The POS Software Blog

The POS Software Blog

News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.

Tagindependent retailer

Pricing after the surcharge ban: how to lift prices without upsetting customers

November 2, 2026
4 Min read
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Since 1 October 2026, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge to payments made by eftpos, Mastercard, Visa or American Express. For a lot of independent retailers, that small line at the bottom of the receipt covered a real cost. The cost hasn’t gone anywhere. You now have to recover it another way, and fairly.

We know of many retailers where the loss of the surcharge has hit hard. This blog post bring together advice for these retailers. What you do needs care.

Customers are paying attention. Online forums are full of complaints about businesses using the ban as cover for bigger price rises, or renaming the surcharge a “service fee” or “platform fee”. The ACCC has said plainly that businesses must not mislead customers about why prices changed. Get this wrong and you lose more than a few cents a sale.

Start with your actual card cost

Before touching a price, be sure of what acceptance costs you. Get your merchant statements for the last three months and calculate the effective rate: total fees divided by total card sales. Include terminal rental and any monthly minimums.

Many retailers find the true figure is lower than the surcharge they used to charge. If you charged 1.5 per cent but your effective cost is 0.9 per cent, a 1.5 per cent rise across the board isn’t cost recovery. Customers will notice, and some will tell you so.

While you’re at it, call your payments provider and ask whether your plan still suits your volume. Lower interchange caps are part of the reform, so it’s reasonable to ask how they flow through to you. If your POS lets you choose your payment provider, you also have room to shop around.

Lift prices selectively, not evenly

A flat percentage increase on every product is the easiest change to make. It’s also the easiest one for customers to spot. Use your sales data instead.

  • Leave known-value items alone. Every shop has products customers know the price of, like a newspaper, magazine, cat food, dog  – the everyday item people notice. Keep these steady. They anchor your price reputation.
  • Lift where you add value. Gifts, specialty lines, exclusive ranges and items that need advice carry less price sensitivity. A small rise here is rarely noticed.
  • Round sensibly. Moving $9.40 to $9.50 is gentler than moving $9.95 to $10.20. Price endings matter more than most think.
  • Review slow sellers separately. If nobody is buying it, a price rise won’t help. Decide whether it belongs in the range at all.

Your POS software should show you sales by item, category and margin. Sort by units sold and margin together, and the safest places for a modest increase stand out quickly.

Protect trust with how you communicate

Skip the sign apologising for higher prices. What you need is staff who can answer honestly when a customer asks.

  • Don’t tell customers prices rose “because of the surcharge ban” unless that is accurate and proportionate.
  • Remove all surcharge references from counter signage, invoices, receipts and your website.
  • Weekend and public holiday surcharges are not part of the card ban, but they must be clearly displayed if you use them.
  • Brief your team on a simple, truthful line, such as: “We stopped charging card fees, and like everyone our costs have gone up, so we have adjusted some prices.”

Find margin outside the shelf price

Pricing is one lever. The retailers who handle this well tend to look at their buying, their mix and their shrinkage at the same time.

  • Buying. Check supplier invoices for cost increases you haven’t passed on. Many shops absorb supplier rises for months without noticing.
  • Mix. Promote higher-margin lines through placement and counter displays. Changing what customers buy can do more than a price rise.
  • Shrinkage (theft). Every item that walks out unpaid is lost margin. Tighter stock counts often recover more than the surcharge ever did.

What to do now

Work out your effective card cost. Pick twenty known-value items to hold steady. Then look at your highest-margin categories for a small, considered increase. It’s a morning’s work, and it beats guessing.

If you want to see how sales and margin reporting can make this easier, Tim and Justin at Tower are happy to talk through your shop’s situation. Call 1300 662 957 or email sales@towersystems.com.au.

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Is your shop haunted?

October 31, 2026
3 Min read
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Halloween has crept up on Australian retail. When we started out, 31 October was just another day. Now there are costumes in the shops, plastic skeletons in the garden centre and kids at the door expecting lollies.

The things that actually scare us in a shop don’t wear costumes, though. They hide in the stockroom and the supplier invoices, and some of them have been there for years.

Ghost stock

The system says you have four. The shelf says none. Nobody sold them, or at least nobody rang them up.

Ghost stock is sneaky because your POS won’t reorder something it thinks you still have. So the gap stays on the shelf, and a customer asks for it on a busy Saturday. Count your fast sellers every few weeks rather than waiting for the annual stocktake to give you a fright.

Zombie stock

Every shop has a few lines that won’t die. They’ve been on the shelf so long they’ve faded. You walk past them every day and stop seeing them.

Run a report of anything that hasn’t sold in 90 days. It’s rarely pleasant reading. Discount it, bundle it with something that sells, or send it back if the supplier will take it. That space and that cash are worth more doing something else.

Vampire costs

This one drains you slowly. A supplier puts a line up by 40 cents, then another goes up by a dollar. Nobody tells you, and the new price sits quietly on the invoice.

I’ve seen retailers absorb increases for six months without noticing. Check invoices against your cost prices when stock comes in, and adjust the sell price that day while you’re thinking about it.

The haunted till

The drawer opens and there’s no sale. A refund appears with no receipt. Usually there’s a boring explanation. Every so often there isn’t.

Your void, refund and no-sale reports will tell you who, when and how often. You don’t need to be suspicious of your team. You just need to look now and then.

The witching hour

It’s 6.15pm. The door is locked, your feet hurt, and you still need to balance the day. If that takes an hour with a calculator and a shoebox of dockets, your system is letting you down. It should take ten minutes.

Skeleton staff

Three people on a dead Tuesday morning and two on a flat-out Saturday afternoon. Most rosters are built on habit. Pull your sales by hour and day and roster to what the data shows, not to what you’ve always done.

While you’re at it, sell some Halloween stock

Halloween is now a real trading event for gift shops, newsagents, toy shops and garden centres. Put Halloween lines at the front of the shop for the last week of October, and put lollies at the counter. On 1 November, mark down whatever is left and clear it. Packing it away for next year just creates next year’s zombie stock.

Then look at what sold, so next year’s order is better than a guess.

If any of these sound familiar, we can show you how Tower’s reports bring us out of hiding. Call 1300 662 957 or email sales@towersystems.com.au.

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The Real Cost of POS Software in Australia (2026): What You’ll Actually Pay

July 21, 2026
4 Min read
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The advertised monthly price on POS software is rarely the whole story. Two systems can look identical on a comparison table and end up hundreds of dollars a month apart once everything is added up. Here is what to check before you sign, including the costs providers tend not to volunteer.

The headline price is only the start

Most POS software is sold as a monthly subscription. For specialty and independent retail in Australia, ongoing fees usually land somewhere between $40 and $300 a month depending on what is included. That is a wide range, and the gap between two quotes usually hides in the fees underneath the headline number.

The costs that are easy to miss

Start with how the licence is counted. Some systems charge per register, per device or per staff login. Run two counters and a back-office computer and a “low” monthly fee can quietly double. Ask whether the price covers every computer at your location.

Then there is card processing, and this is the big one. Many providers bundle payments and take a cut of every sale, typically 1.1 to 1.9 per cent. On $40,000 a month in card sales, 1.5 per cent is $600 a month. That is more than most retailers pay for the software itself. Check whether you must use the provider’s payments platform, or whether you can shop around with your own bank and keep that margin.

Some platforms also charge a separate fee on each transaction just for using the software. Your bill climbs as your sales do, which is a strange thing to pay for.

Support deserves a close look. Cheap software often means expensive help. Check whether phone and email support is included, what hours it runs and whether the team is local. You find out what support is really worth on the day the system goes down.

Ask what it costs to go live, too. Moving your stock file, customer records and sales history into a new system takes real work. Some providers include setup and training. Others charge thousands for it.

The same goes for integrations. Accounting links, e-commerce sync, supplier ordering and loyalty tools are sometimes included and sometimes sold as add-on modules. A cheap-looking system gets expensive once you switch on the features you actually need.

Lock-in is a cost too

A 24 or 36 month contract puts the risk on you if the software turns out to be a poor fit. Month-to-month terms cost nothing to leave. A provider willing to offer them clearly expects the product to keep you there on its own.

Questions to put to every provider

  • Does the price cover every computer at my location, or is it per terminal or per user?
  • Do you charge a fee on each transaction?
  • Must I use your payments platform, or can I choose my own?
  • Is phone and email support included, and where is your team based?
  • What is the one-off cost to migrate my data, set up and train my staff?
  • Which integrations are included, and which cost extra?
  • Is there a lock-in contract?
  • Who owns my data if I leave?

Cheapest is not the same as best value

The lowest monthly fee often carries the highest total cost once payment margins, add-ons and support charges are counted in. The better question is not “what is the monthly price?” but “what will this cost me over a full year, the way my business actually runs?” A system built for your retail category, with local support and no lock-in, will usually cost less to own even when its sticker price is not the smallest on the list.

Work out the all-in annual cost before you decide. Compare that, not the pricing page.

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Hey retailers: Your backup is possibly broken and you don’t know it yet

June 26, 2026
2 Min read
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Most retailers assume their backup is running. It’s a fair assumption because it does work most of the time. The thing is, it’s the time it doesn’t work that causes stress and loss.

Retailers set backup up once, see a confirmation somewhere, and move on. The problem shows up later — usually when they desperately need to restore data — and they find out it’s been failing quietly for months.

It happens more than you’d think. A process that worked fine gets interrupted by a software update, a network change, a setting nobody touched but somehow shifted. The confirmation messages keep appearing. The actual backup stops working. Nobody checks because it never occurs to anyone to check.

By the time it matters, the data is gone.

Tower Systems cloud backup runs continuously through the day. No end-of-day process, no manual trigger, nothing to schedule or remember. Every change made in your system is captured as it happens. Two copies — one onsite, one offsite. If your hardware dies, your premises flood, or your internet drops, the other copy is there.

That difference is real. A backup running once at midnight leaves a full day of trading exposed. A backup running perpetually through the day means the worst case is losing minutes, not hours of transactions.

We also offer a free backup check service. We test-restore your backup to confirm it’s actually working — not that it appears to be working. Those are different things. A backup you haven’t tested is not a safety net. It’s a hope. This service exists because we’ve seen too many retailers discover the hard way that what they thought was protecting them wasn’t.

Your POS data is the record of your business. Sales history, customer data, supplier records, stock on hand figures built up over years of trading. Losing it isn’t an inconvenience you recover from in an afternoon. For most small retailers it’s simply gone.

Backup doesn’t bring in new customers or lift your margin. It protects everything you’ve already built. Talk to the Tower Systems team about cloud backup and the free backup check service — both are straightforward, and one of them might save your business.

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In retail, when the boss steals, staff learn to steal

June 24, 2026
3 Min read
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Years ago we helped a retailer investigate an employee theft problem. Using encrypted transaction data from their POS software, we isolated the days and times where discrepancies were appearing, matched them against the roster, and identified the most likely person. When confronted, the employee admitted to taking around $20 a day.

The reason they gave was not what the owner expected.

The boss took cash from the till for lunch. So they did the same.

The idea of stealing hadn’t occurred to them independently. They watched the owner take money from the register without ringing it through and drew a straightforward conclusion: this is normal here.

The owner hadn’t thought of it as theft. A few dollars for lunch — their business, their money. But watched by a staff member, it looked exactly like what it was: taking cash without processing it.

That’s one of the harder things to sit with in small business retail. The standards your team follows aren’t the ones written down anywhere. They’re the ones you demonstrate every day, on the floor, in front of people who are paying more attention than you think.

Handle cash loosely and some staff will handle it loosely. Take shortcuts on process and some staff will take the same shortcuts. Not everyone, and not immediately — but you’ve shown them it’s acceptable, and that’s enough.

The practical response isn’t complicated. Run every transaction through the system, your own lunch included. Pay yourself properly rather than dipping into the till. Use your POS the way you expect your staff to use it. And when something looks off in your data, investigate it — not assuming the worst, but not ignoring it either.

The encrypted transaction data in this case did its job. It gave the conversation a factual basis rather than an accusation, which matters both for resolving the situation and for treating the employee fairly.

But the real problem wasn’t the employee. It was what the owner had been quietly teaching them for months without knowing it.

In our POS software we have tools available for early detection of employee theft, tools many retailers have used to catch theft earlier than they otherwise might.

…

The right POS system or website for any retail business depends on the specific needs of the business. Tower offers POS software and websites made specifically for local small business retailers in a selection of retail channels. To see if we might help you…, request a free, no-obligation demo today.  

Call 1300 662 957 in Australia or 0800 444 367 in New Zealand. Or, email sales@towersystems.com.au. 

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The Lincraft story and what small business retailers can learn

June 23, 2026
3 Min read
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The Lincraft closure made news last week. Eighty years, every store, gone. It’s the kind of story that sits with you if you’ve been in retail long enough to remember when chains like that felt permanent.

We know it hit small business retailers because of conversations we have had since the news broke.

It’s not the whole retail story, though.

The independent retailer who had their best April in three years won’t make the news. Neither will the gift shop owner who spotted a new category gaining ground and moved on it before the season. These things are happening. We see them in the data.

The difference between retailers finding growth and those feeling stuck usually isn’t location or foot traffic or product range. It’s whether they’re looking at their data. Good data, understood and acted on, is the foundation underneath every independent retail success story we see.

Your POS data knows things you don’t. It knows which supplier is quietly underperforming while a newer one gains ground. Which category is lifting your average sale value. Which days your margin is strongest. What your best customers are buying that your average customers aren’t.

The Tower AI tools are built to surface exactly that — the things not sitting in front of you. Not the obvious wins you already know about. The patterns buried in twelve months of transaction data that you won’t catch on a busy Tuesday. A product that’s been growing 15% month on month and still hasn’t made your reorder list. A margin opportunity in a category you’ve been pricing conservatively out of habit rather than intention.

A chain waits for a report from head office. You can act on your data this week, before the next order goes in. That gap is real and it matters.

The pressures Lincraft cited are real too. Changing consumer behaviour, rising costs, overseas competition — none of that is going away. But the response isn’t to carry the weight of the industry headlines. It’s to look inside your own business and find what’s working.

Green shoots don’t announce themselves. They show up as a slow climb in basket size, a category quietly outperforming its shelf space, a customer type coming back more often than they used to. Your data has already found them.

If you haven’t spent time in the Tower reporting and AI insights tools recently, start there. Not with a big strategic review. Just one question: what’s growing in my business right now that I haven’t noticed yet?

The answer is probably already there.

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Hey retailers: Why paying for a stocktake is usually a mistake

June 22, 2026
2 Min read
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Most external stocktaking services work manually. Clipboards, hand counts, a spreadsheet sent through when they’re done. It looks thorough. It costs real money. For most independent retailers it’s the wrong tool for the job.

Your stocktake is about the operational future of your business, not merely some accounting function.

A manual stocktake is an accounting exercise for sure. It produces a stock valuation at a point in time — useful for your accountant, useless for your POS system. Your on-hand quantities stay wrong. Your reorder triggers stay unreliable. Your buying stays based on gut feel rather than what the data actually shows.

Stocktaking is an inventory management job. It belongs inside your POS software. When you count through the system, you correct the discrepancies that build up through normal trading — unscanned returns, receiving errors, theft, the odd mistake at the register. The software gets an accurate picture of what you have. That flows through to purchasing, ranging, shrinkage tracking, and the AI tools built into modern retail software.

That last point matters more than it used to. The smarter features in retail POS — demand forecasting, slow-mover flags, reorder suggestions, margin analysis — all depend on the data behind them. Accurate stock figures produce useful outputs. Wrong figures produce noise. A POS-based stocktake is one of the most direct ways to improve everything your software does.

External stocktakers aren’t always the wrong answer. If they’ll work inside your POS rather than around it, that can work fine. Ask before you book: will this improve my POS inventory data, or just give my accountant a number?

If it’s the latter, spend the money elsewhere. Train a staff member. Block out a Saturday. Count through the system you use every day. It takes more effort upfront and pays back every time your software makes a better call because it knows what’s actually on the shelf.

Get the stocktake right in your POS software and you set your business up for good decision-making and valuable portability because of this. That’s what we see in our years of service local small retail businesses.

Take your time. Do the work. reap the rewards.

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Learning from a stocktake Q&A

June 18, 2026
2 Min read
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Here’s a video of a stocktake Q&A with a retailer earlier this week. It’s live on our YouTube channel:

A stocktake is one of the most useful things a retailer can do. It’s also one of the most put off. This session is about both — why accurate stock data matters and how to get it done.

We recorded this on June 16, 2026, as part of the Tower Systems library of practical support for independent retailers. We cover spot stocktakes and full store stocktakes, walk through security, talk about taking a backup before you start, and draw on experience from doing stocktakes in shops we’ve owned and run ourselves. We also answer questions from a retailer thinking through what they want to achieve in their own store.

This advice works for any small business retailer, not only those using Tower Systems software. The recording is part of a broad suite of stocktake advice and tools we provide to local small business retailers, to help them get this done accurately and efficiently. The education we offer is foundational.

Accurate stock on hand data changes what you can see in your business. You find the dead stock sitting in a back room that the system still thinks is sellable. You spot the gap between what your records show and what’s physically on the shelf. You get category performance data you can actually trust. From there, your reports mean more, year-on-year comparisons hold up, and if you’re feeding stock data into AI tools, the outputs are useful rather than misleading.

Tower Systems customers can access this session through the knowledge base, the chatbot, the training video library, or directly through the help desk. Stocktaking comes up constantly in support conversations, which is why we’ve built a substantial amount of material around it. Retailers who understand stocktake well get more out of everything else the software does.

Tower Systems builds and supports POS software for local specialty retailers — newsagents, gift shops, garden centres, jewellers, bike shops, bookshops, toy shops, pet shops, produce businesses, farm supply stores, fishing shops, haberdashery, antique shops, charity retailers, and more.

Find out more at towersystems.com.au.

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What Customers Say About Tower Systems Website Development

June 8, 2026
3 Min read
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Getting a website built can feel daunting. For many small business retailers, it sits on the to-do list for months — sometimes years. There’s always a reason to delay: too busy, too expensive, too complicated, not sure where to start. These are words from retailers who finally took the step.

Sharon sums up what we hear most often: “We put off building our website for longer than we should have. Once we finally took the step, Christina and the Tower team made it so easy — we only wish we’d done it sooner.”

That phrase — we only wish we’d done it sooner — comes up a lot. The fear of the process tends to be worse than the process itself.

Nicole from Charlton’s Fishing went further: “I unreservedly recommend Christina. Her work is top-tier. She has gone above and beyond making our website the amazing product it is. She made our complex website seem easy, answered our questions without making me feel silly. I cannot speak highly enough of her.”

Feeling comfortable asking questions matters. A lot of business owners come to this process without technical knowledge. They shouldn’t have to pretend otherwise.

Sophie from Bluey’s Hunting & Fishing had a more involved project and described how the team handled it: “The development of the website for our business was a huge step for us, and Christina and the Tower team made this process quite straightforward despite it being such a complex one. They took the time to teach us as much as they could about the ongoing management of the website, and we have been really happy with the final product. Since our website launched, we have continued to learn a lot about how to evolve and develop the website to continue to meet our customer needs.”

That last part is worth noting. A website isn’t finished on launch day. The retailers who get the most from theirs keep learning and adapting it over time. Tower Systems builds that capability into the handover.

Rod from Bingara Newsagency offers a different perspective: “As an 81-year-old, Christina was able to set me up with great patience and skill. Nine months later, while we are not breaking records, we have a functioning online presence.” Honest and practical — which is exactly what a website should be for a local retailer starting out online.

Phil from newsXpress Silver Sands kept it brief: “Christina is very calm, patient, and professional. She needed to be with a luddite like me.”

Five different retailers, five different businesses, one consistent thread: the support made the difference.

If your website has been sitting on the list too long, talk to us. The Tower Systems team has helped retailers across Australia get online without the stress. It’s worth the conversation.

We develop websites here in Australia, 100% using our own team.

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Why we are focused on stocktake in June — and what it means for your business

June 1, 2026
3 Min read
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June 1 marks the start of our stocktake mission.

For the next 30 days, we are focused on helping local independent retailers get their stock data accurate and up to date. Not because stocktake is glamorous work — it is not — but because what comes after it matters enormously.

The AI opportunity is real, but it has a condition

Tower Systems POS software now surfaces AI-powered insights to help retailers make better decisions. Which lines to reorder. Where margin is leaking. What dead stock is quietly draining cash. Which categories are growing and which are fading.

These insights are genuinely useful. We see retailers using them to make smarter buying decisions, manage cash more carefully, and evolve their product mix with confidence.

But they depend entirely on one thing: accurate stock on hand data.

Feed the software clean data and it works hard for you. Feed it inaccurate data and the insights are unreliable — and unreliable insights can lead to poor decisions that cost real money.

June is the right moment

With EOFY on June 30, this month already prompts retailers to look closely at their numbers. We want to make the most of that momentum.

A stocktake done well in June delivers three things at once. Clean data for your end of year reporting. A clear picture of what to carry into the new financial year. And a foundation from which your software — and its AI tools — can actually do their job.

You do not have to count everything at once. Tower Systems makes it easy to count in sections — a category today, a supplier range tomorrow. Little and often is enough. By June 30 the data can be in good shape.

What we are doing to help

Throughout June we will be sharing practical guidance direct with our customers via email, in our private forum and in human contact on how to get the most from stocktake in Tower Systems — tips, reminders, and real examples from retailers who have done this and seen the difference it makes.

We are also here if you need support. Our team — based across Australia and New Zealand — is ready to help you through the process.

The retailers making the best use of their software are almost always the ones with accurate data. That is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect.

June 1 is the right day to start.

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Sunday reflection: the weight that retail business owners carry

May 31, 2026
2 Min read
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Some conversations stay with us.

Over the decades working with local independent retailers, our team has had tens of thousands of them. Most are about software, stock, or business strategy. But some are about something harder to name, a weight that builds up when you are running a business on your own, making every decision, carrying every risk, showing up every day regardless of how you feel.

From time to time we take calls from retailers who are struggling. Really struggling. The conversation might start with a business frustration, staff, suppliers, the shifting nature of the industry — but it moves somewhere deeper. The distress is real and it is significant.

We are not counsellors. We listen. That is usually the right thing to do.

But these calls stay with us. Because we do not think the retailers who make them are alone.

Running an independent retail business in 2026 is genuinely demanding. The industry is changing. Costs are rising. Customers are shifting. The decisions never stop. For many owners, the business is not just a livelihood,  it is an identity, a community anchor, a life’s work. When it feels threatened, the response is not always just commercial stress. Sometimes it is something more personal and more serious.

If that sounds familiar — if you are finding things hard right now, beyond the usual business pressure — please talk to someone. Your GP is a good starting point. Beyond Blue (beyondblue.org.au) has specific support for small business owners experiencing anxiety or depression. The Black Dog Institute (blackdoginstitute.org.au) is another strong resource. If things feel urgent, Lifeline is available around the clock on 13 11 14.

And if you are reading this and thinking of someone else — a fellow retailer, a supplier contact, someone in your network who seems not quite themselves — trust that instinct. You do not need to fix anything. A call that says “I noticed, and I wanted to check in” can matter more than you know.

We work with local independent retailers because we believe in what they do and who they are. That does not stop at the software.

We listen, and help where we can.

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Laugh about stocktakes

May 30, 2026
2 Min read
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As we’re heading into June, the most stocktaker tend to get done, take a moment for a laugh:

“I did a stocktake last week. Turns out I have more excuses than stock.”

“Stocktake time. The one day of the year you find out exactly how many of those have been sitting there since 2019.”

“We did the stocktake. The good news is we know exactly what we have. The bad news is we know exactly what we have.”

“Stocktake is just retail therapy in reverse. Instead of buying things you don’t need, you count things you forgot you had.”

“Asked the team to help with stocktake. Suddenly everyone had a appointment.”

Yes, they are lame, but they are the jokes we have.

Stocktaking is valuable work, serious work. get it right, and you profit. Ignore it, and you for sure lose money.

Beyond the jokes, focus on thew rock and profit!

Here at Tower Systems we can help.

The joke we like is:

We did the stocktake. The good news is we know exactly what we have. The bad news is we know exactly what we have.

Every retailer has been there. The stocktake does not lie — and that is exactly the point. Start with your highest-value categories, or the ranges you are least sure about. Count them, update Tower Systems, and run a dead stock report. What comes back might surprise you. One retailer found $20,000 worth of stock they had forgotten about. Clean data changes what you can see — and what you can act on.

June is the month. Start today. towersystems.com.au

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