CategoryProduce store software

Tower Systems has announced details of its first series of face to face user meetings for 2017. This is the company putting itself in front of customers in key locations.

We have scheduled sessions for Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, starting March 27, 2017.

We will demonstrate the new look and feel of Retailer, our Shopify / Magento and Woo Commerce integrations, our Xero integration and much more. Plus there will be time for your questions. Free training. An opportunity to pitch your suggestions.

This is an excellent chance to leverage more from your relationship with us. Click here to book and see venue details. Yes, we will announce more dates soon.

This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about the software, discuss change requests and provide feedback on our services.

It is rare today that POS software companies offer sessions like this, except from Tower Systems – we do it regularly as a core customer service offering.

We ae grateful to our customers for their support.

This video shows how Tower Systems is not your average POS software company. We are proud to serve our retail customers with practical advice and insights based on our own retail business management experiences:

We have begun previewing new-look POS software for our specialty retail marketplaces. This new look represents more than a year of work in design, development and testing. It offers our customers a fresh look, it keeps our software current with design standards relevant to retail in 2017.

This latest new look for our POS software continues the Tower Systems commitment to maintaining fresh and relevant software for our retail partners. It is what helps our software stay ahead, be loved by existing customers and winning the hearts of new customers.

The first personal previews of the new software started a week ago at the Sydney Gift Fair. They continue in a week’s time at the Melbourne Toy Fair. Then we will show the software off at our face to face user meetings around the country.

The new software is a result of terrific collaboration across multiple divisions of Tower Systems. It is a great team effort.

We develop, sell and support software for: gift shops, jewellers,  bike shops, toy shops, fishing/outdoors businesses, garden centres/nurseries, pet shops, produce stores, firearms businesses and newsagents.

1. Compare websites. Go deep. Look at ease of contact, support connections. Look for details of the real people being the business.
2. Compare software. On your desktop, next to each other.
3. Compare training. Sit in on a training session. Compare usefulness, professionalism.
4. Look at online tools. get a login and see what real users see.
5. Use it. In a shop,l behind the counter. See first hand the user experience.
6. Learn the total cost of ownership. Get this in writing, for the first three years. See the real cost of owning each of the software packages you are comparing.

There is a huge difference between software products. These six points could help you avoid POS software that is not right for your business.

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.

1. Set a deadline. We’d suggest two weeks for quitting a product or range of products.
2. Choose your timing. The best time to quit stock quickly is on your busiest trading days. For many this will be the weekend. Consider structuring your quitting program to run from Thursday through Sunday.
3. Set your initial price. The discount must be compelling. We’d suggest 50% off. A smaller discount in this marketplace will not get noticed. Think about your discount words: in some areas, HALF PRICE works better than 50% OFF. Sometimes, 2 FOR 1 can be even more effective. A $$ price can work better – for example a dump bin with everything priced at $1. People then don’t have to work anything out.
4. Move the product to a high traffic location. Display it as a line you are quitting – in a dump bin or in open boxes. This must be in a location away from where the product is usually located. Do not make an attractive display. Consider placing the stock somewhere that people almost stumble over it.
5. Put up a sign that is either black on white or white on read. Nothing fancy. Even a hand written sign is good. Do not make a complex or attractive sign.
6. Adjust your price. If sales are not strong enough, go harder with your discount. From 50% off we suggest a drop to a $$ price point. It can be challenging selling something you would have sold for $20.00 at $1 but that $1 is better than getting nothing for the product at all.
7. Give it away. If the products are not selling, consider giving the stock away to a local charity. Getting it out of your shop for no compensation can be better than it taking space and giving off the wrong message about your business.
8. Keep track of time. If you decide to be out of the stock within two weeks, stick to that and make it happen with your pricing and placement decisions.
9. Use the bin. If you can’t sell the item and you can’t give it away, use the bin.
10. An alternative: If you have a large amount of stock to quit, consider hiring a local hall and running an off site sale. Talk to your suppliers about getting extra stock in for this. You could even plan to do this as an annual event. Consider, too, linking with a local charity to drive interest and create a fund raising opportunity for them.

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.

This advice is an example of how Tower Systems helps small business retailers beyond POS software.

In years working with small and independent retail businesses, the team at Tower Systems has learnt plenty including the indicators of in which retail businesses theft is more likely to occur.

Our experience is that theft is more likely to occur in businesses where stock is not managed properly.

By not managed properly we mean where:

1. All items sold are not tracked at the point of sale.
2. Where new stock arriving in the business is not properly arrived through the software.
3. Where spot stock-takes are not undertaken regularly to maintain an accurate stock on hand account.
4. Where stock given away or thrown away is not written off.
5. Where stock returned to a supplier is not scanned out.

Our advice on reducing the cost of employee theft and customer theft is simple – follow our advice, manage your stock and without a doubt the cost of theft in your retail business will be lower than it would have been.

If you think the cost of managing stock is too great, think about the cost of $25,000, $50,000 or even $250,000 in theft. Yes, we see this all too often in retail businesses – where stock is not managed.

Managing your stock = less theft and less theft = increases product and increased profit = you get more when you sell your business.

As a service to its 3,500+ small business retail customers, Tower Systems offers disaster planning advice. This advice is regularly revisited and revised to ensure its appropriateness.

Here is our current small business retailer initial steps disaster planning advice. We call this initial steps as there is more to be said, more help we provide, but were will keep that for a more confidential discussion with our customers.

DISASTER PLANNING FOR YOUR RETAIL BUSINESS

How protected is your retail business in the event of disaster? Since we are a software company, our interest is more to do with data and technology.

Are you as protected as you can be?

This is an easy topic to ignore and most small business retailers do. Those most likely to plan for a disaster are those who have gone through it. Once bitten, twice shy as they say.

Insurance. Insurance coverage is vital to helping overcome any type of disaster. In addition to ensuring that your insurance policy covers all disaster situations of concern to you, including flood, theft, water inundation, fire, earthquake, riot—be sure to carefully read the policy, ensure that your insurance policy / policies cover payouts for the following:

1. Business interruption. The amount should equal your anticipated gross profit for whatever period you choose to be covered.
2. Data recovery. Including the hiring of experts to recover data from backup sources or the manual entry of data that cannot be automatically recovered. Ensure you are covered to the point of recovered data being useable.
3. Lost stock. This is stock stolen, lost from the business.
4. Damaged and unsaleable stock. This is stock which is water damaged, scuffed or dented and which will not attract full price.
5. Dated stock. This is stock that you cannot sell by the due date.
6. Glass. Many policies require explicit statement of glass coverage.
7. Temporary trading premises. Business interruption may cover this.
8. Key person injury and/or death. This will usually be a separate policy. Depending on the disaster, coverage may also be available through the overall business policy.

Ensure that the value of stock, fixtures and fittings covered by your policy is an accurate reflection of the real value of these items. Use your POS system to track all stock movements in and out. The stock on hand in your software should be your coverage.

Ensure that your insurance policy protects for the seasonal nature of your business Data Protection. Business data is a valuable asset. Follow these steps:

1. Backup your business data every day, at the end of the day, without fail. Better still: use a cloud based backup service that undertakes the backup as the day unfolds without you having to every do anything to backup.Maintain a separate backup for each day of the week.
2. Remove the backup from the business property.
3. Store the backup in a safe, dry place.
4. Check the usefulness of the backup by restoring and checking the data.
5. Store original business software in a safe off-site location.
6. Check the backup every three to six months – to make sure the backup is actually backing us current data and can be read. A backup you cannot read is a waste of time and money.
7. Change your passwords regularly.
8. Do not share passwords widely.

The Tower Systems installation and training team and the customer service post sales support team both help our small business retail customers to reduce paperwork with practical business focussed advice.

From more efficiently managing regulatory obligations to managing internal business management paperwork, Tower Systems through its software and its people can help.

Our advice is founded in our own experience running successful retail businesses for more than twenty years. There is no doubt that using our software in our own businesses makes a big difference to the practical value of the advice we provide. It separates us from POS software companies where the advice is more tech focussed.

Cutting paperwork for us is more than a marketing pitch, we offer practice help in achieving this so resources in the small retail business are freed for more valuable activity.

Our company motto is we’re here to help. Our focus on paperwork is one example of how we pursue this for our customers.

Tower Systems is thrilled to offer its small business retail customers access to the Visual Deck, cloud based software developed in Australia by Tower Systems for local small business retailers using our smart POS software:

We are thrilled with the response to our paperwork campaign supporting operational efficiency in small and independent retail businesses. This is a campaign for existing Tower Systems customers as well as prospective customers.

Launched by Tower Systems as part of a broader training, POS software enhancements and business support package, this focus for 2017 encourages small business retailers to better manage paperwork for the benefit of the business and those served by the business.

Eliminating paperwork is easy when your POS software directly links to the right tools such as web platforms, appointment facilities and accounting software.