Amex has always seemed a bit different to all the other card schemes.

In this cause the fraudsters were using cloned cards. Most card schemes have defenses against cloned cards, however, as part of Amex being a bit “different”, these clone card detecting schemes didn’t work. More likely than not, Amex is not part of this scheme.

Sainsbury’s lost many thousands of pounds to this scam.

My advise to UK retailers is to avoid taking AMEX payments unless you are in  market where each sale is for a very large value – the type of transactions favoured by Amex customers. For the rest of us it simply isn’t worth the hassle and risk.

For a small retailer, the failure of chip and pin is a pain, but for a large retailer, the costs are huge. Especially if it lasts for more than a few minutes.

Sainsbury’s were clearly unprepared. It is possible to have two chip and pin solutions you know? How much would it have cost Sainsbury’s to keep a dozen chip and pin machines from an independent chip and pin solution provider that operate over another network (e.g. 3G). These would well be wireless devices and used by staff walking around the store dealing with each sale once it has been rung up on the main EPOS system.

This might seem an exessive investment to double the chip and pin solution in the supermarket, but you don’t need to double it – so long as you have enough mobile devices to handle the customers- probably one per 5 or 10 tills would probably do.

This is an opportunity for small retailers. In a parade of shops, each retailer will have his own chip and pin arrangements, but what if there are 3 or 4 of you next to each other. Would it be impossible to share chip and pin systems.

So two things here. Talk to you fellow retailer about a chip and pin sharing system. If your system goes down, then get your customers to pay in the the shop next door. Also, get a couple of wireless 3G chip and pin machines that you can all share if your main solution goes down.

Because of the success of the TM-88 printer, a lot of manufactures make similar printers either under license or as downright copies. The main reason for this is the cost the TM-88 receipt printer. It isn’t the cheapest receipt printer on the market and a lot of copies sell for significantly less.

However, non-Epson TM-88 clones are the second most common hardware failure in EPOS systems after the chip and pin machine.

A few years ago we started to sell clone TM-88 printers at the very low end so that we could save maybe £50 to £100 on the cost of the package. After a few months the returns started to come in. We rapidly made a decision to stop selling the clones and go back to original Epson product.

If you are thinking of buying a reciept printer, don’t be tempted by the cheaper TM-88 clone models, they are very poor value, buy a genuine Epson TM-88 and it will go on running for years!

The latest offering from Cybertill includes hardware, software, training and installation for the great price of about £3.5k. This is a great one-box EPOS solution.

Whilst I would treat their claims to a 15%-40% reduction in stock holding with a pinch of salt, this is undeniably a great offering. With training and installation included, you won’t need an IT guru to run it.

Cybertill have also used another trick here. They are selling this as a EPOS software solution designed specifically for bike retailers. Part of their sales pitch includes the advantages of a software packages designed for a specific vertical and not a generic EPOS system designed for all types of retailers.

Of course, we know that Cybertill already has an EPOS software product, and they aren’t going to rush out and write a whole new one for bike retailers. We can safely assume this is the standard Cybertill product which as been tweaked and optimised for bike retailers.

Cybertill have a lot of different types of customers in different retail verticals. Clearly they’ve got a lot of bike customers, and have learn the specific needs of this market. Expect to see some more systems aimed at specific verticals in the future from Cybertill.

In the old days it was quite simple. Up until a few years ago, if you wanted a customer facing display on your EPOS system, the till simply sprouted a two line character display unit. More often than not this was on some kind of pole.

This type of display simply showed the name and price of each product that was being rung up on the till. When it was time for payment, the customer display showed the amount due. That was pretty much it.

In recent years it has become popular to have two monitors on your computer. Some bright spark realised that this means that a till could have two monitors. One for the normal tilling functions, and another screen showing something completely different to the customer.

Normally these customer facing display monitors become an extension of the original customer display units. They show the name and price of the goods being rung up on the till. Of course, the programmers have all that extra screen space to fill – the first thing they do is put a picture of the product being rung up. Not useful. If I’m scanning the item on a till, then I probably already know what it looks like.

The main purpose of these displays is marketing. Special offers and other more general marketing material is shown to the customer whilst their sale is completed.

I can’t think of a worse place to put marketing material.

The customer has already made their selection. They’ve chosen which products they want to buy and they have decided how much they want to spend. If they are buying a packet of tea, they are unlikely to stop the sale and run back across the store to fetch chocolate biscuits. In true British style it is considered a huge social faux-pax to do anything which delays the checkout of your shopping and inconvenience other shoppers.

And of course the shopper is just about the leave the shop. Whatever enticements the customer display screen uses to make the shopper spend more money, they are going to be quickly forgotten – certainly before the next visit to the shop.

Frankly speaking, I feel that customer facing screens on EPOS systems are not a great benefit, and I adivse small retailers to consider any investment in this area with great care.

The government is setting the trend with massive budget cuts and spending reductions across the board. This year alone we know that spending will be reduced by many billions of pounds. This is going to breed job insecurity with a lot of civil servants and government suppliers. This feeling is only going to filter down to the rest of us.

Therefore it is only fair to give gloomy predictions for UK retail sales in the coming season. If the government is slashing spending, we can only expect massive reductions in spending on the high street as the supply of money is reduced.

What can small retailers do to combat this? Well, having a decent EPOS system is the first step, this way you can spend your Christmas buying budget carefully on the most profitable stock and minimise the reductions you have to make in the New year.

It is also important to watch the cashflow. Spending all your Cash on stock before the end of November means that the bills due over Christmas will cause pain. If the New year sales are also poor, the staff will have to go. Watch the cashflow and make sure there is enough in the pot to last until spring.

The benefits of an EPOS software system are wide and varied, but a large proportion of the advantages and EPOS system brings to a small retailer is the increase in stock turn and reduction of stock holding.

For example, if you turn over a respectable £1m per year and have a stock holding of about £250k, lets look at the improvement of the figures you can expect to get from an EPOS system. With these stock figures let us assume your margin is about 40%. You’re making a gross profit each year of around £400k. So for each pound of stock you can hold, you make £1.6 of profit per year.

A good EPOS system implementation can realistically reduce your stock holding by 10%. Higher figures are often quoted by EPOS software companies, but lets go for that 10% figure with the same profit.

Its too easy, isn’t it? If your stock holding is reduced by £25,000, then you have another £25,000 to spend on, urm, stock. Of course, this is an immediate benefit to cashflow.

However, that £25,000 can be used to buy more stock and increase sales, giving a further profit of some £40k.

Whilst this example is extremely simple and somewhat contrived, it clearly shows that a EPOS sytem can easily increase your gross profit by around 10%.

How much does an EPOS system actually cost? Most retailers underspend on their initial EPOS solution, but for the sized business we are talking about, a sensible investment would be around £15k-£20k. Even in one year the EPOS system can pay for itself.

So come on, all those of you running prehistoric paper based systems, get your self sorted with a decent EPOS system and see your profits soar!

One of the most important jobs you can do as a retailer with an ecommerce website is craft unique written descriptions for each product your sell on your site. This might be a complete description you have written yourself, or you might just paraphrase the suppliers description. Also pay attention to bulleted lists of product features, just copying these will create duplicate content. Try and reword them.

This is a very time consuming job, but getting unique descriptions for each of your products will be a fantastic investment of time and there are few other things you can do to enhance the search engine traffic coming to your site.

Also pay attention to the title and meta descriptions on your product pages. Make sure each meta description is relevant and hand crafted as a both a search engine happy keyword rich statement as well as  good marketing call to action.

Make sure your ecommerce software hosts reviews as well. Write your own reviews of products to boost the amount of keyword rich unique content on each product page on your website.

I have seen some ecommerce sites easily double their well converting search engine traffic just be spending a couple of weeks rewriting all their product descriptions as unique keyword rich content.

This is doubtless due to the combined effects of Chip and Pin for retailers, and 3-d secure, the online chip and pin system for Ecommerce web retailers.

I must confess, I’m slightly cynical about what exactly these figures mean. How is UK card fraud calculated? Is this UK issued cards by UK fraudsters working on UK retailers? Or does it mean fraud against UK issued cards world wide, regardless of the location of the retailer? It isn’t clear. There are many combinations of possible issuers, fraudsters and retailers.

Even more obviously, this “card fraud” figure only contains those frauds actually reported by customers. How much more fraud goes undetected by wiser fraudsters taking small amounts on busy accounts that falls below the customers’ diligence horizons?

What is even more alarming is the absence of any information about who was liable.  Whilst the customers reported the fraud, how much of this fraud relates to transactions where the responsibility was passed onto the banks because the customer used chip and pin or 3-d secure. Do these figures include frauds that the banks had to pay back, or frauds where the burden fell on the retailer?

Or perhaps it relates to card fraud where the criminal was actual caught and the money reclaimed.

More shocking are the ongoing increases in worldwide card fraud. I am sure that the UK authorities are massaging the figures to reduce “UK Card Fraud” by excluding certain transactions, making the figures meaningless.

I for one would like to see a breakdown of card fraud by issuer, and by whom was ultimately responsible to the money – the retailer or the banks.

It goes without say that card fraud is still a major problem. UK retailers spend many times more than £180 million a year protecting themselves again fraud – are they getting value for money. Retailer have no choice now but to embrace expensive technologies such a chip and pin and 3-d secure and they deserve much better answers to these questions.

This can be somewhat of an adventure. In the worst situation, your Ecommerce solution provider doesn’t actually host your website. A separate hosting provider does that. This means you will simply get sent around in circles if you start asking questions about your ecommerce website hosting speed. Your ecommerce provider will blame the hosting company, and the hosting company will tell you the hosting is fine, and the fault lies with the Ecommerce software.

There are a couple of things the retailer can do to try and break this circle.  First of all, look at the actual size of the pages on the site. This is easily done in firefox using “Save Page As” and doing a web page complete type save of the page. This puts all the html and images for that page into a folder on your computer. Simply look at the size of that folder. If it is several megabytes, then the chances are that that page will always be slow to load because it contains excessively large images. It should be a simple matter to resave the offending images as more compressed JPGs. If you have hundreds of small thumbnails on a homepage, the same problem can happen.

Another thing you can do is find which type of pages are slow. Look carefully and you might find that whilst individual product pages load quickly, a category page might load slowly, even though both are a similar size when saved. This points to flaws in the ecommerce software – probably poorly written code or an incorrectly indexed back end database.

You can also upload a large file to your ecommerce site and download it back onto your computer. If the downloads are slow (e.g. less than 30 kbps) then it is likely that your hosting is the limiting factor.

These rules still apply even if your ecommerce solution provider hosts your website. Some ecommerce providers are more design or software oriented and don’t know much about hosting or software optimisation. Giving them a few pointers when you complain about site speed is bound to make them stop and think!

You need your site running fast and effeciently to get the best search engine ranking and also allow your site to scale with increasing traffic. IF you do a mailshot and get 1000 visitors in one evening, you don’t want to site grinding to a halt and disappointing all that well converting traffic!