pcAmerica, a leading developer of point of sale software applications, recently returned from RSPA’s RetailNOW Convention in Orlando, Florida. RetailNOW took place from July 24-27th and is the premier convention and expo for all professionals in the retail technology industry. RetailNOW is where the industry meets each year to become educated on new business trends, emerging technologies and best business practices.

The event was extremely successful, bringing in over fourteen hundred attendees from all markets of the retail technology industry. pcAmerica featured several products at their booth, including the newly released Restaurant Pro Express Mobile™. The company was also highlighted as a RetailNEXT exhibitor and CEO, David Gosman was featured on the Technology Vision Panel. To learn more about pcAmerica, please visit www.pcamerica.com.

pcAmerica, a leading developer of point of sale software applications, has been chosen as a RetailNEXT exhibitor at the 2011 RetailNOW Convention. The RetailNEXT designation highlights exhibitions that offer cutting-edge technology solutions. As part of RetailNEXT, PCA will showcase an integrated digital signage feature that enables businesses to display advertisements alongside current transaction information on a variety of POS peripherals including LCD displays, full size displays and pin pads.

pcAmerica had to apply for their position as a RetailNEXT exhibitor and was one of seven chosen. Some of the criteria for RetailNEXT is that your technology was released in the past 18 months or will be available in the next 6 months and that it will provide a clear benefit to the reseller channel and/or RSPA members. To learn more about pcAmerica, visit www.pcamerica.com.

Email has become a highly accepted form of interpersonal communication, even among business owners and operators and their clientele. However, you may find that the effectiveness of email can be diminished if you don’t take steps to ensure that you’re following the proper procedures and  working from the “right” email recipient list. Here are three best practices for doing so:

1. Know the rules. In accordance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, senders must ascertain that all email recipients have “expressly consented to receive the message, either in response to a clear and conspicuous request for such consent or at the recipient’s own initiative.” The Act also stipulates that bulk e-mail is considered spam when it contains content that may be offensive to the recipient, the e-mail contains no unsubscribe option, the “from” address is not clearly visible or incorrect, the subject line is misleading, or the recipient e-mail addresses have been stolen from other websites or online services. And the Act notwithstanding, it’s a given that recipients are more likely to open and click-through email if they have elected to receive messages from the sender.

2. Create your own list instead of purchasing one. There is no sense investing the time to create a great email campaign, only to send it to the “wrong” audience. The easiest, safest way to build a database of email recipients is to create a sign-up form on your Web site and or at the point of sale and point customers to it. Offering an incentive, a prize, or loyalty points if customers refer friends also helps.  In the latter case, it’s best to opt for a double opt-in (DOI) sign-up process or at least a confirmed opt-in (COI). With DOI, the referred friends will not automatically be subscribed to receive emails; they must first confirm their subscription via an activation e-mail request. DOI minimizes bad addresses and malicious subscriptions and also helps to ensure that those referred friends do really want to receive your e-mails. DOI and COI help with deliverability and to avoid your e-mail practices running afoul of an ISP.

Additionally, think about printing the Web address of your email sign-up form on the bottom of point of sale receipts and invoices. Employees can even be asked to collect e-mail addresses over the phone when customers call your store or restaurant.

3. Optimize the opt-in process. More than 80% of individuals polled by Habeas said they favor doing business with organizations that use opt-in permission to send them e-mail. It is essential to provide a clear link to the privacy policy in your email/newsletter sign-up form, and advisable to provide links to past newsletters or e-flyers. Further optimization can be achieved through a thank-you page or pop-up when new users subscribe.

Both Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express from pcAmerica support email communication, and Version 12.5 of the point of sale software makes it easier by supporting mass emailing through SMTP mail server. Visit www.pcamerica.com to learn more.

Okay—so having read the first three installments of this four-part series of blogs posts, you now understand why you should strongly consider deploying an integrated fuel pump and point of sale system, as well as some of the basic and not-so-basic capabilities such a system should offer. However, there are still two more desirable features to look for.

The first of these features is the option to integrate a security camera and DVR system to record in-store activity. Why is this important? Employee theft—caused by a combination of theft of cash and inventory along with the granting of unwarranted discounts by employees (a practice known as “sweethearting”) is one of the leading causes of retail shrink. With an integrated security camera and DVR, you can introduce a new level of accountability by tagging your security record every time a key function is registered on the POS system.

Equally desirable in an integrated fuel pump and point of sale system are advanced cash control features. These features play a major role in reducing retail shrink by allowing cash discrepancies to be identified not only down to the shift, but to the cashier. Employee access to the point of sale system—and accordingly, to transaction processing commands as well as the cash in the cash drawer, can be restricted by using employee IDs or logins.

Retailers in the petroleum business can also benefit greatly from an age verification component to protect them from the stiff fines and penalties they will almost certainly face should they accidentally sell age-restricted products like alcohol or tobacco to patrons who are underage.  An age verification system doesn’t just restrict the sale of  alcohol, tobacco and similar items that cannot be lawfully purchased by to minors; it also reduces merchants’ liability and insurance costs. Even better, the same barcode scanner used for customer checkout can be engaged to scan a driver’s license to verify a customer’s age.

pcAmerica’s Cash Register Express-Fuel Edition offers all these features, and many others. Visit www.pcamerica.com to find out more.

In the last two installments of this blog, we discussed why retailers should seriously contemplate implementing an integrated fuel pump and point of sale system and which basic capabilities they should look for. Other features are equally desirable, because they allow end-users to “work the system” even further.

Consider, for example, an integrated digital signage feature that allows advertisements to be displayed on a variety of point of sale peripherals, including LCD pole displays, full-size LCD displays, and pin pads. With this feature in place, it’s easy to cross-sell food, merchandise and gas in special promotions (e.g., buy gas and get a discount on a sandwich); generate additional revenue through the sale of advertising space to vendors/suppliers; deliver specific messages to target audiences in key locations and showcase, on the pole display, the last few items rung up in each transaction.

Also a priority, are marketing and loyalty features that give retailers the option of offering frequent customer discounts (e.g. buy 10 coffees and get the next one free) along with the above-mentioned promotions intended to facilitate cross-selling. Such features automatically track and distribute rewards, making loyalty programs and promotions easy to execute.

Similarly, with social media taking the country by storm, the ability to tie popular social marketing tools like Facebook and Twitter into an integrated fuel pump and point of sale solution is critical.

pcAmerica’s Cash Register Express-Fuel Edition has these marketing tools in place. To learn more, visit www.pcamerica.com.

Faster, more efficient processing ranks at the top of the list of benefits to be reaped from deploying an integrated fuel pump and point of sale system. However, it is far from the only benefit—providing that the solution you select has a top-notch reporting component.

Look for a solution with built-in reporting capabilities that enable managers to generate and print sales reports by shift or day, track seasonal trends and deftly manage inventory, and for an inventory tracking module that will allow you to reduce or eliminate shrinkage, stock outages, and stock discrepancies as well as identify best- and worst-selling products and overall movement for merchandise, food items and fuel alike. Inventory stock levels should be adjusted for each item sold, so as to eliminate guesswork and discrepancies.

But this is not all. A good integrated fuel pump and point of sale system will have a wide range of standard inventory management features for handling purchase orders, automated stock replenishment, minimum/maximum inventory levels, back orders and direct store deliveries. You’ll want the solution to offer standard inventory reporting features that range from actual versus theoretical inventory counts, discrepancy reports, item cost/profit margin tracking and low stock alerts to fast lookup by bar code/description, detailed sales history by product, “on-the-fly” item addition and tracking by case/individual.

Moreover, leveraging the reporting capabilities of such an integrated system should not be difficult. You need a user-friendly reporting screen and the option to select the type of report, date and time range for any desired information, then narrow down options in accordance with additional criteria—including, but not limited to—store number, cashier ID, customer, vendor, department or item. Reports should be viewable online, and integration with an accounting package like QuickBooks Accounting is desirable to simplify the financial piece.

pcAmerica’s Cash Register Express-Fuel Edition offers all these features, and many others. Visit www.pcamerica.com and watch this space—to find out more.

For many independent gas stations, gas station chains, convenience stores and grocery stores, selling both gasoline and merchandise has become a competitive weapon as well as a way to bolster productivity. But while it is not difficult to persuade consumers to fill up the gas tank while simultaneously making a food purchase (or vice versa), managing these different facets of the business can be challenging on many levels. Implementing a robust point of sale solution like pcAmerica’s Cash Register Express-Fuel Edition—which integrates with industry standard pumps and PCI-compliant card readers–helps to overcome these challenges.

When you deploy such a solution as Cash Register Express-Fuel Edition, you can dramatically increase customer throughput at the pump, without sacrificing point of sale performance. That’s because bundling the point of sale system with an integrated gas pump interface lets you have one point of control—a single point of sale terminal inside the store—from which to seamlessly handle fuel-related functions as well as foodservice and merchandise sales. Multiple tenders–including cash, debit, credit, gift, and fleet (gas) cards—can be processed from that terminal, as can pay-at-the-pump and loyalty card transactions, fuel drops, car wash sales, discounts and coupons. Merchandise is easily rung up by scanning the bar codes on items being purchased or, for products without bar codes (e.g., coffee and prepared foods), via a touchscreen interface. Transactions are processed in as little as two-to-three seconds, eliminating long lines and delays. You can shorten the wait even more by suspending one transaction to allow another transaction to be processed should another customer be waiting while an individual who is checking out returns to his or her car to retrieve a forgotten wallet or suddenly remembers to pick up an additional item from the store’s shelves.

To find out more about Cash Register Express-Fuel Edition, visit www.pcamerica.com, and don’t forget to check out our next two blogs.

It’s no secret that pcAmerica has long been committed to providing its retail and restaurant operator customers with a level of data security that goes above and beyond satisfying PCI compliance requirements set forth in the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). In another move to demonstrate this commitment, we have cooperated with MagTek, Inc. to certify our Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express point of sale solutions to work on the MagTek IPAD ® SC hand-held point of sale terminal.

The most comprehensive end-to-end security solution available today, the IPAD ® SC helps merchants and restaurateurs prevent personal cardholder data breaches, without compromising the speed and convenience of customer transactions. Here’s how: Cardholder data is immediately encrypted when cards are swiped, keeping it from being accessible by hackers even for a millisecond and eliminating the risk of interception. A digital identifier component called MagnePrint ® authenticates customers’ ATM, debit, credit, gift and other cards; any counterfeit or cloned card presented at the point of sale becomes entirely useless.

Why does using Cash Register Express or Restaurant Pro Express with the IPAD allow our retailer and restaurant operator customers to exceed PCI DSS compliance requirements, while relying on encrypted magnetic stripe readers (MSRs) would not offer this advantage? Easy! MSRs encrypt only card swipes, so they can only be utilized solely to execute credit card transactions. However, with the IPAD, we bring to customers the same added security for all credit card transactions– swiped and hand-keyed–as well as for PIN debit transactions. We also give them the convenience of electronic signature capture on the same point of sale device, reducing paper usage and making storage more organized.

To learn more visit www.pcamerica.com.

In a previous installment of this blog, pcAmerica offered three different ways to spice up your blog and win the blogging game. Here are three more.

1. Watch your language—or at least, your keywords. Not enough people reading and/or commenting on your blog? You may have targeted the wrong keywords—or neglected to target any at all. Some retailers and restaurant owners who blog opt not to do any keyword research and use keywords in their writing, using as their rationale the fat that in their case, the purpose of the blog is to communicate with the community rather than to “sell” readers on their business. This is a big mistake, because using the terms your audience seeks brings them to your Web site and your blog. There’s no need to go overboard by using the terms multiple times in the same paragraph, but do so when it’s appropriate. The Google Adwords keyword tool can be very effective in helping you choose the correct keywords.
2. Get ahead with headlines. In preparing this blog, we spend a lot of time thinking up what we hope are clever headlines to reel you in. Try to do the same with your audience. Need a bit of added inspiration?  Look to such blogs as Copyblogger.
3. Change the subject. Going “off-topic” on a business blog once in a while keeps things fresh and keeps readers coming back for more surprises. Stumped about what to write? How about a profile of your chef or one of your best sales associates? Or, consider profiling your favorite or most interesting customer. Talk about your vacation, your planned vacation, a book you just read or a dish you just tried to make at home. You can always get back down to business another day.

Blogging is just one way to enter the realm of social marketing to improve repeat business and build rapport. pcAmerica has the technology that can get you started with social marketing, using solutions from behind the counter. To learn more about pcAmerica and social marketing tools visit, www.pcamerica.com/socialmarketing.

If you’re like most retailers and restaurant owners, you have a “love-hate” relationship with  credit and debit cards. While accepting “plastic” likely increases your sales by giving customers more purchasing flexibility, it also comes with a downside in the form of transaction costs paid to credit card issuers. Fortunately, new federal regulations ease the burden.

Notably, while merchants were once required to charge consumers the same rate no matter the payment vehicle, a recent settlement among the U.S. Department of Justice, Visa, and MasterCard lets them offer their customers discounts tied to specific payment vehicles. For example, a retailer who is tired of high credit card processing fees might tout a discount of 1 percent to customers who pay for their purchases or settle their tabs with a debit card rather than a credit card. One caveat to remember here: You must clearly and conspicuously post your payment incentive policy at the point of sale and provide the discount to all customers. Discriminating based on card brand or issuer is not permitted.

Additionally, under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed by Congress in 2010, retailers and restaurant owners can set minimum price levels for the use of credit cards in their establishments. The minimum must be under $10. Why bother? The transaction fees operators pay to process really small purchases—say, below $5—essentially cancel out the profit from the sale.

Further, as you are aware, you currently pay an interchange fee each time you execute a transaction in your store or restaurant; this is in addition to the processing fee mentioned above, The Durbin Amendment, a last-minute addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that is slated to go into effect in July, calls for putting a cap of 12 cents apiece on interchange for debit-based transactions. This will be a boon to the independent retailer and restaurant community, as U.S. interchange fees currently average 1.6 % in the U.S. Small retailers pay up to 3%.

Much of merchants’ positive or negative experienced with debit and credit cards hinge on having in place the proper point of sale hardware, such as the newly updated Version 1.5 of  pcAmerica’s Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express, as well as a viable payment processing solution. For more information, visit www.pcamerica.com.