To recap:  Look at what you want to achieve in terms of Controlling Your Stock, Controlling Your Cash, Managing Your Staff, Managing Your Customers and Managing Your Suppliers.  Gain an understanding of which EPOS vendors operate in your retail sector and contact retail organisations for feedback.  Then approach between 4 to 6 EPOS vendors.  Make sure that you are comfortable that an effective EPOS Needs Analysis is being carried out.  At this point, the EPOS vendor should advise you how much an EPOS system costs from their organisation.

The next step is to view an EPOS demonstration.  Ensure that all relevant parties attend this demonstration.  Finally existing customer references will provide the piece of mind to ensure that you end up with an EPOS System and EPOS vendor which is a good fit for your retail business.

Don’t forget to join Steven’s Circle in Google+ and Connect on Linked in:

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Back in the late nineties, I spent some time earning my point of sale credentials by installing several hundred AIB Verifone credit card terminals. These terminals were basic in operation and had quite a large desktop footprint. The method of authorisation needed a regular phone cable connected and a transaction could take up to a minute to successfully dial out. It was this reason along with call costs that only certain transactions dialled out, once they were over the terminals ‘floorlimit’, normally £100 or so. Credit card fraud was also less prevalent at this time.

Fast forward to today and I am still dealing with Verifone when we setup new systems. Not only do we have chips, pins and realtime broadband authorisation, but we also have credit card transactions integrated with your point of sale system. These safeguards are put in place to fight fraud, with the added advantage of making your end of day procedures easier by not having a separate terminal to cash up. It is important however, to be aware of procedures when your site may suffer a loss of broadband. For this reason I have listed some points of information below.

During a normal credit or debit card sale, an authorisation request is sent via your broadband line, to verify funds are available for the transaction. If the authorisation is cleared, the system will generate a specific authorisation code for that transaction.

If your broadband experiences difficulty and the system cannot connect remotely for authorisation, then the store will have to perform an off-line transaction. This can only be done once you have made contact with your authorisation centre over the phone, who will issue you with an authorisation code to manually enter. You cannot enter random digits as an authorisation code. While the system may accept them, once the system comes back online the transaction that you initially believed had authorisation may be rejected due to an invalid code.

When dealing with offline transactions, the system has by default a floorlimit of zero. Meaning that all transactions require a manual authorisation code entry if off-line. Some banks have the ability to increase the off-line floorlimit, and in these special circumstances the till will generate an authorisation code even if off-line and below the floorlimit. You must contact your bank directly to see if this can be put into place for your specific account.

Off-line refund transactions can take place with a default authorisation code ‘9999’, but only for refund transactions.

When your broadband is restored correctly, you must exit the POS software and relaunch it. This should then send any pending off-line transactions.

It is important to review the above points and to also circulate among staff members in your organisation. If these procedures are followed, then you should have no trouble in handling card transactions during a broadband outage, once you have the knowledge in advance.

Regards

Dereck

TRC are proud to be able to bring this world leading technology to our customers. Please send an email to Steven Maguire on smaguire@trcepos.ie for more information. For more info on ZBD E-Paper please click here.

Why incur the expense and stress of traveling, the sore feet, and multiple salesmen selling all the same thing telling you that theirs is better? Well there are three main reasons why you need to think about attending.

They could be summed up in three words: Education, Awareness, and Preparedness. Any retailer not concerned at the incredible pace of change taking place in retail technology and how it may affect the buying habits of their customers is doing so at their own peril.

1. Educate: 250 top Retail Technology companies are exhibiting. Each company will be showcasing the latest and greatest tools for use in your businesses and will happily offer advice to retail and hospitality organisations. It’s a one-stop shop for all technology needs.

2. Awareness: Your kids, your staff, your peers are giving you advice as to Facebook or Mobile POS. Loyalty is the buzz word, E Paper is the differentiator etc. There will be numerous presentations over the two days, where you can see how the innovators in retail have done it and learn from their successes and mistakes. In fairness to the high street they are quite generous in sharing their experiences at these kind of gatherings. Do not spend your IT budget on a hunch. Be aware of the players out there, what the big boys are spending money on and the pitfalls to avoid.

3. Preparedness: Only by educating yourself as to what is available and how it has been used in similar situations, can you be sure you are prepared. Since 2008 more and more of the Retail industry has postponed EPOS upgrades and system replacement because of uncertain times. However, the demand from customers for ever more information innovation and communication in order to win their custom is relentless. This is resulting in a need to upgrade to meet customer expectations. Make sure you’re prepared.

I hope that you will think about the points raised, and if you do travel please come to our stand and let us show you how we can help.

As a thank you to our newsletter readers we would like to offer twenty of you the opportunity for us to give you a guided tour of the show and send you a personalised recommendation for presentations and seminars. Please send an email to Steven Maguire on smaguire@trcepos.ie for more information. For more info on the exhibition please click here.

Regards, Gavin.

The TRC “Figure Gemini Weblink” allows your existing products, barcodes and stock levels to move seamlessly from your Epos system to your website which reduces administration time and ensures products are not being sold that are unavailable! Most retailers with a physical shop will not want to hold separate stock for the on line store, on the contrary it should be used to drive the movement of all stock lines both fast moving and slow moving right down to clearance at the end of season.

“So what’s the big deal, build it and they will come!” Unfortunately the world of on line retailing is not as simple as this, as many a retailer has discovered through experience. Think of it this way, if you were thinking of opening a new bricks and mortar store in May or June this year then you would already have put a lot of time and effort into getting to this stage – there is much commitment, time and effort involved on your behalf to make sure everything is right. Opening a new on line store requires the same focus, commitment and effort in order to make it happen.

A key partner in the process will be the selection of the company you choose to build your on line shop but again this is no different from what you have done in the past in selecting the right shop fitter or Epos System Provider when opening your physical store or stores. While Total Retail Control do not build Ecommerce websites we do partner with a number of best practice companies and are happy to recommend these to you are part of your evaluations.

Please drop me an email at phesnan@trcepos.ie or call me at 087 2513920 if you wish to discuss how you can start selling on line soon.

A number of customers were running standalone loyalty systems along side their figure systems. The problems they encountered were.

• Manual calculation of points
• No way to reconcile whether points were being granted accurately and no audit trail for customer points balance queries
• Transaction speed issues – Transaction must effectively be processed twice, one in Figure and once on non- integrated loyalty system

A number of customers told us that they would have seriously evaluated a Figure Loyalty system but for the above type of problems. They strongly felt that any loyalty system needed to be integrated into the Figure till application – well now it is! You can create a new database or use your existing customer database (which we will advise you on how best to clean up) and set them up as loyalty customers. If you are using a standalone system we may well be able to bring across the customer details onto the EPOS units enabling a smooth transition.

You can then assign global points to money ratio. This will seamlessly apply the points to the transaction and record it on the customers receipt. The customer can then at any time use their points balance to pay for goods. A five-minute run through is all that is needed for the cashiers as they are using familiar screens.

You can now also communicate effectively to selected customers. Total Retail Control owns Loyalty.ie which is a web based loyalty system. We have now linked seamlessly the Figure EPOS Loyalty with Loyalty.ie. The many features of Loyalty.ie include, segmentation and reporting of customers by recency, frequency, and spend. There is the ability to communicate via an integrated text system. For example, if you wanted to identify customers who purchased over € 100 of Brand X in December and invite them in for a new season launch, this can be done in minutes. If you are interested in learning more, please give Steven Maguire a call on 086 2050711 or email him at smaguire@trcepos.com.

Gavin Peacock

SwiftQB Retail Intelligence

SwiftQB is installed all over the world and is integrated with many corporate grade EPOS Systems.

What it does

Swift QB delivers information in an easily digested form, to the relevant people, at the relevant time. The system enables better decision making – consistently.

Metrics such as footfall counting, square footage, sales targets, KPI performance levels etc. can be easily input to the system. The system will then display performance against these metrics, in an easy to understand report, dashboard, email, text etc. formats.

Exception Based Reporting

Lets say you want to achieve a minimum of 50% margin range of a particular supplier. You can enter this threshold information into the system and have exception based automatically emailed to you at 09.00 every Tuesday. Only items which were retailing at less than 50% margin would show up on the report making it easy to take action on incorrectly priced items.

KPI Management

Enter your Key Performance Indicators and report actual performance against these. For example, you might measure staff performance using the KPI “Average Transaction Value.” You can set the system to email or text an alert for sales assistants who fall below an acceptable level.

Dashboards

SwiftQB displays the information store managers, cash offices, buyers, financial controllers etc. need in concise web based dashboard. This put key information at their fingertips and allows consistently good decision making.

Why not drop me line to discuss what SwiftQB can do for your business. smaguire@trcepos.ie or 086 2050 711

Steven Maguire

Stocktaking.ie is a TRC Strategic Partner. TRC recommend Stocktaking.ie for outsourced stocktaking following many months working in partnership to deliver accurate stock takes to our customers. These stock takes can be uploaded directly to any TRC Supplied EPOS system.

Drop me a line to find out whether Stocktaking.ie are a good fit for your business. smaguire@trcepos.ie

In my conversations with retailers I think is fair to assume that what you cannot measure, you cannot manage. Some managers however have a head in the sand attitude to their stock and how it should be managed.

With this in mind, I wrote this article to assist managers and owners in achieving efficient stock control without having to undertake continual a full stocktakes.

So firstly, what is a cycle count?

A cycle count is a mini stocktake where you count a certain area of department within your operation. It is then used to either:

Update your EPOS and generate a variance report
Or
Used to provide a valuation of stock so that a margin can be calculated

What will this do for my operation?

In a nut shell, it provides you with a snap shot of how that department within your business is performing. Any losses are immediately highlighted and action can then be taken accordingly.

My EPOS already tells me what I have on hand, why would I want to waste resources doing this exercise?

Wrong! Your EPOS tells you what you should have on hand, your theoretical stock on hand level. What you want to know is your actual stock on hand level. The difference is what you want to know.
It doesn’t tell you the level of wastage, pilferage (internal or external), breakages etc, is within the business.

What’s best practice for dealing with cycle counts?

We recommend a regular schedule of cycle counts for each department. This of course, does depend on the stock turnover, value of the stock, level of current control measures and loss, your current accounting practices and your particular type of EPOS.
A general rule of thumb is that a stocktake of all stock is conducted four times per year and a cycle count of each department is conducted between each full stocktake.

This way you are:

Taking a proactive approach to you stock control (as it is this which makes you money and contributes most to losses within the business)
You know your losses and can make adjustments accordingly and immediately
Going back to the first line of this article – if you don’t measure, you cannot manage

Many thanks to Patrick McDermot, MD of Stocktaking.ie for this article.

We want to kick off 2013 by giving you this handy checklist for technology in your retail environment to make sure you are best placed to succeed in the year ahead. Read on to see if your technology passes or fails…..

A. Your EPOS System:

Is it leading edge, can it cope with all the unique aspects of your business, is it integrated into your signage, accounts and reporting systems? Jump on the vouchers bandwagon! More and more shoppers will not shop in store or will show restraint where they are not rewarded with vouchers. Luxury brands are now using vouchers, Google “Harrods Vouchers” and See! PASS / FAIL

B. Your Retail Intelligence:

For example, can you run a report on last years Top Ten Promotions in terms of profitability and items sold and insert them in your calendar for this year? Can you break down your stores targets performance last year and an email automatically delivered to all stores, every morning the top x performing stores from yesterday? PASS / FAIL

C. Your Customer Loyalty System:

Know your customer and communicate to keep them. Can you identify what your best customers are buying, how much they are spending and when they last transacted? Don’t let someone else steal your best customers from under your nose. PASS / FAIL

D. Your Selling Online Strategy – Do you have one?

Is my existing e-Commerce solution costing to much in terms of clunky processes and lack of features resulting in poor performance and lost sales? Do I continually have to update stock on my e-Commerce site and on my EPOS system separately? PASS / FAIL

E. Your Signage:

e-Paper is coming! Digital signage is here. Do you use shelf edge labels, have display signs and shelf talkers that aren’t compelling and communicative? You may be missing out on one of the last pieces of margin left on the table. PASS / FAIL

At Total Retail Control we scour the globe to bring you the best of global Retail I.T Products, to help you run a more profitable store. Talk to us and lets see if we are able to help you. You can call me on 01 2963155 or email me at smaguire@trcepos.ie for more information.

Steven Maguire

There are many reasons why retailers might have cause for moving to a new company for their EPOS software & hardware maintenance services, including poor standards, excessive costs, lack of proactivity, no value add, among others. The purpose of this article is not to identify the issues why a retailer might want to change but to clearly show how simple it is to make the change.

At Total Retail Control we have identified and refined over time and experience the 3 simple steps that are involved to ensure a seamless changeover for the retailer.

Step 1: A little bit of Administration


1 Pager to be filled out to list the number of branches you have, the number of tills that are in each branch, number of handheld computers in each branch and some other relevant information such as whether or not you use integrated credit card payment terminals.

Step 2: A short handover call
15 minute “Go To Meeting” web call that involves you and our Head of Operations to show how our support systems operate on a day-to-day basis. This includes how to log a support query on our web-based support system, how to call direct for more urgent issues and how our internal escalation procedures work.

Step 3: Go

Once we have all the details from Step 1 and you know how to contact our experienced support team then we are ready to go! Steps 1 & 2 can literally be done in a single morning so we can take over your maintenance contract in less that a day.

Some additional detail…
At Total Retail Control we do not need to wait for the contract with your existing service provider to expire – we will look after you from the get go.  There is no minimum contract term with Total Retail Control you pay on a monthly basis and there is no minimum contract term.
Total Retail Control are constantly looking to add value , for example we have integrated a best in class “Retail Intelligence” reporting system into the Epos systems and recently a seamless E-Commerce fully integrated solution.

Please call me on my mobile at 086 2050711 or email me today at smaguire@trcepos.ie to arrange a meeting or just to have a conversation.