The POS Software Blog
News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.
We support the call for businesses to provide employees with time off to get their covid vaccine shots. That’s what we have been doing since the first of our team members became eligible. We are grateful to be able to offer this worry-free coverage for our team members.
Here’s a recent video we shot in which we explore some of the features and benefits of this fresh Aussie game shop POS software:
This POS software for game shops from Tower Systems is made for game shops. It has evolved from our toy shop software.
Game shops have some unique needs, which we seek to serve in this marketplace specific POS software.
Packed with facilities that help these local and loved game shops better serve customers and attract new customers, this software is not your everyday POS software. It is not generic.
Our game shop software offers many benefits, including:
We are grateful to local game shops for their advice and guidance we tune the software for marketplace specific needs.
Requests from schools, charities and other community for donations can be a challenge for any size business. If you do not take a structured approach to this you will find yourself giving away plenty for little or no return.
Requests are often loaded with guilt. People can be passive aggressive in their approach. Often, people requesting help leverage pester power. It can be hard to say no. There are too many stories of retailers giving a gift as a prize, receiving the Thank You poster and achieving no benefit for the business.
having heard many stories from our POS software customers and experience ourselves in running retail businesses, we have put together advice for small business retailers on this challenge of the constant stream of community groups asking for donations.
Our advice is to manage your philanthropy as you would any business activity.
THE PRIZE / GIFT
Decide the amount in cash or product value or both that you are prepared to donate in a full year, calendar year or financial year.
Our recommendation is you give away cash, but in the form of a voucher to spend in your business. This ensures that value of the gift or prize is greater than the cost of it to your business.
The best mechanism for giving away cash or an amount to spend in-store is to do it by way of a gift voucher. Use your software to manage this as any manual approach is dangerous and time-consuming.
YOUR PITCH, NOT THEIRS
Get on the front foot and write to local community groups outlining that you budget a year in advance. Seek their submissions. With this advice sheet we have included the text of a suggested letter. Please read the letter as it outlines the approach we suggest and why. It is important you communicate this with all community groups.
On the page after the letter is a suggested notice for use in-store when you are asked for donations.
HOW TO PICK GROUPS TO SUPPORT
Focus on community groups that support you. That is, groups with members who support you. The more they support you the better you are able to support the community.
Be prepared to ask where people shop for the items you sell in your business. Ask if they will change in return for your support.
Asking these questions underscores to you the importance of approaching the decision as a business decision.
Be thoughtful and deliberate. Support the groups that support you. This is important as it helps you stay within a budget.
LET YOUR SHOPPERS CHOOSE
If you run discount vouchers and if customers say they don’t want the voucher, invite them to contribute the voucher to a local group – one of three you setup for in the business. Every month, two months or three months, tote up the vouchers and give the group a parentage of the total voucher value ‘voted’ for them.
This idea could be in addition to any giving program you run in the business. It offers a daily reminder of your commitment to local giving.
Grill’d burgers run a program kind of like this where each shopper is given a bottle cap, which they place in a tub to vote on a group to receive a cash donation for the month. The process of groups submitting to be considered is onerous. You can find out more about that program with this link – it is a good place to research what others do: https://www.grilld.com.au/localmatters/
REWARD ENGAGEMENT
In addition to any direct gift, consider an offer whereby anyone who is a member of the group who shops with you accrues an amount you donate to the group. You could manage this through your software. It could be you offer a discount to the shopper as well as accruing a value for the group.
This type of program could also be in addition to your core giving program as the value here is driven by sales – hopefully, incremental sales.
EDUCATE GROUPS ABOUT GOOD ENGAGEMENT
Here are things groups you support can do to help your business. You should ask them to do these things:
WRITE ABOUT YOUR ENGAGEMENT
Once you have a decision on which groups you will support, write about this in your newsletter and on Facebook. Not just once but multiple times. Invite them to provide you with content to publish too. Talk about their good works.
Ask them to write about you too.
Your giving must serve your heart and serve your business. Going about it in a structured way will ensure you meet your objectives.
Here is suggested text for a letter:
[date]
Good morning
I write to invite your community group to submit a proposal to be considered one of the groups we support this coming year. We are taking this more formal approach rather than considering donation requests when they are pitched trough the year.
We are a small family business with limited resources. We seek to be engaged with community groups that support us as the more successful we are the more we can help the community.
The approach we are taking here is to allow us to plan our giving, to be deliberate in the support we provide.
We will not take on donations through the year from groups who call or visit. While this may seem unfair, we think it will result in more valuable support for the groups we engage with.
In addition to a financial donation, we will support the groups we select through promotion on our business Facebook page and in other practical ways. We want an involvement that is more than just financial, we want to help the groups we partner with to reach further into the community.
To help us consider your business please provide a one page written submission that briefly outlines:
We will consider all submissions at the same time and advise the outcome of our deliberations.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Here is suggested text for a notice:
OUR POLICY ON HANDLING COMMUNITY GROUP DONATIONS.
We receive requests to support local community groups and charities regularly. As a small family business with loans, rent, wages and other costs, we cannot say yes to everyone. We wish we could but we cannot.
To help us better connect with and serve the groups we do support, we now decide at the start of the financial year the groups we will support over the next year. The selection process is based on written submissions from groups.
Our decision to select the groups we support at the start of the year means we cannot take on additional donation requests through the year.
We hope you understand and respect this.
Please consider applying in advance of the start of the next financial year.
But all is not lost…
If your group can bring in new customers to our business to purchase items they want we may have another way we can help. Ask us for details.
Thank you and we wish you all the best in your community group.
We are loving the reaction from our new range of POS software marketing postcards, which are out now. Each features a happy image representing our software in a specialty niche retail channel. They are a good reflection of the specialty nature of our small business retail focussed POS software.
This is us, Tower Systems. We are proud of what we make and the businesses we get to help.
We are grateful for the terrific session with our POS software customers last week in which we discussed software enhancement ideas and how our transparent software Ideas platform works.
Established in March 2009 and inspired by US author Jeff Jarvis and his book What Would Google Do?, the Software Ideas platform has been a wonderful Gide to opportunities for software enhancements as much as for customer education – when ideas suggested already exist in the software.
The Tower Systems customer forum last week explored several POS software enhancement idea suggestions and shared with customers how to submit ideas and vote on them.
What makes a good software enhancement idea?
Our transparent approach to software ideas is a differentiator for us … for which we are grateful.
Tower Systems is a vertical market POS software company serving a range of specialty retail channels with software tailored to their needs. It is this specialisation that is served by the company’s transparent approach to harvesting ideas from customers as it leads to better software for the niche retail channels.
We have a separate focus within our help desk team that is solely for new customers … to help them settle into the software and land with comfort in the use of our POS software.
This focussed work solely with new customers helps them enjoy the software more, and sooner.
Their early feedback helps us help them tune the software through its many settings so that it is better in it’s service of our customers.
We are grateful to be able to offer this and appreciate our new customers who love the service. It means a lot.
While today is national donut day, we got in early at the office yesterday with these treats and more.
The quote and invoice management tools in the specialty retail POS software from Tower Systems are unique and robust, working in service of these unique business needs.
Tower Systems offers repairs and workshop management facilities in its specialty retail business POS software.
Australian made and supported. Software for fishing & outdoor shops. $185.00 a month.
Here are some of the ways our locally made POS software made especially for fishing and outdoor shops helps them be more enjoyable businesses:
Our Australian made and supported fishing and outdoor business software does much more than what’s on this list .. thanks to the advice and support of fishing business wooers and those who work in them. The latest update has some terrific enhancements that nurture more love for this software.
The POS software needs of fishing and outdoor shops are unique. A generic point of sale software program mis less likely to serve these unique needs. That’s what we have found. It’s a key reason people switch to our specialty fishing and outdoor shop POS software. Just as those businesses are speciality at what they do, we, too are specialist at what we do.
Specialty retail benefits from specialty POS software, that’s for sure. It’s even more true in the fishing retail space where unique facilities in our POS software help these local businesses thrive.
We are grateful to the many retailers who have already embraced our end of financial year offer for a $1,000 gift off our fixed price Shopify POS software integrated website development.
This is a genuine EOFY offer, not one of those inflated prices discounted to make it look like you’re getting a deal situation.
Our fixed price through to life POS software connected Shopify web development packages cost $6,600, which includes a commercial and beautiful template of your choice.
The EOFY offer is $1,000 off this.
There are a couple of conditions, which our sales people can help you with,.
Here is what is included in our fixed price Shopify POS software integrated website solution:
Tower Systems offers to create a Shopify website for $6,600.00 for which you receive:
What this list does not show is the back and forth, the discussions, explorations and investigations with you that lead to the creation of a website that serves your needs. This is a comprehensive and iterative process between you and our webbed experts, all of whom work here in Melbourne Australia.
The bookstore inventory management software developed and supported by Tower Systems is designed to serve the needs of local independent bookstores.
From managing book title inventory to handling electronic invoices to managing searches in a book store friendly way to managing special orders for customers, this bookstore inventory management software is made for the job, made here in Australian for local Australian and New Zealand bookshop software needs.
We are grateful to book retailers and people who work in bookshops for their advice and guidance as we have evolved this software. Their feedback and courafgement are key to the life this bookstore inventory management software is enjoying and will have in the future. Tower Systems offers a structured and transparent process for capturing ideas for enhancing the software and gauging user community interest in suggested ideas.
Using our bookstore inventory management software, book retailers can expect to have a more enjoyable experience running the business as we facilitate structure around many of the day to day tasks in a bookshop, enabling the business to operate in a more reliable way, especially when the owner is not in the business all of the time.
Connecting to title page and other tools, this software is packed with opportunities, workflow smoothers and revenue drivers, which work well in bookshop situations.
The bookshop POS software from Tower Systems helps local bookshops in myriad ways from the sales counter to the back office to the website driving online sales. There are two ways, however, where the bookstore inventory management software from Tower Systems provide practical and beneficial help to the local book shop.
We serve local booksellers with POS software made to help them serve their local communities. Our software helps them position their businesses as locally focussed in unique ways and touchpoints from reader loyalty to special interest focus to local club support to bundle offers. We help local bookshops better serve local readers and those who buy for them.
Beyond the shop, our seamless Shopify link helps local booksellers sell online easily and professionally … enabling them to play in the online world and reach shoppers way beyond their local catchment area. We are proud to have delivered bookshop software connected websites that are doing this.
Here at Tower Systems we have experience in shoplifting. Not the act of, but, rather, the tracking and prevention of.
Using our specialty retail POS software, retailers can expect to reduce the impact of shoplifting in their businesses. Shoplifting can be expensive – anything from 2% to 7% of retail sales revenue in terms of value. Knowing this helps you focus on investing in eliminating the cost of theft.
Embedded in our POS software are tools for tracking shoplifting. Knowing what is being stolen and broadly when is an excellent start to reducing, and even eliminating, shoplifting.
We back the tools in our POS software with advice on how to leverage them to reduce the impact of shoplifting. Knowledge is power. Okay, that is a tired old cliche. But it is true. Knowing what is being stolen and when we can help you to act appropriately to mitigate the situation.
Using our software and our expert knowledge, we have worked with loss prevention experts as we as the police in several states to help with matters of shopper theft. We are skilled in this area.
In the many 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.
We have leveraged our experience with small business retailers who use our smart POS software to help these and other b businesses reduce the impact of theft – shopper theft and employee theft.
Our experience is that theft is more likely to occur in businesses where stock is not managed properly. By not managed properly we mean in retail businesses where:
Our advice on reducing the cost of shoplifting 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.
Given the essential status of our business as determined by the state government we are open as usual, providing customer installation training and related services assistance.
We have some people working from home as well as a team located at our Hawthorn head office.
Beyond our POS software and the advice we provide to our customers on its use is the general retail advice we provide. Often, this is advice that has nothing to do with our POS software. here is an example from a couple of weeks ago. It’s advice on visual noise.
If you give your customers too many things to look at inside or outside your business, they will notice less. Your choices show them what you want them to look at
Less is more. Have less visual noise, less visual pollution, and more will be noticed.
Show your customers what you want them to notice by giving that product, range or display fresh air (visually) around it.
Stand at the door of your business and scan around counting the signs you can read and displays you can see. How many are there? More messages, more signs = less noticing them. yes, less is more.
Here is advice for less visual noise in your business:
Reducing visual noise will improve the experience for your shoppers and for those who work in the business. It will focus everyone on what you decide matters the most right now.
This is part of an extensive package of business management advice newsXpress provides its members.
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Thanks to our retail experience, we are able to provide suggestions b beyond the POS software. This is another differentiating factor for us, for which we are sincerely grateful.
Made for Australian vape shops, this POS software for vape shops helps vape businesses manage inventory, meet regulatory requirements, transact accurately, run easily under management and well serve vape customers.
Evolved over several years in consultation with vape shop owners and people working in vape shops, this vape shop POS software is made for these specific businesses. Here are some examples from within the software of how:
Vape shops are specialty retail businesses. They have a unique set of needs. Our vape shop POS software has been built to serve these needs, to enable the businesses to thrive in a regulated situation, to run efficiently under management and to run more enjoyably for all involved in the business.
Tower Systems is grateful to the many in vape businesses who have contributed advice and encouragement to us as we have created our vape shop POS software for Australian vape shops.
This is another specialty retail POS solution from our software development team, backed by an awesome help desk team that helps you get the most from the software we make.
Here is a video in which we discuss some of the facilities in our vape shop POS software:
Australian made and supported POS software for mobility scooter shops. $185.00 a month.
Mobility scooter businesses are truly unique businesses. Here are some of the ways our POS software for mobility scooter businesses leverages their uniqueness:
Our Australian made and supported mobility scooter business software does much more than what’s on this list. See it for yourself, live and obligation free, to see if it could serve you and your business. We’d be glad to show it to you.
We understand the importance and value of local specialty retail …
Our Mobility scooter business Software costs $185.00 for each 30 days. The $99.00 is for access from as many computers as you have in the business.
There is no long-term contract, cancel any time. There is no finance application.
This is software made for your type of business. See it for yourself …
Australian made and supported. For charity and op. shops. $99.00 a month. Charity / op. shop POS software.
Charity and op. shops are unique and special businesses, providing valuable service to the local community and to those supported by the charity. We are grateful to serve these community enterprises with our POS software:
Our Australian made and supported charity / op. shop shop software does much more than what’s on this list. See it for yourself, live and obligation free, to see if it could serve you and your business. We’d be glad to show it to all involved in the operation.
We understand the importance and value of charity / community group retail …
Our charity / op. shop software costs $99.00 for each 30 days. The $99.00 is for access from as many computers as you have in the business.
There is no long-term contract, cancel any time. There is no finance application.
We are grateful to have added to our software development team with a new hire joining us on a new project.
Software development, especially vertical market software development is many marathons, run back to back.
We love marathons.
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