A shop local pitch needs more than words to cut through and succeed
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Toy sales are growing. Here is how local toy shops can win more of them.
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Australian toy sales grew 10% in August 2026 based on professionally collected industry data and are up 12% for the year to date. Games and puzzles were the biggest dollar gainer, up 38%. Building sets rose 16% and explorative toys 55%.
Licensed toys now make up 47% of all toy dollars. Pokémon, Hot Wheels, Marvel, Star Wars and Magic: The Gathering lead the way. The average toy sold for $19.19.
This is good news for local independent toy shops. The question is how to make sure more of that growth comes through your door, not the big-box store’s or an online marketplace’s.
Local indie retailers: compete on what makes you local
You can’t outspend the big players. You can outsmart them.
Local toy shops know their families, schools and community. Tower Systems toy shop software helps you turn that knowledge into sales.
Reward shoppers at the moment of purchase. Our loyalty tools let you give a reward at the counter, as a discount or as points. Shoppers feel the benefit straight away, which gives them a reason to come back to you.
Offer member pricing to local groups. You can set exclusive pricing for members of local schools, kindergartens, community groups and clubs. It is a simple way to build relationships the big chains can’t match.
Run promotions at the register. Set up custom bundles at a set price, or run buy one, get one free offers. Bundles work well for games, puzzles and building sets, the categories growing fastest.
Help people buy more
Smart loyalty is not just about discounts. It is about giving shoppers reasons to add one more item and to come back sooner. A bundle that pairs a board game with an expansion, or a puzzle with a second puzzle, lifts the sale. A reward that lands on the day gives people a reason to return before the next birthday party.
Run the shop more efficiently
Toy deliveries are often assorted, with mixed items from many suppliers. Our software handles assorted stock, and supplier invoices can be imported automatically with built-in AI tools.
You can track high-value items by serial number for warranty claims. You can print assembly instructions, age guidance and care details on the receipt.
Our AI tools are included, not charged as an extra. They can write website product descriptions, compare prices and answer questions about your business reports in plain language.
Sell in-store and online
Tower Systems connects with Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento and WooCommerce. Product details and images flow out to your website, and online sales flow back into the software. Xero integration is available too.
Local software for local shops
Tower Systems software is made locally and supported locally. Our help desk is open six days a week, including Saturday, with after-hours help for urgent system-down issues. Your licence covers unlimited computers in your shop.
The toy category is strong. Let’s help you make the most of it.
Find out more at towersystems.com.au/toy-shops.
AU 1300 662 957 | NZ 0800 444 367 | sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
Software made and supported in Australia, for local Aussie jewellers
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A local jeweller is a different business to a chain jewellery store, and everyone in town knows it. You made the engagement ring for a couple who now bring their daughter in for her 18th. You have served some families across three generations. Being local is a superpower, and we think POS software should help a jeweller lean into it rather than flatten it into something generic.
Our jewellery software is made in Australia and supported from Australia and New Zealand.
We compete with software made overseas, that’s often supported overseas.
Being Australian made is a point of difference for our Tower Systems jeweller software.
We have served local jewellers for decades, and that shows up in practical ways.
Call our help desk and you speak with our own people, in your time zone, who know Australian retail. Second-hand goods record keeping is handled. Xero is connected. You choose your own EFTPOS provider. The software was built around how jewellery shops here trade, which is a different thing to software written for shopping malls in another hemisphere and adapted later.
Occasion marketing is where localness pays most directly. You already know your customers personally. The software records the anniversary, the birthday, the wedding date, and prompts you to reach out at the right moment. Customers notice when a jeweller remembers. They tell people about it too, which is marketing money cannot buy.
If you run a workshop, repairs are tracked from intake to collection, with notes, status updates and customer contact along the way. Repairs deserve more respect than they sometimes get. People hand over pieces that matter to them, and a repair handled well often earns more loyalty than the original sale did.
The inventory side is built for jewellery. Stone details, metal types and certifications sit against each piece. High-value items are tracked by serial number. Rings and designer collections are managed by colour, size and style, and special orders let you sell a piece before it arrives. There is also club pricing, so you can give a local sporting club or community group their own pricing. Small thing, strong tie.
When the town show or a local market comes around, the Retailer Roam app takes sales away from the counter with stock kept in sync. The Shopify integration keeps the web store and the shop on the same data, which matters when a piece is one of a kind. Selling it twice is not a mistake you get to make quietly.
The AI tools handle the tedious parts. Supplier invoices import automatically from almost any PDF, product descriptions for the web store are generated from your stock data, and reports explain themselves in plain English, so understanding your own business does not require an evening with a spreadsheet.
We also do business the way local businesses tend to prefer. Monthly rental, cancel any time, and we take no fee from your transactions.
If you are local independent jeweller keen to leverage your localness, consider our locally made and supported software for jewellers.
Book a demo and we will show you the software with your shop in mind: towersystems.com.au/pos-software-free-demo.html, or 1300 662 957 (AU), 0800 444 367 (NZ).
Advice for local retailers: What the chains get wrong, and how you turn it into an advantage
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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.
Why Australian-Made POS Software Matters for Local Australian Retail Businesses
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Your POS software runs your business. Every sale, every stock order, every end-of-day report flows through it. When something breaks — and at some point it will — who picks up the phone is not a trivial question. You’re local. Your software needs to reflect this.
Built here, for here
Australian retail is not a scaled-down version of US or UK retail. School holidays shift buying patterns. Public holidays differ by state. GST works the way it works. A gift shop in regional Queensland has different pressures to a homewares store in suburban Melbourne. :language is different too.
Software built overseas is designed for overseas conditions. Australian localisation gets added later, if at all. Tower Systems was built in Australia for Australian independent retailers from the beginning. That is not a slogan — it shows up in which features exist, how compliance is handled, and whether the terminology actually matches the way local retailers run their businesses.
Someone answers when you call
Offshore support means time zone maths. You log a ticket on a busy trade morning and wait. The reply arrives after close, points to a help article, and does not quite address what you asked.
Tower Systems support runs in Australian business hours. The people you reach understand local retail. They know what a rough Saturday looks like. They understand the pressure of a stocktake before a long weekend. You do not have to explain your context from scratch every time.
A register that stops processing at 11am on Saturday is not a problem that waits.
Retailers shape what gets built
With a large offshore provider, you are one customer among millions. Feature requests go into a global queue and most never come back out.
Tower Systems works directly with Australian independent retailers — gift shops, garden centres, homewares stores, toy retailers. What those businesses run into day-to-day feeds into the software. When a real gap surfaces, there is an actual conversation about it. That does not happen when your vendor is twelve time zones away and has ten million other customers to think about.
A practical decision
Buying Australian-made software keeps money in the local economy. It supports jobs and businesses operating in the same communities your shop serves. It also means you are dealing with a company subject to Australian consumer law — if something goes wrong in the relationship, you have genuine options. That matters when you are committing to software you will run your business on for years.
Decades in independent retail
Tower Systems has been building POS software for Australian independent retailers for decades. Through recessions, a pandemic, and the steady reinvention of what a viable local retail business looks like, the software has been shaped by retailers actually working through those conditions.
That experience does not come from a global template. It comes from being here.
If you run a gift shop, garden centre, homewares store, or any independent retail business and want software built for your operation, talk to Tower Systems.
Call 1300 662 957 or visit www.towersystems.com.au.
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