The POS Software Blog
News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.
Last week we released these enhanced knowledge base articles for retailers using our POS software:
Every day can be tough in small business. You can feel like the big competitors are winning and that you can’t climb the mountain to compete. You may not know where to start.
There are green shoots of good news and opportunities in every small and independent retail business. The key is to find these and to leverage them for more success.
A green shoot is a product or a category of products or a supplier performing above average in the business. Often, these successes have gone unnoticed.
We were working with a retailer recently who said business was down by 20% and they did not know what to do. It turned out that the best performing product category in their business was ‘failing’ for six months because they had not replenished stock.
They invested, instead, on new lines that had not gone as well as the successful product.
They, in part, created their own downward spiral and had not looked at their business data to understand that contributed to the problems they were confronting.
Once they realised the situation, they re-stocked the successful range of products and numbers started to improve. More important, their confidence level grew and with this their business decisions improved.
There are opportunities for optimism in every business.
Finding optimism is like mining, you have to look for it, sometimes for a long time. It is there, though, in every retail business.
As soon as you hear yourself talking your business down, STOP. Look at your data, look for the good news. That is what you need to think and talk about.
By looking at your data, we mean looking at year on year, quarter on quarter or month on month comparison data for departments, categories, suppliers or even individual products. Look for growth and once you see growth, think about what you can do with and around the products achieving growth so that you can achieve other growth.
Any product achieving year on year increases in unit sales is a product to be appreciated, nurtured and used to help grow other products that can sell to the same customer.
This is how you grow optimism. Find those small green shoots, leverage them with some small steps and, over time, build more success for your business.
While overall revenue, traffic count and profitability may be down, growth even at the smallest data point, such as for one or two products, could be enough to get you looking at your business differently.
In the Tower Systems POS software, the best initial reports for good news are: Monthly Sales Comparison (department level, category level and / or supplier level), the 10×10 Report, Ranked Sales Report (by units) for one period and then for the comparative period.
We’re here to help you find the good news in your business. Your business data is the key.
Members of the Tower Systems leadership team were at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, checking out trends, talking to start-up and innovators, renewing business connections and getting a feel for 2016 and beyond.
While our plans for this year were locked in months ago, it has been wonderful to consider these in the context of the latest trends.
There is no substitute for being there, in the amazing halls of CES with close to 200,000 others to see what appeals.
For commercial reasons, the insights of CES will be kept internally within the company for now.
For years Tower Systems has provided its customers with a professionally printed support card. Indeed, we provide several cards to new customers, updating customers and yearly to all customers – to help make contacting our help desk and the after hours support service easier. We also had the card out at trade shows, user meetings and other customer events.
We know small business retailers prefer to speak with an engaged human rather than deal with a nameless person by email or through a third-party call centre. This is why we make contacting us, at all levels of the company, easy.
The blue card published with this post is the latest version of our support card. It’s professionalism reflects the professionalism of the software it supports.
Small business retailers often state the point of different their small business offers but too many do not live the point of difference.
Take customer service, for example.
Many small and independent retail business owners I know say they offer a better and more personal service than big retailers.
Retail shoppers often judge service by ease of doing business, the returns policy and any barriers along the way. Too often, small and independent retailers have barriers that get in the way of their goal of better customer service. Barriers such as hand written signs about eating in the shop, a notice about a credit card surcharge or an inconsistent returns policy.
If you say your customer service is better than your bigger competitors, live it every day. Believe in yourself by doing what you say.
Small and independent retailers who do this – who carry through with actions the words they pitch about their business – tend to be more successful.
Tower Systems helps small business specialty retailers to live their belief in their business through business processes, platforms and tools that drive consistency and deliver better quality and more personal customer service. These and other benefits are at the core of the Tower Systems POS software.
While we are a POS software company, we play an important role in helping small business retailers believe in themselves.
We invited several customers last year to have their photo taken in-store as part of a promotional series showing happy small business customers in their shops where they use our smart POS software. We were thrilled every customer we approached agreed.
Here is one photo from the wonderful LollyBomb business in Adelaide. Some of the specialist facilities in our software help this business in smart and engaging ways.
We are grateful for their help in promoting our software.
As with each POS software update released by Tower Systems, the communication provided announcing the release of the latest update is thorough, professional and easy to understand. This good advance communication is key to confidence in the software. It encourages trust.
Our communication helps customer decide when they want to install the software. We do not force any update on our customers. There are no surprises.
The latest communication lists all enhancements and changes in the software – showing the value of our commitment to software development and the extent to which we listen to our customers in deciding what is to go into an update.
In addition to testing the software itself, our comprehensive beta release program tests the communication announcing the update.
All Tower systems customers can vote on items to be included in an update through our transparent software ideas process.
Tower Systems is thrilled to announce the successful hiring for two new POS software development positions in the business.
The expansion of our software development team in our head office is a reflection of the growth of the business in terms of customers and in anticipation of further considerable enhancement of software capabilities through 2016 and beyond.
The latest hires are a result of an extensive search for candidates appropriate to our needs.
Our new colleagues are settling in and familiarising themselves with our professional software development environment.
This week between Christmas and New Year is usually the quietest for the POS software company help desk with many retail businesses either closed or busy with post Christmas sales.
Regardless, the Tower Systems help desk has been open for business, taking calls, checking supplier stock files, providing free training, enhancing Knowledge Base content and undertaking installations.
As with other years we have used the opportunity for housekeeping – as have many retailers. We support this with assistance in running housekeeping tasks including sales to quit dead sock and other tasks retailers like to reset their businesses for the new year.
Hence the decision to ensure we have been at full strength and capable of serving any needs expressed by our customers.
Tower Systems is using the rush of trade for small business retailers at Christmas to reinforce the commercial value of the Tyro integrated eftpos solution we offer. With 1,000 retailers connected through Tyro we have excellent data reflecting time saving, mistake reducing and other benefits for retailers that help at the sales counter as well as in the back office management of the business.
In the middle of the busy trading of Christmas, the benefits of the Tower Systems Tyro broadband eftpos integration are clear and felt on small business retail shops across a range of marketplaces:
In the first three days of Christmas / New Year most support calls have been from people wanting advice on how to do things they might not have got to through the regular busy trading period. Being accessible has been key to the service we provide – accessibility like regular blog posts here, access by email, access by phone and the continuation of our weekly support email.
How do you identify product that is not working? When do you quit a product that is not working? Why should you quit stock? How do you quit the stock? How long should quitting stock take? What if the item does not sell no matter what you do?
These are all questions we will answer here for you in the form of suggestions. What you ultimately do is 100% up to you. Your choices need to reflect your own situation and circumstances.
Identifying product that is not working.
Product is not working if it is not paying its way – paying for the floor space it takes and the time you spend on it. Check your sales, rank all your stock based on sales – look at the bottom performing stock. Your software should have a ranked Sales Report that lets you list all your stock ranked by unit or $$ sales. Use this to create your list of items to consider.
The other way to identify stock that’s not working for you is to check your back room or other storage facility. Stock that is not generating cash regularly has to be considered dead in our view.
When do you quit a product?
You quit, exit, products when they are not paying their way, when a season is done or when you want to exit that category for some other reason.
Let’s say your rent is $1,250 per square metre per year. If your gross profit averages, say, 50%, you will need to sell $2,500 worth of product to pay for a metre of space. However, this is not the complete consideration as you have labour, power and other costs to cover. The suggested rule of thumb is that your retail sales need to be at least three times that necessary to cover the cost of the space. In the scenario covered here, you should be earning at least $7,500 from a square metre of space. If stock is not delivering this, quitting it could be necessary.
Why quit stock?
To keep your shop fresh, to not be weighed down by dead stock to make your shop look more relevant, to stop hoarding.
How to quit stock.
Here is how we quit stock in retail businesses we operate. These businesses are in shopping centres where retail space is limited and expensive. We are necessarily aggressive.
Quitting stock takes strength and commitment. We urge you to do it to keep your business fresh. Product not selling gives shoppers a bad impression of your business.
Take a look at your shop floor and in your back room. Look at what you can get rid of right away to reduce the anchor of dead stock on your business.
Too many retail businesses have old stock gathering dust. One of the best ways to separate your business is to regularly quit stock that is not performing as it should.
Tower Systems is thrilled with the structured professionally managed beta release of a major POS software update. Representing many man-months of software development, this latest update delivers new facilities along with user-requested enhancements, taking our software into new areas and leveraging new opportunities.
The roll out is proceeding well and at the pace chosen by our customers.
Retailers using our POS software and following our retail management advice has had access to terrific tools with which to leverage the Boxing Day / Post Christmas sale opportunity. Our training, support and retail business advice platforms have aligned to help retailers make the most of the seasonal sale opportunity – well in advance of the big day.
Our focus has also included training and guiding new retailers and those who have never undertaken such sales. Owning our retail businesses for years, we have been able to drawn on our own advice to to speak from personal experience, to help those new to the Post Christmas sale opportunity to help it work for them.
From discount facilities to inventory opportunity discovery to targeted marketing tools, our POS software is an ideal platform through which to drive additional revenue this time of the year.
We have been advising our small business retail, customers our planned Christmas hours for several weeks:
CHRISTMAS HOURS.
We will close at 12 noon Christmas Eve and reopen 7am December 29. On December 31 we will close at 4pm. we reopoen January 4 at 7am. Our after hours numbers will be available for urgent system down queries.
There are some bad web development businesses out there, charging too much and delivering website solutions that are not what customers sought. Like anything in business, when it comes to web development – you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor.
Our advice when it comes to choosing a web developer is simple:
Tower Systems is helping several retailers transfer old-school loyalty points balances to cash value for engaged shoppers.
With points based loyalty so damaged from the poor value offerings of major retailers, smart small business retailers are engaging in the switch.
Having POS software with multiple loyalty offerings makes it easy for retailers to make this switch – to leverage the value accused in points and to package this is a more practical offering that shoppers love.
Even though this is the busy Christmas season, we have retailers engaged with this process – to emerge Christmas opportunities even further. With traffic peaking, this is a perfect time of the year to push even further.
Customer reactions to the conversion of points to dollars is appreciated – we are loving the reactions we are reading.
We were privy recently to correspondence between a POS software company and a customer from just before the customer switched to us. The correspondence is an example of how a tech company serving small business retailers ought not communicate with customers. The correspondence was rude, condescending and short on ethics.
In response to concerns raised about the time consuming nature of some functions in the software, the software company representative ignored the question and ranted on using technical terms to claim, more or less, that the customer would now know if the software was good as they were technically inept.
Yes, sometimes the customer is wrong. The key is to deal with this in a respectful and helpful way.
The communication we have seen was disappointing as it reflects badly on all software companies, especially those of us serving small business retailers.
Thankfully, we have switched the customer to our software and are providing respectful customer service that is restoring their faith in tech companies.
Here at Tower Systems we are transparent, letting our actions and our words here speak for us. This blog, for example, is a place of transparency that you can use to compare what we do and how we communicate.
We urge you to compare the content and professionalism of this blog with that of any competitor. Put the two side by side and see for yourself the Tower Systems difference – in words, design and visuals.
We are grateful to the 3,500+ small business retailers we serve for it is their insights and feedback that help make us what we are and this blog the useful place it is.
We love Xero. While we link to multiple small business accounting solutions, Xero is the one receiving most praise by experts and good press on a number of fronts at the moment.
Tower Systems is proud to be an approved authorised Xero POS software partner, listed on their website.
We are not surprised to see a POS software competition ignoring Xero when rating accounting software. Their ignorance is not unexpected.
With all the talk of a change to GST arrangement in Australia, it is appropriate we note that any change to GST in terms of quantum and the products and / or services on which it applies would be easy for Tower Systems to manage.
The Tower Systems POS software today has all the facilities necessary for our customer to handle such changes without the need for a software update.
The Tower Systems designed and manufactured gift cards are growing in popularity across a range of retail channels. We are thrilled to be of service to retailers keen to offer professional gift cards backed by professional gift card management software as they have access to through their smart and engaged Tower Systems POS software.
The latest design customer gift cards are being shipped right now – pitching fresh designs to retail partners in time for Christmas trade.
The image loaded with this post shows some of the cards we have designed for our garden centre customers.
We are grateful to have in-house graphic design capabilities through which we can promote deeper engagement with our software.
We saw excellent sales processed yesterday in small business retail outlets in Australia as Christmas 2015 trade hits high gear.
Our personal and engaged service of retailers using our POS software sees us working with them on such a busy day to ensure their IT infrastructure genuinely helps them through the busy time.
Tower Systems is thrilled to have commenced the structured professionally managed beta release of a major POS software update. Representing many man-months of software development, this latest update delivers new facilities along with user-requested enhancements, taking our software into new areas and leveraging new opportunities.
We are grateful to our beta release sites and to all who have contributed ideas and inspiration to this latest release of our popular software.
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