The POS Software Blog

The POS Software Blog

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

Tagpet shop

POS software made for local independent pet shops

October 29, 2026
3 Min read
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Ask a pet owner where they get advice and plenty will name their local pet shop. Not a big-box store. Not a website.

That’s because the local shop knows them. It knows the family down the road has a new puppy that isn’t settling on its food. It knows which customer keeps a bearded dragon and what the enclosure needs. It remembers when the dog is due for worming.

Big pet businesses sell a lot of product. We’d argue local pet shops matter more to local pets. And we think they deserve software built for the way they work, not a generic system they have to work around.

A pet shop is not a simple shop

Think about a normal day. Birdseed sold by the kilo. A collar in a particular size and colour. A live fish. A dog in for a groom. A conversation about changing a cat’s diet.

Most POS software handles the barcode scan at the counter and not much else. The rest ends up on paper, or in the owner’s head.

We built Tower Systems for pet shops to deal with all of it. Bulk food and treats sell by weight, in whole or part quantities. Collars, apparel and bedding are tracked by colour, size and style. You can record the history and care of live animals, and track high-value items by serial number.

The customer side is where a local shop really wins. You can record microchip numbers. You can recall customers when worming, or a similar product, is due. You can print care notes on the receipt, like how to move a puppy onto a new food. And you can market to people based on what they’ve actually bought, so your offers make sense to them.

Promotions work the way a local shop needs them to. Buy-one-get-one deals. Coffee-card style loyalty. Bundles too, such as a tank, filter and starter food at one price. Bundles lift the spend per visit, and they’re harder to price-check item by item online.

If you run a grooming salon or a DIY dog wash, you can track that work in the same system as your retail sales and let owners know when their pet is ready to collect. Repairs and servicing are tracked at no extra cost, whether it’s an aquarium pump or a set of clippers that needs sharpening. Recurring billing is there if you need it.

Then there’s the admin. Supplier invoices import automatically. The built-in AI tools write product descriptions for your online store and help you make sense of your reports. The software connects with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce, plus Xero, Tanda and Deputy. You pick your own EFTPOS provider, and we don’t take a cut of your sales.

The people behind it

Our help desk is in Australia and New Zealand. When you call, you get a person who knows independent retail, not someone reading a script.

You also decide when to install updates. We release them regularly, often with improvements customers asked for, but they go in when it suits you. Not in the middle of a busy Saturday.

If you run an independent pet shop, we’d like to show you how it works. Bring your own situations to a demo: a bulk food sale, a grooming job, a worming reminder. If you’re switching from other software, send us your data first and we’ll confirm whether we can bring it across.

You can read more about Tower Systems for pet shops, call 1300 662 957 (0800 444 367 in New Zealand) or email sales@towersystems.com.au.

Contacting a human is easy.

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Advice for local retailers: What the chains get wrong, and how you turn it into an advantage

July 2, 2026
3 Min read
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The big chains are good at what they do. Buying power, slick fit-outs, ad budgets you’ll never touch. It’s easy to look at all that and feel like the small shop is on the back foot.

You’re not. The things that make a chain efficient are the same things that make it slow. Most of their weaknesses you can use.

Our customers here at Tower Systems are local small business retailers, independent retailers. This issue of big versus small is on our minds because we see too many small business retailers get in their heads about big competitors.

A chain runs on uniformity. Every store the same, every price set by head office, every range decided by someone who has never set foot in your suburb. That’s how you keep a thousand stores consistent. It also means the manager on the floor can’t change a price, can’t bring in a line a local keeps asking for, can’t back a hunch. They send it up and they wait. Usually the answer is no, or it comes too late to matter.

Small business retailers are not bound by the inflexibility of the chains and heavy structure. You can decide something at nine and have it live by ten.

That’s the advantage, and it’s where the right software earns its keep. Flexibility is only worth anything if you can act on it before the moment passes, and that’s the part plenty of small retailers leave sitting on the table.

Pricing is the obvious one. A chain sets a price nationally and leaves it there for months. You can put a special on the slow stock this afternoon, match a price for the shopper standing in front of you, or build a bundle that suits your local trade. Our POS software lets you set that up in a few minutes. The chain physically cannot move that fast, no matter how big it is.

Range is the same story. A chain ranges for the average store in the average suburb, which doesn’t exist. You range for the actual street you’re on. When a local asks for something three times in a week, you bring it in, watch how it sells, and decide whether it earns its place. The numbers are right there in the software. No committee. No national rollout. Just you reading your own shop.

Then there’s the customer. A chain has a loyalty number and a postcode. You know Margaret buys the same card every month for her grandkids and would want a heads-up when the new range lands. Our software remembers what people buy, so you can do something with it. That’s a sale the chain can’t see, from a relationship you already have.

Loyalty is another. You could decide right now to implement our most popular loyalty facility (it’s available free in our software) and you could be live in 5 minutes. Bam!

None of this is about beating the chains at their own game. You won’t, and you don’t need to. Play the game they can’t play instead. They’re built to be the same everywhere. You’re built to be right for one place, and good local software is what lets you move as fast as being small allows.

That’s what local POS software for local retailers actually means. Not a longer feature list. The freedom to back yourself, and the speed to act before the chance is gone.

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Free POS software training from Tower Systems. Still free, still regular.

June 29, 2026
2 Min read
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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.

Click here to see the full list of sessions.

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