CategoryProduce store software

For years we have offered Christmas marketing tips here ands elsewhere to indie small business retailers. This year, we offer a revised list, the best of the best based on our experience in retail,. ideas that workehvery time and in just about every situation.

Tower Systems works with more than 3,500+ small business retailers using its POS software in speciality retail niches including jewellers, garden centres, bike shops, toy shops, gift shops, newsagents, pet shops, adult shops and more. We offer these ideas as our Christmas gift to you.

1. Make it easy. People often talk about how hard Christmas is. Be the local business that makes it easy. The ways to do this are with easy Lay-By, free wrapping, better shop floor help, guide buying advice or tips on perfect gifts no one else will think of. Consider making Christmas easy as being a key part of your messaging.
2. Be thrilled people are in your shop. Your personal smile or greeting is something they may not see in a big business where employees are less invested in each shopper and where the owner is usually thousands of kilometers away.
3. Make the giving easy. If people purchase items from you to send somewhere else. Offer a one-stop shop. Save them the trip to the post office.
4. Make the shop less about Christmas. Consider pulling back on the Christmas visual noise. Go for something simple, muted, respecting the season but making a calm statement. Consider declaring the shop a Christmas carol free zone – not because you hate carols but because you want to help customers take a break.
5. Help people rest and recharge. Create a Christmas shopping rest and recovery zone. Offer free tea, coffee, water and something to eat. Encourage people to take a break in your shop – without any obligation for them to spend money with you.
6. Let your customers help each other. Setup a whiteboard or sheets of butcher’s paper, yes keep it simple. Get customers to write gift suggestions under different age/gender groups. For example: Girls 18 – 25, Boys 55+. Encourage your customers to help each other through their suggestions.
7. Make price comparison difficult. If you sell items people are likely to price compare with other businesses, package them so price comparison is not easy. Put items into a hamper as a perfect Boy 8 to 12 bundle for example. Or offer the item with pre packages services if appropriate for an item.
8. Facilitate sharing stories. Find space in your shop for customers to share their Christmas stories. It could be a story wall inside or in front of the shop. This initiative encourages storytelling by locals and better connects the business with the community.
9. Become a gallery. Work with a school, kindergarten, community group or retirement village to bring in local art for people to come and see through Christmas. A small space commitment can drive traffic from family and friends of those with art on show.
10. Send cards. Send Christmas cards early in the season to suppliers, key customers and local community groups. This connects you with Christmas. Invite all team members to sign each card.
11. Host a Christmas party. For shops nearby. You are all in the season together – let your hear down before things get crazy.
12. Ensure you have gifts targeted at occasions. For example: Kris Kringle, by price point and by recipient. Make it easy for people to know what they could give.
13. Be local. Ensure you have a selection of locally sourced products available for purchase. Make it clear in-store that these products are sourced locally.
14. Tell stories. On your Facebook page, talk about what is important to you at Christmas. Personalise the season and deepen the connection with those who could shop with you.
15. Share Christmas recipes. Each week for, say, four weeks, give customers a family Christmas recipe. This personalises Christmas in your business, creates a talking point and makes shopping with you different to your bigger competitors.
16. Sell training. Leverage the specialist knowledge you have in your business by selling as gifts places at classes you run sharing your expertise.
17. Hold back. Don’t go out with everything you have for Christmas all at once. Plan the season to show off what you have as the season unfolds. This allows you multiple launches.
18. Share a taste. Regardless if your type of business, bake a family recipe of Christmas cake, Christmas pudding or Christmas biscuits and offer tastings to shoppers on select days. This personalises the experience in your shop.
19. Offer hampers. Package several items together and offer them as a hamper. Time-poor shoppers could appreciate you doing this work for them. We have seen this work in many different retail situations.
20. Buy X get Y. Encourage people to spend more with a volume based deal. Pitched right, this could get customers purchasing items for several family members in order to get the price offer you have. Use your technology to manage this.

Christmas is the perfect time to plan for next year. It is the time to do everything possible to leverage bonus Christmas traffic to benefit your business through next year.

Choosing the right POS software can be key tot the success of any retail business, especially a small retail business.

Okay,  this seems like a motherhood statement. It is. But there is more to it than that.

The right POS software can be a proactive support for the business, I can guide business decisions, early detect employee theft, dramatically cut mistakes, guide product placement in-store and help bring shoppers back more often. These are all practical deliverables from good POS software. Indeed, these and more.

Any software can ring up a sale and track what is sold. Those steps are barely the beginning of what good POS software should do.

This is why retailers need to take time to assess software, to see how it has evolved with the needs of physical and online stores, and see what it offers in terms of helping independent small business retailers to leverage opportunities to be truly competitive.

The right POS software will also be purpose specific to the needs of a specialty retail business, serving needs inquire to the niche business channel and unique to the suppliers of the business. There are many interaction and integration opportunities that bring retailers together, that help them be smart and engaged together for mutual benefit. Niche channel specific software is the glue to make this happen.

Tower Systems offers specialty POS software for specialty retailers. We make what we sell and we ensure that each marketplace specific version of our software is finely tuned to the needs of retailers in each retail channel. This is what makes our software more useful and valuable to niche retailers than generic software.

Take our produce / farm supply /stockfeed business software. This is made specifically for these types of businesses. What we offer is made for them and made to work with their suppliers. This is very different to what you would see from general POS software. We are not general. We are specialist, deeply specialist.

How do you chooses there right POS software for your business?  Research, take your time and make sure that the software you choose reinforces, supports and enhances the specialist nature of your business.

Retailer Roam from Tower Systems is the perfect App for retailers on the move, who want to sell anywhere, anytime, even while there is no internet access. This is truly portable POS software for indie retail businesses.

The Tower Systems POS software offers small business retailers access to valuable and financially beneficial integrations that help these retailers to win more business.

Here are some of the integrations we offer. We say some as there are more that are classified, for commercial reasons. There are those who like to copy us so we figure why make it easy for them. Ha!

1. E-COMMERCE: Magento. WooCommerce / WordPress. These are direct through partnership relationships, to the deepest level, delivering the best seamless functionality. Plus, for others, generic.
2. ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE: Xero – this is genuinely direct. We are a Xero partner. Plus, we use Xero ourselves in businesses that we own.  MYOB. Quicken. Both of these are through a 3^rdparty platform.
3. EFTPOS: Tyro. Quest. DPS/Payment Express NZ. PCEftpos.
4. BUY NOW PAY LATER: Humm. Zip Pay / Zip Money.
5. TEXT MESSAGING: Message Media. Message Net
6. OUR OWN ADD-ONS: Visual desk – smart and portable reporting.  Make My Appointment – calendar booking. Retailer Roam – sell anywhere.
7. ANCILLARY: Federal government approved scale int.  Fuel / Postec. Touch Phonecards.

These are desktop and cloud hosted POS software integrations. For our e-commerce solutions, consumer facing websites, we offer substantially more integrations that go to a new level and deliver substantially more benefits. Our integration strategy for web is comprehensive, deep and flexible, in service off our customers who take their retail businesses online.

Integrations matter to businesses in this time of mass integration. We are on a cross platform world and POS software that integrates offers terrific flexibility to retailers working in spaces where integrations can be beneficial.

Since we develop the software we sell, lease and rent, we are in control of what we do and how we do it. We are not relying on another party to do the integration work. This makes us more flexible for and accountable to our customers.

Delivering integrations to our customers matters as we are in a  position to help them find new customers for their businesses by offering better services seamlessly across more platforms. Flexibility is key today and we are proud to be delivering this through our POS software and the POS software connected websites that we develop0 and deploy.

Tower Systems offers Retailer Roam as an easy to setup and run POS software solution for pop-up retail shops situations.

With Pop-up retail becoming more prevalent, having a sweet POS software solution to help owners and managers of pop-up retail stores makes sense.

From selling to store management, the Retailer Roam pop-pop retail solution from Tower Systems offers an easy to setup, easy to use and easy to fund pop-pop retail management solution. Pop-up retail is easier thanks to this solution from Tower Systems.

Running in the cloud with easy to use redundancy built in should the internet be down, Retailer Roam works in a variety of situations and for a variety of businesses. It is safe, secure and accessible.

Retailer Roan is another cloud based POS solution from the web team at Tower Systems where cloud based POS Solutions have been delivered for indie retailers for years.

Retailer Roam is a tablet app-based POS extension to the Tower Systems Retailer POS software. The app runs on Apple iPad and Android based tablets. It can run connected over WiFi or any other network. It can also run disconnected, syncing when connected again to a network at a later time.

Retailer Roam is designed to help retailers better manage buy times without the need to install considerable hardware as well as to transact business away from the counter, from an outpost or from a vehicle some distance from the shop.

Pop-up retail needs to be easy, fast, safe and secure. Retailer Roam from Tower Systems is all of these things. It is a wonderful solution for indie retailers looking to expand their retail business reach into the pop-up retail space.

If you are considering a pop-up retail store, consider Retailer Roam from Tower Systems and enjoy the flexibility of selling anywhere, anytime and with safety, security and speed as benefits at your fingertips.

Tower Systems is a small business focussed POS software company serving in excess of 3,500 indie retailers in several niche retail channels.

We make and support what we sell, including Retailer Roam. For pop-up, online and fixed location high street retail. 

Retailer Roam is a beautiful piece of new software from Tower Systems that facilitates small business retailers selling from anywhere at any time.

Roam is an App that can run on any iOS or Android device. It is POS software on the road. Hence, the name Roam. Retailers really can sell anywhere. From a pop-up store, market stall, school, a truck – anywhere on the go at any time. It is easy, fast and secure, and it can trade even without an internet connection.

Retailer Roam is next generation POS software, bringing facilities engaged and transforming retailers want to their businesses, helping them reach new customers, helping them sell places that are hard to sell at today. Retailer Roam helps small business retailers transform how they sell and through this to find new shoppers for their businesses.

It is fresh software unique and made in Australia by Tower Systems as an extension to our specialty retail small business suite.

Retailer Roam is ideal for retail businesses in these retail segments: jewellers, garden centres, produce, toy, firearms, fishing, outdoors, newsagents, pet, gift, book, bike and adult.

Retailer Roam is portable POS software with all small business retailers expect from portability yet with access to the  power of wonderful data held in systems in the back office of these retail businesses. It brings to life out in the field, away from the shop, tools through which the retailer can find new shoppers and win new business.

Retailer Roam in a game changer for small business retailers looking to innovate how and where they sell products for their business. It places into the palm of retail employees on the shop floor the ability to sell to and serve customers that help ease the counter log-jam, that helps provide assistance and service to customers in the store but away from the counter.

It is fast, flexible and evolving. Retailer Roam today will evolve as more use it and provide feedback to guide further enhancement. This iterative approach to development is loved by small business retailers who like a say in the evolution of the POS software they use in their businesses.

A free workshop for small business retailers: How to find new customers by selling online direct from POS software for your specific type of business using Shopify and Magento.

Join us for a free workshop where we will explore Shopify and Magento direct connected POS software for specialty retailers: jewellers, garden centres, produce, toy, firearms, fishing, outdoors, newsagents, pet, gift, book, bike and adult.

At the interactive and engaging workshops we will focus on new online insights for 2020 and beyond that are relevant to indie small business retailers.

1. Hear from current case studies what other indie retailers are doing.
2. Find out how to use online to drive in-store shopping.
3. Learn how click and collect actually works.
4. Find out about the different buy now pay later options for online sales.
5. See how stock data including images flow easily from the POS to online.

Each workshop will be live and interactive and relevant to your type of business. It could save you thousands in web developer fees. This will not be a sales pitch. We will share what we know having done this work ourselves for the retail businesses we own in the homewares, pop culture, collectible, plush, gift and games segments of retail.

We live everyday the challenges of pricing, marketing, shipping and more and we will share out learnings.

We will cover hot topics including: SEO, shipping options, free shipping, the role of social in online sales, returns, bundles, branding and a plan b for your web strategy.

Click on your preferred city below to book. Each workshop (except for online) will be in an easy to get to capital city location.

1. Sydney. Sept. 30. 10am.
2. Adelaide. October 1. 10am.
3. Perth. October 2. 10:30am.
4. Hobart. October 3. 11am.
5. Melbourne. October 4. 10am.
6. Auckland. October 7. 10am.
7. Brisbane. October 8. 10am.
8. Canberra. October 9. 10am.
9. Online. October 10. 10am. AEST.
10. Online. October 10. 2pm. AEST.
11. Wellington. October 14. 10am.
12. Christchurch. Oct. 15. 10am.

We are local. Tower Systems serves 3,500+ specialty businesses – with POS software and websites. We make what we sell. We use it ourselves too, in our own retail and online businesses.

With these workshops and all we do, goal is to help you enjoy a more successful and valuable business.