3 Tips for Managing Post-Christmas Returns

Christmas is crunch time. Before your customers start racing to buy gifts for friends and family or picking up their festive essentials, you’ll want to be certain your business is set up to simultaneously maximise their last-minute shopping experience – and your profits. With that said, here are seven tips to help ensure this Christmas brings good cheer to your business and your customers. 1. Extend your trading hours into the O Holy Night. Longer trading hours make things a lot easier for shoppers with packed schedules. Promote your extended trading hours via store signage, social media and email, so customers know you're there when they need you. Consider offering special ‘late-night exclusives’ or ‘last-minute discounts’ to encourage foot traffic during these extra hours. Top tip: Most promotional emails go unopened, so make sure your subject line gets the ‘extended hours’ message across without any additional clicks required. 2. Offer shipping that’s swifter than Santa. Make life easier for online shoppers by offering discounted express shipping, and make sure to clearly display cutoff dates for guaranteed Christmas delivery. Highlight gift-ready products that are eligible for expedited shipping to further simplify the shopping journey. Also keep in mind that Australia Post also advises their own Christmas delivery cut-off dates , so be sure yours are aligned with theirs to avoid any risk of delayed orders. 3. Gift wrapping, all wrapped up. Save customers time and hassle by offering gift-wrapping services. Free or paid, it’s a thoughtful touch they’re sure to appreciate, especially if they’re not much chop at wrapping gifts. Better yet, add extra flair by using festively branded wrapping paper. For example, a Santa hat hanging off your logo could be a good design thoughtstarter. Top tip: If you’re using Zeller POS Lite to sell Christmas gifts this holiday season, add ‘gift wrapping’ as a modifier so you can track how frequently customers request it. You can learn how to apply modifiers to a cart here . 4. More merry helpers. The Christmas rush can be overwhelming, so ensure you have enough staff to manage the extra foot traffic and handle queries efficiently. Make sure your team members are up to speed and across any new processes to ensure peak service during peak season. A little extra training can go a long way. 5. Deck the halls of your website. An easy-to-navigate, festively decorated site will draw in time-crunched buyers. Adding a ‘Last-Minute’ section or countdown banners can create urgency and attract shoppers looking for quick solutions. Top tip: A curated gift guide on your website can be a neat idea, but if it’s too tricky to pull off in time simply create a PDF version to email to customers. It’s a great way to build and drive engagement from your subscriber list, too. 6. Many happy returns. Ease customers' hesitation with a flexible return policy. It’s a simple way to encourage impulse purchases. Promote this benefit in store and on your website (and perhaps via email or social media too) to reassure shoppers that buying now doesn’t mean risking regret later. You can also add your flexible return policy to your receipt printed, emailed, or sent via SMS from Zeller Terminal too — learn how to do that here . 7. Sleigh the essentials. Make sure you’re stocked up stocking stuffers, greeting cards, wrapping, and any other items that make easy and essential add-ons at the checkout. Consider bundling these items into ready-to-go holiday kits for added convenience. By putting these strategies into play, you’ll not only provide your customers with a seamless, thoughtful shopping experience, but also give yourself the best chance to boost your holiday sales. If you’d like to learn more about payments and POS solutions to make spirits bright this Christmas, give our local team a call on 1800 935 537 and we’ll be happy to help.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with streetscapes around the country adorned by oversized candy canes, inflatable Santas, and enough tinsel to tickle a reindeer’s nose. Naturally, all this fun, festive frivolity comes with increased consumer spending, and businesses can sometimes experience payment bottlenecks if they’re not prepared. 1. Take payments down the queue with Tap to Pay. Got a smartphone? Great, you’ve got a mobile POS terminal. Simply open up the Zeller App on your smartphone, hit the hamburger in the top left corner (the three stacked lines), enable ‘Tap to Pay’, follow the prompts, and you’re ready to accept contactless payments. Tap to Pay with Zeller App can be handy in so many scenarios. For example, if you’re running a one-off stall selling Christmas hampers at your local farmers market, you can accept payments directly on your phone. No EFTPOS terminal needed — it’s that easy.. Another example could be a fishmonger with a steadily growing queue of people lining up to buy fresh seafood for Christmas Day. While one staff member takes orders and accepts payments at the counter using  Zeller Terminal, another can walk down the line using Tap to Pay with Zeller App on a smartphone as a secondary POS. By reducing customer wait time, you’re helping to ensure fish-fans don’t get salty and move on to a quieter nearby competitor. 2. Lock in bookings or large orders with Zeller Invoices. Sending professional invoices has never been easier. Let’s say you run a restaurant and have just received a booking request for a large Christmas party. To accept a deposit payment to secure the booking, you’d open Zeller Dashboard, whip up an invoice in a few clicks (including detailing the payment terms), create a new contact, and send the invoice for the client to arrange pre-payment quickly and securely with their credit card. Or perhaps you’re a bakery taking Christmas pudding orders. You can fire off the invoice in a few clicks, and then be automatically notified when your customer completes their order payment. And if your customer was slow to pay, they’d automatically receive reminder emails to prompt them. We’re proud to say that 75% businesses using Zeller Invoices get paid in under 24 hours. 3. Take card payments over the phone and send payment links with Virtual Terminal. Zeller Virtual Terminal allows you to manually enter a customer’s card details they’ve given you over the phone, or send them a secure payment link via email or SMS, right from Zeller Dashboard. But what if you don’t have their email address or phone number? What if you’ve been communicating with your customer purely on social media? No worries, Virtual Terminal can handle that too. Let’s say you’re a handmade jewellery creator crafting cute Christmas-themed earrings for customers on Instagram and Facebook Marketplace. You would take an order via your DMs, add the payment details into Zeller Virtual Terminal in a few taps, click ‘Copy Link’ and shoot your customer the payment link back via DM. Quick, easy and efficient, the way it should be. So whether you’re a sole trader, a medium sized business or even running a bigger operation, hopefully this article has given you some fresh ideas on taking payments this Christmas and beyond. If you have any questions on any of these additional payment options available to you, log in to your Zeller Dashboard to try them out, or give our local team a call on 1800 935 537 and we’ll step you through the process.

The holidays are almost here, and with them comes a big surge in shopping, gifting, and payments. As consumers become ever-increasingly tech savvy, businesses are adopting new trends to enhance the shopping experience. With that in mind, here are five payment trends to keep an eye on this holiday season and into 2025. 1. The takeover of mobile wallets This year, more Aussies than ever will leave their physical wallets at home when they head out to do their Christmas shopping. Consider the following three statistics: In 2022, 30% of in-person card payments were made via mobile devices, up from 10% in 2019. Source: Reserve Bank of Australia Over 15.3 million cards were registered to mobile wallets in 2022, a 760% increase from 2018. Source: Australian Banking Association. A 2022 survey revealed that 69% of Australians felt confident enough using mobile wallets to leave their physical wallets at home. Source: Marqeta If we piece those three stats together, it’s clear to see the shift away from physical cards, and towards mobile wallet payments, is continuing to pick up speed. Make sure your business is set up for seamless electronic payment acceptance, whether your customers are tapping with their card or mobile wallet.  Zeller Terminal  equips your business to accept physical cards as well as mobile payments via smartphones and smartwatches. 2. Selling via social From Instagram and TikTok offering in-app shopping experiences to businesses selling solely via Facebook Marketplace and Instagram DMs, social platforms have become key places for payments to take place. Payment Links , which are built right into Zeller Virtual Terminal , are perfect for  businesses selling on social media. This handy tool lets you easily generate a secure, clickable payment link that you can simply send to your customers in a DM. We’ve seen many innovative artisan businesses utilising Payment Links to sell quickly and easily via social media, without the need for a permanent, e-commerce enabled website. Instagram or Facebook Marketplace + Payment Links will help set you up for success, too. 3. Enhanced fraud protection They might call it the silly season, but with the sophistication of fraudsters these days, you don’t have to be silly to be scammed this Christmas. Thankfully, the payments world is fighting back with advanced fraud detection tools, including AI-powered analytics and biometric authentication. For shoppers, this means increased protection of their funds, and for businesses it means fewer chargebacks and losses. Learn more about how Zeller keeps you and your customers safe here . 4. Accepting payments via Tap to Pay Turning a smartphone into a payment terminal can be a game-changer for small businesses. Tap to Pay works on selected iPhone and Android smartphones, making it super simple to take payments wherever you are with just a mobile app, or even to use as a second EFTPOS machine when things get busy. While Tap to Pay is still an emerging innovation in payments, we’re already seeing many mobile businesses adopt it as a way to accept payments in lieu of sending online invoices or carrying an EFTPOS terminal with them at all times. 5. The inexorable rise of self-checkout As we move into 2025 and beyond, expect to see more self-service kiosks, from fast food restaurants through to airports, department stores, supermarkets, universities… you name it. Couple this with QR codes on pub tables and cafe menus, one thing is clear – love it or hate it, self-checkout is only going to become increasingly common. With advancements in self-checkout technology making it easier for smaller businesses to set up a kiosk too, we’re looking forward to seeing this innovative new technology in a wider variety of scenarios. If you’d like some expert advice on setting up your business with the right payment and POS solutions for this festive season and beyond, speak to the Zeller Sales team .