by Stacey on September 4, 2009
Tips, Tips and more Tips in this weeks weekly roundup. Below you will find great questions to answer when considering the purchase of a point of sale for your business. Then go on to 101 tips for small businesses from small business owners, followed up by three rules you should abide by when using digital audio signage. We finish up with a couple great articles about how small retail has declined and the nostalgia of the mom and pop stores.
1. What Retail Point of Sale (POS) System is best for my business? – This is not your typical article about buying the right POS. The author gives you very poignant questions you should consider and answer before attempting your point of sale purchase.
2. 101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers – This article is invaluable and a must read for all our viewers. There are 101 tips from small retail business just like yours. These are tips you can use and put in place immediately to help conquer any obstacle you may encounter.
3. Three rules for digital signage audio in the retail environment – The retail customer experience pull it off again with a fantastic article about digital signage. This is one of the latest, most effective advertising technologies but it can be ineffective even annoying if not used right. Take these three rules for displaying your audio digital, implement them and reap the rewards.
4. The Slow Drift From Great to Good – This writer makes a great analogy comparing the way to get a good cup of coffee to the way small retail hospitality has declined. Just like the taste of your coffee dwindles as it ages so does the generous experience from your local retail shop. The change is slow and you might not notice but this spells it out and gives you something to think about.
5. The enduring wisdom of Mom & Pop – A truly inspiring story about the time when small retail shops lined the city streets. It was not just a matter of retail style it was about the values, the experience and always the friendships.
by Justin on November 22, 2005
The biggest problem for Point Of Sale system vendors are the traditional cash registers. Cash registers not only take a big part of the market, they also influence what shop owners expect from a POS terminal. Many shop owners switching from a cash register to a complete Point Of Sale simply want the same functionality and the ease of use of their old equipment.
I have done some POS implementations where I delivered exactly that: a POS system configured to emulate a cash register, with a few buttons on the sales screen to book sales on the various product groups, but without inventory control, reporting and all other features that make a POS system worth its money. The idea is to provide them the same way of working in a new environment to get the employees used to the new system. Once they now how to sell using the old-fashioned buttons I have them take an inventory so they can start selling using the barcodes on the items. Little by little they get deeper into the available features of the system, and the system becomes more valuable.
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by Justin on November 17, 2005
When I recently visited a restaurant trade show, I noticed that there were just as much companies presenting POS systems as there were stands with on-line reservation systems, while I haven’t seen any reservation system on previous visits. When something new comes up that fast, I immediately suspect a hype.
So when talking to the good ol’ POS dealers, I asked them if they had received customer requests for on-line booking systems and whether their systems includes or can be linked to such a tool. As I already expected and according to my own experiences, no-one had received requests for on-line booking systems from their customers, and therefore none of them had included such a tool in their system. Some POS systems did have a bookings screen, and I even found one system that offers an API to connect external applications to the reservation module.
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by Justin on November 14, 2005
A recent study by Fujitsu Siemens claims that about $217 million (123 million pounds) is wasted every year in the U.K. alone powering PCs that could have been shut down or left in hibernation mode. The report also pointed out the environmental impact of all the wasted energy.
Though the study involved generic PCs, its results are also valid for Point Of Sale systems. Many shops leave the POS terminal running during the night, in order to start working directly when opening the shop the next morning, not realizing that they could save an significant amount of money on the energy bill.
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