Our POS software sales team is local and ready to listen
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Retailers: You choose when to update your POS software
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At Tower Systems we give local specialty retailers agency. We think you should decide when to install a software update. We don’t push it onto your counter on our schedule.
We release updates regularly. Many of them include improvements our customers asked for. When an update is ready, it’s up to you when it goes in.
It sounds like a small thing. Independent retailers tell us it isn’t.
Why forced updates hurt independent retailers
Plenty of software companies update on their own schedule. The update arrives whether you are ready or not.
For a small retailer, timing matters. Nobody wants a change to their POS in the week before Christmas, in the middle of a stocktake or on a busy Saturday morning. A new screen layout or a changed workflow can slow the counter at exactly the wrong moment.
You know your business. You know when it’s quiet, when your experienced staff are rostered on and when you have time to learn something new. That knowledge should decide when an update goes in.
What goes into our updates
Our updates are shaped by the people who use the software. Through our Software Ideas platform, customers suggest improvements and every customer can vote on them. Those suggestions guide what we build.
So an update from Tower Systems usually includes something a retailer like you asked for. It might be a faster way to process a supplier invoice. It might be a new report or a tweak to a screen you use a hundred times a day.
We want you to have these improvements. We just think you should choose when they arrive.
Why we do it this way
I’ve run retail businesses and built software for them for more than 40 years. Independent retailers are business owners. They make hundreds of decisions every week about stock, staff, pricing and the shop floor. I think it’s odd for a software company to take one of those decisions away from them.
Giving you control over update timing is a matter of respect. It’s your business and your counter. It should be your call.
Independent retailers tell us they value this. Some update the day a release is available. Others wait for a quiet Monday. Both are fine with us. If you’d like help, our local help desk team can talk you through what’s in an update before you install it.
Ask before you choose
If you’re comparing POS software, ask each company one question: who decides when updates are installed? The answer tells you a lot about how they see their customers.
To talk with us about Tower Systems:
Australia: 1300 662 957
New Zealand: 0800 444 367
Email: sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
Personal Service Matters in Retail. It Should Matter in Your Software Company Too.
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Good retailers know the value of personal service. They live it, deliver it, every day.
A customer walks in looking for a gift. You ask a few questions. Who’s it for? What do they like? What’s the budget? You show them a couple of options, they think it over, and you go back and forth until they find the right thing. That conversation is often the reason they come back.
Running a retail business is personal in the same way. Every shop is different. The owner, the staff, the location, the shoppers and the product mix all shape how the business works. Plenty of retailers and retail staff understand this.
At Tower Systems, we understand it too.
Training is personal
Our training is delivered by people, not videos you’re left to work through on your own. It’s tailored to your business and the way you trade.
A newsagent with a busy card department needs different help to a garden centre preparing for spring. A new owner taking over a shop needs different help to a long-time customer adding a new category. We start by understanding what you need, then train to that.
Our help desk is personal
When you contact our help desk, you can talk to a person. It starts with a conversation. We listen, ask questions and work through the problem with you until it’s sorted.
We’re a vertical market software company. We build POS software for specific retail channels and work only with independent retailers in Australia and New Zealand. That means the people helping you understand how shops like yours actually work.
Compare us on service, not just software
If you’re considering a change of POS software, compare our personal approach with any other software company on your list.
The tech stack is one thing to compare. Features matter, and we’re proud of ours. But software is useless without the level of service you need to get value from it. The best system in the world won’t help if you can’t get someone on the phone when your shop is busy and something isn’t working.
Ask each company you’re considering a few simple questions. Can I talk to a person when I need help? Will my training suit my business? Do your staff understand my type of shop?
We’re happy to be judged on our answers.
Talk to us
AU: 1300 662 957
NZ: 0800 444 367
Email: sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
Software Is Only Part of the Story: How Tower Systems Helps Retailers Get More From It
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Buying point of sale software is the easy part. Getting real value from it every day is where the work starts.
Retailers ask practical questions once the software is installed. Who do I call when I am stuck? Can a new casual learn it on their first shift? What can it do beyond ringing up a sale? Does anyone listen when I suggest an improvement?
Tower Systems answers yes to each of these. The company has served independent specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand for more than 40 years. Its approach rests on one idea: software works best when real people stand behind it.
Yes, you can talk to a human
At Tower Systems, a question gets a person. Support is delivered by a local team that understands specialty retail. The same is true in sales and in leadership. Customers can reach the people who make decisions about the business.
This matters on a busy Saturday when something needs sorting fast. It also matters for the bigger questions, like how to set up a new department or report on a slow category.
Retail is personal.
For quick answers at any hour, Tower Systems also offers an AI help desk. It launched more than three years ago and answers in plain language. Customers say it saves them time. It sits alongside the human team, not in place of it.
New staff can get up to speed quickly
Staff turnover is a fact of life in retail. Every new team member needs to serve customers confidently, and soon.
Tower Systems builds software for specific retail channels, not for every business type. That focus keeps screens and workflows relevant to the shop floor. New staff learn the tasks they actually need, without wading through features meant for someone else.
When a question comes up mid-shift, help is close at hand. Staff can ask the AI help desk in plain English or call the support team.
More than a cash register
A cash register records a sale. Good retail software helps run the business. Tower Systems customers use the software in three broad ways.
- Saving time. Automating routine tasks such as receiving stock, reordering and end-of-day processes frees hours for serving customers.
- Making more money. Sales and stock reports show what is working and what is not. Retailers can back winning lines, clear slow stock and use loyalty tools to bring shoppers back.
- Managing better. Clear numbers on margin, stock holding and staff activity support better decisions.
The AI tools in the software have found keen supporters among Tower’s most experienced retailers. Customers in their 60s, 70s and 80s report time savings of up to 8 hours a week.
Tower Systems also keeps costs predictable. It does not charge fees based on a retailer’s sales. It is payments provider agnostic, so retailers choose their own payment provider and control that pricing.
Your suggestions shape the software
Retailers know their shops best. Tower Systems built its Software Ideas platform to put that knowledge to work.
Any customer can suggest an improvement. Other customers then vote on it. The process is open, so everyone can see what has been suggested and how much support it has.
Those suggestions and votes guide what Tower Systems develops next. Customers see their ideas reflected in software updates, which keeps the product grounded in how specialty retailers actually work.
A community, not just a customer list
Tower Systems serves only independent specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand. It does not chase franchises or chains. That focus shapes everything, from the features it builds to the people who answer the phone.
The result is software backed by people who understand independent retail and want their customers to succeed.
Contacting a human is easy:
- Australia: 1300 662 957
- New Zealand: 0800 444 367
- Email: sales@towersystems.com.au
Meet the Tower Systems sales chatbot: answers on your schedule
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Independent retailers work odd hours. You might be researching POS software while restocking on a Sunday night, or catching up on admin after dinner. Your questions don’t keep office hours and we understand that.
Our website has a sales chatbot that answers them any time. Visit towersystems.com.au and look for the small blue circle with a white square, bottom left of the screen. Click it and ask.
Our chatbot is only trained by us, about our software, what it does and does not do. It doesn’t hallucinate.
It’s trained on our software and handles specific questions, like:
- How much does the software cost?
- Do you have software for jewellers or garden centres?
- How do produce, farm supply and stockfeed stores use the system?
- How do toy shops, music shops, trophy businesses and newsagencies use it?
- What was in the latest software update?
You’ll get direct answers about features, integrations, the retail channels we serve, and pricing. Ask a follow-up and it keeps the thread, so you can dig into the detail that matters for your shop rather than starting again each time.
People in the software business ask why we’d make the chatbot so open. Couldn’t a competitor use it to look us up? Sure. They’d find out about us anyway. Our focus is the retailers we serve, and an open chatbot fits how we prefer to sell.
It’s also a fast way to qualify us out. If we don’t serve your retail channel, better to find that out in one question at the counter than across a 40-minute call you were too polite to end. The chatbot will tell you straight.
The chatbot is also useful after you become a customer. It knows what shipped in recent updates, so “what’s new” is a ten-second question rather than a trawl through release notes.
One more thing: we won’t stalk you. Ask as many questions as you like, anonymously. There’s no forced contact form and no follow-up calls, unless you ask to talk to a human. We think that’s how software should be sold: you decide when you’re ready to talk, and the information you need to decide is available at 10pm on a Sunday, because that might be when you have time to think about it.
Try it. Ask it something hard.
Newsagents made us the industry standard, not the other way around
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More newsagents have chosen Tower Systems than any other POS software. We didn’t set that label ourselves. Newsagents did, one shop at a time, by choosing us over everything else on offer.
We don’t take that lightly, and we don’t think it happened by accident.
We know the shop floor because we’ve stood on it
We’re the only POS company in this space that has owned and run its own newsagencies. Our founder bought their first shop in 1996 and built our software off the back of what that business actually needed, not what looked good in a sales pitch. That’s still true of every update we ship, even though our company today does not own a newsagency.
Newsagencies aren’t standing still, and neither is the software
The traditional core of a newsagency, magazines, papers, lottery, is a smaller part of the business than it used to be, and it keeps shrinking. The newsagents doing well are the ones shifting shelf space and attention toward gifts, cards, stationery and collectables. Software built for a magazine-and-lottery counter doesn’t help with that shift. Software built by people who’ve made that shift themselves does.
That’s where features like our loyalty tools earn their keep. You can market to a customer based on what they’ve bought, which means turning a regular lottery shopper into someone who browses the gift wall, or a magazine reader into someone who tries the stationery range. That’s not a feature for its own sake. It’s the whole point of the software.
The parts that just need to work, working
A newsagency runs on integrations most other retail software doesn’t bother with. We link directly to The Lott through XchangeIT, so lottery sales are captured without manual entry. Magazine arrivals and returns run through XchangeIT too, so your stock and your credits stay accurate without someone doing it by hand. Greeting card suppliers load in as electronic invoices in seconds instead of an afternoon of data entry.
Beyond the newsagency-specific stuff, the software connects to Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce if you sell online, to Xero for your books, and to EFTPOS with every major bank. If you pass on card fees, the system calculates the surcharge for you. We don’t charge a fee per transaction, ever.
AI tools built into the day-to-day
The AI tools built into the software write product descriptions for new gift lines, help you compare prices, and turn a stack of sales data into something you can act on, which categories are growing, which need attention, without you having to dig for it.
None of this makes us the biggest software company. It makes us the one most newsagents chose. If you want to see why, we’re happy to show you.
Book a free demo, or call 1300 662 957 in Australia and 0800 444 367 in New Zealand.
Getting the most out of a call to our POS software help desk
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Our help desk is human, and it’s local: people in Australia and New Zealand, not an offshore call centre reading from a script. That matters because retail is personal, and so is fixing it when something goes wrong.
But even a good help desk can only work as fast as the conversation allows. A lot of what determines how quickly a problem gets solved isn’t the technician, it’s how the call itself goes.
Retail interrupts everything, including the fix
Support calls usually happen while the shop is open, which means a customer at the counter, and the customer always comes first. Fair enough. But every time a call gets put down mid-troubleshooting, the technician loses the thread. Getting back to where you were takes longer than the interruption itself did. A five-minute pause can turn a ten-minute call into thirty.
Nobody’s fault. It’s just what happens when technical support runs into a trading floor.
What actually speeds things up
A few habits make a real difference to how fast a fix comes through:
- Start with email where you can. It’s often faster than a phone call, not slower.
- Include a screenshot and a proper description in that email. No pressure of a live call, so you can properly explain what’s happening.
- With the details in hand, our help desk can sometimes solve it before anyone picks up the phone.
- If you do need to call, try to call when you can give it your full attention.
- If the shop gets busy mid-call, say so. Offering to call back later is usually faster than trying to push through.
Just tell us
If you’re short-staffed and it’s not a good time, say that. It costs nothing, it lets us manage the queue properly, and when you do call back, you get someone’s full attention instead of a rushed half-conversation.
None of this is about making things easier for us at your expense. A call that isn’t interrupted gets solved faster. That means less time away from your counter. Everybody’s better off.
That’s the kind of help desk we’re trying to run: local, human, and worth your time.
If you’re considering switching to Tower, here’s what happens to your data
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The question comes up in almost every conversation with a retailer thinking about switching software: what happens to everything I’ve already got in my current system?
In most cases, you can bring it across. Not all of it, and not automatically, but the parts that matter most usually make the move.
What we can convert
Stock is the file we convert most often: SKU, barcode, description, buy and sell prices, GST status, tags and variants where they apply. If you can export it from your current system in a form we can read, usually a spreadsheet, we can generally load it.
Customer sales history and loyalty balances are a different story. Every POS system stores that data differently, which makes an accurate conversion hard to guarantee. We’ll do our best with loyalty balances. Sales history, usually not. Outstanding account-customer balances do transfer. Laybys don’t, particularly from older software, so plan on those not coming across.
How it actually works
We assess your data first, free of charge, before you commit to anything. That way you know what will convert cleanly before you decide whether to switch at all.
The conversion itself is a paid, fixed-price service. You’ll know the cost upfront. It’s typically done in about half a day, with no downtime, and it’s ready by your go-live.
Should you bring your old data across at all?
Not necessarily. If it’s clean and reliable, bring it. If it’s messy, out of date, or full of dead stock lines nobody’s looked at in years, a fresh start in the new system can be the better move. Carrying old problems into new software doesn’t fix them. Only you know how good your current data really is.
One more thing worth knowing: we don’t log into your current software and export the data ourselves. You, or your current provider, need to export it. It’s your data, and getting it out sits within your relationship with them. If your current software won’t let you export it easily, that’s worth noticing. Some providers make it difficult on purpose, as a way to keep you. If that’s happening to you, it’s as much a reason to leave as anything else.
Getting started
If you want to talk through what a conversion would look like for your business before deciding anything, we run obligation-free discussions over Microsoft Teams at a time that suits you. If it turns out we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so.
Call 1300 662 957 in Australia or 0800 444 367 in New Zealand, or email sales@towersystems.com.au.
Free POS software training from Tower Systems. Still free, still regular.
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Most POS software companies sell you the software and leave you to work it out. Tower Systems doesn’t. We run free training for our customers, on a regular schedule, and we have done for years.
Training long after you have started using POS software is valuable. We know and this is why we continue to offer free training to our customers.
This isn’t a one-off or a sweetener to close a sale. It’s an ongoing part of being a Tower Systems customer. Sessions run often enough that you can pick the topic you need, when you need it, rather than waiting for an annual roadshow.
The part people value most is the Q&A. You’re not watching a recording. There’s a real person running the session, and you can ask your own question about your own shop and get an answer on the spot. That’s rare. A lot of companies charge for it, or don’t offer it at all.
The training suits everyone. New staff finding their feet on the counter. Owners who want to use a part of the software they’ve never touched. People who’ve used Tower for years and want to sharpen up on the features added since they last looked.
Here’s what’s coming up.
- Getting more from your sales reporting
- Stock control that actually saves you money
- Running a stocktake without closing the doors
- Managing repairs and the jobs that come with them
- Tracking the KPIs that tell you how the shop is really going
- Loyalty and customer marketing built into your POS
- New features you may have missed in recent updates
Topics rotate, so if the one you want isn’t listed this round, it’ll come around again. You can also tell us what you’d like covered. A lot of our sessions started life as a customer request.
It costs you nothing. It’s there because retailers who understand their software run better businesses, and that’s good for everyone. The shops that get the most out of Tower are almost always the ones that turn up to a session or two a year.
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