty of other software companies that have delivered this for may years.

The big Lightspeed Payments advance is that they integrate with their own payments platform, a payments platform off of which Lightspeed makes money from every payments transaction in a retail business using their software.

This is the advance – that Lightspeed makes more money from its customers.

It is disappointing seeing news outlets publish news of an advance that is really a tool or tax of retail transactions conducted through specific software.

Is this fair for retailers?

If you are Lightspeed customer and you choose to not use their payments platform Lightspeed has started charging customers a fee to compensate for them not making payments revenue from you.

In our opinion, what Lightspeed claims is an advance in its technology solution for retailers via Lightspeed Payments is, in fact, a price increase in the use of its software, something imposed on retailers but dressed as some great advancement.

Here at Tower Systems we believe that retailers should get to choose the payments platform that is right for their business. This choice can lead to significant savings in the cost of payments. We know of retailers paying way less than if they were using Lightspeed and were locked into the Lightspeed Payments platform.

But let’s go back to the article at Inside Retail by Lightspeed and check in on another claim.

Where Lightspeed takes things a step further is in conjoining these linked systems into a single, comprehensive platform that combines POS and payments, allowing every aspect of the transaction process to be seamlessly synchronised.

In 0ur opinion, this is a misrepresentation of the facts.

Okay, Lightspeed Payments may take things a step further compared to what Lightspeed did in the past. But for many POS software companies, for manny years we have provided a single, comprehensive platform that combines POS and payments. And, we have done that for a lower cost and with more control offered each retailer.

Lightspeed is a mighty and successful company for sure. We are not even the size of an ant in comparison. The size difference does not mean they should get a free kick in terms of marketing spin. In our opinion, the claims being made in relation to Lightspeed Payments are inaccurate and shallow.

Our advice to retailers is to do your homework, look at the total cost of ownership, and, choose the software that serves your needs best as functionality and customer service are the two most critical factors. All good POS software puffers integrated payments, what Lightspeed claims as an advance is not – they are late that party.

Arielle Executive claims to list 7 Best POS Systems In Australia For 2023.

We think what they actually promote is software companies that pay them to be on the list. We think theirs is an ad platform.

Why do we say this? Because they’ve not assessed our software. Okay, we’re a small company. But we do have 3,500+ local Aussie business customers.

We think that if you are going to pay Google to rank well for listing the best POS systems in Australia you should have at the very lease actually looked at POS systems made for retailers in Australia. Like, you should have done the work to enable you to make the claim.

Oh, and by looking at POS systems we mean looking at the actual software, comparing functions, getting into the total cost of ownership and understanding each product before making an assessment leading to the claim you promote.

We are suspicious about comparison websites like that offered by Arielle Executive because in our experience they are ad platforms you pay to list your product to be considered ‘best’, when really the ranking comes down to an amount of money you spend.

Arielle Executive is a commercial business that offers a range of services. None of the services listed at the Arielle Executive claim expertise in assessing the best software of any kind.

We get that Arielle Executive is running a business and has to make money. We wish they were clearer about what they were doing with the ads they are running on Google claiming to list the 7 Best POS Systems In Australia For 2023. And while they products they list are well known and loved by many, whether they are the best comes down to much more than whether they have paid money to be on the marketing list promoted by by Arielle Executive.

Here at Tower Systems we are a transparent company, clear in what we offer. People considering us can see demonstrations of our software on our website and on our Google channel. We’re not pushy either. Folks who enquire about our software are respected. We are keen to understand their needs. If we think we are good fit we will say so, and show how.

If you are considering POS software for your business, take your time, do your homework, trust what you discover and not a marketing lost others have paid to be on.

Have you read a blog post or article from a company recently and thought about how generic and bland it was. It’s happening more thanks too AI. AI bland we call it.

AI tech is grinding out content fast and doing do by regurgitating what others have written and trying to make it sound new and from the voice of the person giving the AI machine the prompts. The blandness is one of several AI tells. You can see it in the words, the formatting and more. Ho-hum.

It’s okay, businesses can use AI for their posts if they want. But, here at Tower Systems, we prefer the real, the human, the emotional, the reality with feelings, because, after all, local indie retail is all about feelings. You know what we mean 0- you walk into a local shop and there’s a warm smile from a local, locally relevant conversation, useful local knowledge and engagement with the local community that locals understand.

AI doesn’t get any of this, because it has no feelings, no local roots. It can only fake it so far.

In our POS software we reflect the humanity of what we do by bringing to life enhancements our customers ask us for. Every enhancement we deliver in response to a customer requests, and votes from their colleagues, enhances the humanity of our software, the connection our software delivers to our customers, to0 its users.

Here at Tower Systems, our knowledge base articles are written by humans, our videos are made by humans, our software is written by humans. We do all this in service of local indie specialty retail – a very human local retail endeavour. Locals feel the heartbeat and that’s something that AI cannot give you.

So, next time you read something from a company and it feels bland or middle of the road, wonder to yourself if it is AI bland, wonder if the company cared about the reader in a way that they used an AI bot to write for you rather than having a human from their team write it.

What are we in small business if we are not ourselves, real, human, authentic, and in the moment? Sure, AI can provide useful tools, but when it comes to communication abut who we are, what we do and why it matters to customers and prospective customers, being human is our difference.

The folks are at it again today, if you do a Google search for Tower Systems, an ad comes up for www.compareposquotes.com.au.

They are encouraging those searching for Tower Systems by name to look at comparisons. But, the www.compareposquotes.com.au business does no such comparison. You have to do that work.

Theirs is an ad platform that other businesses pay to be part of to be found when people are looking for a business, like Tower Systems.

We think it is lazy advertising to directly target us and to use our name or part of our name in their advertising.

The best way to research POS software is to do your own research, and not use a faux comparison website, like www.compareposquotes.com.au. Since it costs money to list with them, the businesses that do list with them have an advertising cost that they would surely want to recoup somehow. Businesses that do not pay to list with a comparison website may not have these costs.

One of the main drawbacks of using comparison websites like www.compareposquotes.com.au from Comparison Advantage is that they often only display a limited number of options. This means that shoppers may not be aware of all the options available to them, and they may not be able to find the best deal for their needs. Additionally, some comparison websites may only display options from certain companies or providers, which can bias the results in favor of those companies.

Another issue with comparison websites is that the information they provide may not always be up-to-date or accurate. Since the websites rely on the companies themselves to provide information about their products and services, there is a potential for bias or even misinformation. Additionally, prices and other details can change rapidly, so the information on a comparison website may not always reflect the most current situation.

Furthermore, using comparison websites can also be time-consuming and confusing. Consumers may have to sift through a lot of information and compare different features and prices in order to make a decision. This can be overwhelming, especially for people who are not familiar with the products or services being compared.

If you click on their ad it costs them money, which is something we suppose.

If you are looking for POS software for your retail business, take your time, figure out exactly what you want, search for yourselves for the software that serves your needs.

If you go to Google and search for us, for Tower Systems, you are likely to see an ad from Compare POS quotes, a website run by a company called Comparison Advantage.

Comparison Advantage is paying Google to run an as with our name, Tower Systems, in the headline.

To a small business owner, this could look like a link to a website about Tower Systems.

We are concerned that the Comparison Advantage www.compareposquotes.com.au Google ad appears to pass itself off as related to us. It is not.

This situation sucks in that here we have a company, Comparison Advantage, paying to get their ad in front of people looking for us, for Tower Systems.

Their website claims to offer comparisons of POS systems, for business owners looking for POS systems. The thing is, you are only listed at www.comparisonadvantage.com.auy if you pay Comparison Advantage to list with them. There is no assessment by them, no value add, other than them paying Google to list their Tower Systems related ad.

Good businesses win customers on their own merits, not by jumping the queue and paying to come up as a search result when someone is searching for something else. This is what sucks about this. Of course there will be people with deep pockets who want to trade off the good name and success of others. It’s what the world is like.

All we can do is to continue to build and support POS software that local small business retailers like and use. we are grateful to our thousands of customers for their support.

As for Comparison Advantage and their www.compareposquotes.com..au website, we hope click on the ad and then not choose any of the products they offer. Eventually advertisers will withdraw and the company will have to find another way to make money. Making money on the back of the hard work of others is poor form in our opinion.

One of the main drawbacks of using comparison websites like www.compareposquotes.com.au from Comparison Advantage is that they often only display a limited number of options. This means that shoppers may not be aware of all the options available to them, and they may not be able to find the best deal for their needs. Additionally, some comparison websites may only display options from certain companies or providers, which can bias the results in favor of those companies.

If you found us by looking for us, thank you, welcome, we hope we can help.

Do a Google search for Tower Systems and the top result is an ad for Comparison Advantage and their www.compareposquotes.com.au website. Take a look:

This sucks because they are paying Google to trade off people searching for our company.

We had a sales prospect tell us recently that they used the Comparison Advantage www.compareposquotes.com.au website, entered their details and was hit with a torrent of calls, emails and text messages from some companies listed by Comparison Advantage all before they even understood if the software may be useful.

Tower Systems does not do this. We do not use Comparison advantage and their website www.compareposquotes.com.au.

Many consumers and business owners turn to comparison websites to help them make informed decisions about purchasing products or services. However, it is important to note that these websites may not always provide an accurate or complete picture of the options available.

One of the main drawbacks of using comparison websites like www.compareposquotes.com.au from Comparison Advantage is that they often only display a limited number of options. This means that shoppers may not be aware of all the options available to them, and they may not be able to find the best deal for their needs. Additionally, some comparison websites may only display options from certain companies or providers, which can bias the results in favor of those companies.

Another issue with comparison websites is that the information they provide may not always be up-to-date or accurate. Since the websites rely on the companies themselves to provide information about their products and services, there is a potential for bias or even misinformation. Additionally, prices and other details can change rapidly, so the information on a comparison website may not always reflect the most current situation.

Furthermore, using comparison websites can also be time-consuming and confusing. Consumers may have to sift through a lot of information and compare different features and prices in order to make a decision. This can be overwhelming, especially for people who are not familiar with the products or services being compared.

In conclusion, while comparison websites can be a useful tool for consumers, it is important to be aware of their limitations. They may not always provide a complete or accurate picture of the options available, and the information they provide may not be up-to-date. It is always a good idea to do your own research and compare multiple sources before making a decision.

As for www.compareposquotes.com.au from Comparison Advantage, in our opinion, steer clear of them.

Comparison Advantage runs www.compareposquotes.com.au. Their pitch is “compare POS quotes. All major brands”

The thing is, this statement is not backed by the evidence.

We did a search this morning, December 5, 2022, for Tower Systems, our own POS software company, and the top result is an ad from Comparison Advantage with our business name in the ad. But we don’t advertise with Comparison Advantage. We don’t pay them to list our Tower Systems POS software on their www.compareposquotes.com.au website. because we don’t pay them, they do not include us. It seems to be considered a major brand by Comparison Advantage you have to pay them. That doesn’t make sense.

www.compareposquotes.com.au is not, in our opinion, an authentic comparison website. rather, it is an advertising platform. Businesses pay to have their software listed. Comparison Advantage Pty Ltd does not undertake any comparison itself. being listed on their website is a result of what you pay them, and not as a result of any assessment they have made as to the abilities of the POS software.

As the www.compareposquotes.com.au website notes, it is an introduction service:

7. INTRODUCTION SERVICES
   CAF is a medium that facilitates the introduction of Users and Providers, in order for those Providers to provide Quotes, offers goods and services to Users. CAF simply acts as an introduction service to Users and Providers, and does not have any obligations or liabilities to, and is not a party to any contract between, Users and Providers in relation to such offers, goods or services, or otherwise resulting from the introduction. You agree and acknowledge that:
   • . any terms and conditions relating to Quotes, offers, goods and services are solely between you and the Provider and do not involve CAF in any way, except that they must not be inconsistent with your obligations under this agreement;
8. as part of the Services, we provide links and introductions between third party Providers that are not under the control of CAF;
9. any Quotes and subsequent follow-ups are not under the control of CAF, and any queries or complaints about the Quotes should be directed to the Provider;
10. our provision of introductions between Providers and Users through the Website does not imply any endorsement or recommendation by CAF of any Provider;
11. we do not constantly examine, determine or warrant the legality of any Provider, or of the offers, goods and services listed by a Provider on the Website. In the event that you wish to use a Provider, you are solely responsible for making your own enquiries;
12. we make no guarantee of any cost savings or any other financial outcome by facilitating introductions between you and Providers;
13. any terms and conditions agreed relating to an offer, a good or a service, or Quote provided via the Website, constitute a contract between a User and a Provider and do not involve CAF in any way; and
14. all Quotes provided by a Provider are subject to change by the Provider without notice.

We’d go further and note that they only introduce you to businesses that pay them for the service. It looks and feels like an ad platform. we think it is an ad platform.

We don’t think that www.compareposquotes.com.au by Comparison Advantage Pty Ltd is accurate in its claims of representing major brands.

We also don’t think it is fair that they pay to use the names of businesses like ours to attract traffic. if someone is searching Google for Tower Systems, that is their goal, not to be presented an ad platform that lists nothing about Tower Systems.

We share our opinion about this here today because we are frustrated that this ad platform is seeking to trade off the good reputation and market depth we have achieved.

If you search Tower Systems on Google today, this www.ComparePOSQuotes.com.au ad appears.

In our opinion, this ad appears misleading. we say this because it says in the headline Compare Tower Systems – POS Systems for every industry. The thing is, there is no comparison with us, no comparison with Tower Systems. So, why is Tower Systems in the headline. We think this is because we are sought after, searched for via Google and so this business, Comparison Advantage Pty Ltd, is using our business name as a form of click bait, as a way of getting people to click the ad.

If you click this compare POS systems ad that has our Tower Systems name, you are not comparing Tower Systems, we are not involved whatsoever.

So, guess what we did … we entered our details into their website that came up after we clicked the ad. They emailed us. While we were typing a response to their emails, they called us. Talk about spam.

We explained to the representative of Comparison Advantage, who sounded like they were calling from an offshore call centre, what the company was dong by boyu=ing our business name for Google advertising their response was that it was outside their area.

While we get that there is nothing illegal to this type of Google advertising, we think it is ethically wrong for one company to pay to present the name of a competitor in order to divert traffic the competitor may have otherwise achieved.

We think, it’s our opinion to be clear, that Comparison Advantage sucks. We think their approach is questionable ethically. But, hey, it’s our opinion only.

We have sought to raise a complaint with Google, but that is not an easy process. In fact, dealing with Google on anything like this is frustrating. We think the company makes it so deliberately.

Our Tower Systems POS software is awesome in our opinion. The best way to decide whether it is right for you is for you to take a look at it, and con sider whether it serves your needs. It may not. But do compare it. Using a comparison website like Comparison Advantage is no comparison at all as they are not comparing everyone, not even the key players in our experience. It is misleading we think.