The POS Software Blog

The POS Software Blog

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

CategoryConvenience store software

5 ways retailers can use the POS software from Tower Systems to pitch value to shoppers

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Plenty is being written about the economy at the moment and it is negatively impacting consumer confidence. There are things you can do with the Tower Systems POS software to show your business offering value to shoppers, and thereby nurturing more value for you.

And here in this post, value means the value shoppers perceive in dealing with your business. You could also use the term savings.

While value can be about price, it is often not as straightforward as that. Something could cost more but it could last longer or you might get more pieces than if you pay a lower price or there may be some other add-on that drives value.

While our POS software offers many ways retailers can pitch value to shoppers, here are 5 ways retailers can use the POS software from Tower Systems to pitch value to shoppers:

  1. Discount vouchers in Retailer are a perfect way to pitch value. A dollar amount discount is better understood than points. You can set the vouchers up in a way so costs are covered by benefits. Show your shoppers what they can save.
  2. Offer to fund raise for local charities, community groups and clubs. They could give their members a card that gets them, say, a 5% discount off purchasing from you while also earning for the charity a 5% donation. The goal here is to bring new shoppers into your business.
  3. Offering a coffee card type discount of, say, buy 9 and get your 10th free for habit-based purchases, like coffee, pet food, cards, magazines, fertilizer etc. can help nurture shopper stickiness to your business.
  4. Bundling products together into something that only your business offers can pitch a value proposition unique to your business.
  5. Volume pricing, where the cost of an item decreases as the quantity purchased increases, can help shoppers save and you sell more.

Your software offers more ways of pitching value to shoppers than these, and it helps you systemise pitching value. Being consistent about this is key to it working for you.

Consider this list of 5 a starting point, a jumping off point for exploring other ways for your business.

Tower Systems offers business management advice like this to all of its POS software customers, taking the POS software help desk experience beyond the technical and onto the shop floor, to help our local small business retailer customers to themselves get more value from their use of our POS software.

Here’s an easy local small business retailers can better connect with their community

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Community connection is vital in local small business retail, authentic community connection at a level that is loved by folks in the community.

Back in the day, sponsoring a local sports club, donating prizes for a raffle or helping the local Rotary or Lions were the go to ideas for retailers. And while those ideas continue today, there are another local small business retailers can engage in providing community support that is funded buy the community itself.

Through our loyalty tools and, in particular the discount voucher tech we offer, local small business retailers can reward shoppers and they can offer in store a way for these shoppers to pay it forward, to support a local charity or community group organisation.

The Grill’d burger chain was an early adopter of something similar with their bottle caps and giving customers the caps to vote for one of three local charities the store would donate cash to.

Our suggestion is to invite shoppers to donate their discount voucher to one of several local charities in your business, which you could have every month or so, accruing the value of the vouchers for a gift card donation to the charity, or you making a cash donation of a portion of the voucher value to the charity.

It pitched well this could see people who support the local charity shopping with you so that funds are raised for the charity.

We know form years of data that around 20% of all vouchers handed out to shoppers are used by those shoppers within 28 days. This means there are other vouchers that expire unused. A nuanced campaign in-store connected with loved local charities and community groups could drive engagement, do good in the community and show the business as community connected in a fresh and loved way. That is the goal here.

Of course, the execution will be different in each location. Our job as a tech company is to provide opportunity. Our job as retailers ourselves is to share what we have seen work well, and what we have learned.

Your job as a local small business retailer is to make decisions that are right for you and your situation.

Using the discount vouchers generated by the software in this way, to support loved local community groups and charities, could be the reset you want, the engagement driver the business needs. The beauty of it is that it is low cost, self funding and truly community focussed.

We are grateful to the feedback from our customers and this has guided our own activity in this space of local community group connection.

Local high street retail continues to benefit from people working locally

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Just about all local high street retailers will tell you trade is good, even if the face or a returned wave of covid infections.

High street retail is strong because shoppers are concerned abut big shopping centres. They prefer the easier local high street situation for shopping. We hear from shoppers that they feel this situation is safer for them. So, in a comparison of a shopping mall visit versus a high street retail visit, for plenty of shoppers the preference will be the high street visit.

The other reason local high street retail is strong is because plenty who shifted to work from home at the start of Covid have not returned to the city, to big offices. People are loving working from home, living and working locally … and, local retailers are loving serving them, helping out with new needs of this now more regional office based workforce.

We are not part of the camp calling for workers to return to the office. For our customers and even for our own business we support people working where they are able, where they are happiest. This is good for local communities, and especially good for local high street retail.

Of course, our views are selfish in that the vast majority of our Tower Systems POS software customers and local high street retailers. Jewellers, garden centres, bike shops, toy shops, pet shops, games shops, sewing shops, fishing shops, charity shops, music shops, produce businesses, newsagents, camping shops, firearms dealers, convenience shops … and more.

These local shops benefit from shoppers preferencing local high street retail over a shopping mall or shopping during a lunch break from office work in the city.

Plenty of local retailers have adjusted their businesses to better serve these new opportunities that emerged from Covid and while some saw the shift as temporary, engaged retailers have planned for the permanent shift of some from city based work to suburban and regional work. The benefit for the local community of this shift is considerable as local retailers will spend more of what they make locally than a shopping mall big business or than a city based business.

What we are seeing in Australia, and globally, is a reset of how, where and when we work and having a front seat to this shift, this change, is a wonderful opportunity not only as an observer, but as a participant.

Updated advice for POS software users in Tower Systems knowledge base

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The Tower Systems Knowledge base continues to expand with weekly enhancements. We add new articles and update existing articles. This makes the knowledge base a living thing for our customers, offering fresh insights and advice through which they can learn more about how to use the software.

Here are knowledge base enhancements in the last few days.

  1. Importing The Blueshyft Stock File & Invoice File
  2. Common Problems With Magazine Arrivals
  3. Gift Vouchers / Cards Setup
  4. End Of Financial Year Procedures
  5. How To Add A New Staff Initial
  6. NETWORK Sales Data Being Sent Back To XChangeIT
  7. New PC / Windows Configuration – Operating System Configuration

Our POS software customer in their weekly email get a more comprehensive list … weekly.

SUNDAY RETAIL MANAGEMENT TIP: HOW TO CHOOSE LOCAL COMMUNITY GROUPS AND CHARITIES TO SUPPORT

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Local small business retailers are asked to support local schools, community groups and charities on an almost daily basis. While community groups and charitable organisations beat a path to the doors of local businesses, so do individuals engaged on personal fundraising of their own for a cause or for an other individual.

It is tough making the call about which organisation to support or not for there is a real fear that declining will hurt the business. Often, small business retailers do not look for an uptick in business from a charity support decision but they do worry about a decline.

So how do you choose which local business you support?

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.

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:

  1. Tell members to buy from you.
  2. Write about your business on their Facebook page.
  3. Distribute flyers of your offers.
  4. Have you speak at a meeting.

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 has to serve your heart and serve your business. Going about it in a structured way will ensure you meet your objectives.

Good POS software can drive the relevance of your small or independent retail business

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Choosing the right POS software for your business can re-energise, refocus and redefine your retail business.

Choosing the wrong software can hold you back.

The challenge for small and independent retailers is: which POS software is the right POS software.

Leading Australian POS software developer Tower Systems is clear that its software is not right for all retail businesses. Indeed, the company focuses on a select group of retail niches, vertical markets as they are called, in which it refines software to specific needs of teach of the markets.

This specialisation sees Tower Systems become deeply involved in and knowledgeable about each of the retail channels in which it serves. It’s deep specialisation results in offering software functions through which specialist niche retailers can reinforce their relevance.

For example, a pet shop using the specialist pet shop software from Tower Systems has pet shop management facilities that are unique and tailored to their needs whereas a generic POS software package only offers generic facilities that are offered to all retailers. These generic facilities are less likely to enable the pet retailer to reinforce their specialisation compared to a general retailer.

Specialist software in retail niches helps specialist retailers embrace their specialisation.

This is the Tower AdvantageTM in action. A suite of specialist tools that are constantly evolving thanks to the engagement of its 2,850+ customers.

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