Fantastic Features of Video Shoppe

Video Register Display... better than a pole display!

Digital Signs... a sign of the times

New... Online Movie Viewer

The new Online Movie Viewer will let your customers see your movies online in near real-time. It is simple to use. Simply select some movies in the Inventory Utility and upload them to your website. Then, during the day when your movies are being rented and returned, a message is sent to your website and that title is displayed or not displayed, depending on what you actually have in your inventory.

Try the link below. All the movies are currently connected to our website, except for Couples Retreat. Click on that movie and you can see what you can setup on your website:

http://www.vmtsoft.com/vmtvidbase/htmlviewer.php?store=server

Leditor

Leditor means Letter Editor. Ok, we may not be very good at coming up with new names, but the program gives you the power to send HTML or Text letters to your customers. There is mail merge, which lets you pick any field from the customer record (like the first name, last name, address, last date purchased, etc.) and put it anywhere in your letter. Then when the letter is sent, the information is replaced automatically for each customer (**Last Name**) becomes Smith for instance.

And with the built in HTML editor, you have the capability of creating a professional looking Email with pictures, bold print, colored typefaces, etc. It even comes with a built in spell checker.

Not only can you create unlimited letters, you can have unlimited lists. You can create a list of customers for anything you can imagine. How about customers that have a certain kind of membership. Or customers that haven't been in for a while. Or find all the customers that have a certain zip code, create a list automatically, and send them an Email.

There are unlimited possibilities that you can do with the built in query program. And of course you can save your queries for later use. And because you can have multiple lists, you can create a list of your customers, save it, and come back to it later to use to send an Email.

Email Invoices

What a simple way of giving your customers more security (think about parents knowing what their kids are renting) and promoting new releases all at the same time.

Using Leditor, you create a letter called "EmailInvoice", and add tokens to it including **Invoice**, and **Totals**. These tokens are replaced by the actual line items of the invoice and the totals (subtotal, tax, tendered, change, etc.) This way you can put the line items for the invoice and the totals anywhere you like. You can also put in specific information like the invoice number, late charge, tax, etc. from the totals fields.

For instance (below was an actual invoice sent via email, we just copied it here):

Hi Ray,

Thank you for your business. Below is your recent invoice (#75568).

Check out the new movies for next week:

If there are any issues, please feel free to contact us:

VMT Software

1-800-457-7818

You can put the pictures of the movies in, or not. And, you can even make html using a web editor and paste it into the letter to make it even fancier!

Here is what we put in for the invoice part above.. how easy is this!

Hi **CUS:FIRST_NAME**,

Thank you for your business. Below is your recent invoice (#**INP:NEWNUM**).

**TOTALS**

**INVOICE**

And, there is a listing of these tokens available right from the letter editor screen. Of course, if you need help, just give us a ring!

New Backup Program

Our New backup program does what we've been asking people to do... keep multiple backups. It is simple to use and is zip compatible so you're not stuck with having to use our software to restore your data (of course it has a restore and rebuild function built right in!)

 It keeps a copy on your hard drive as well as creates a copy on your memory stick (or any external drive) for each day of the week. So if for some reason (not likely) that your data gets corrupted and you backed it up, you'll always have the backup from the previous 6 days (assuming you do your backups everyday).

RSS Feeds

Using the Inventory Utility, you can select any movies by any criteria (for instance select movies you just added today)... .then publish them to an RSS Feed. Advertise your feed on your website and your customers can subscribe to them, then they will see your name on their web browser and they can click on it and get an instant list of your new releases. You can set up links in your inventory so the links are part of the RSS Feed. The links could be to any web site that has information about that movie, either the IMDB or your own web site. It is very simple and cost effective.

For a sample, we have setup a feed that we created from the Inventory Utility. You can subscribe to it or view it by clicking here:

On-Line Reservations / Viewing

With the new Online reservations or viewing system, your customers can view and search your inventory, and see what is currently rented out. The program runs on your local computer (fast internet connection required). Your customers will finally be able to view your inventory and put items on the waiting list, and/or actually reserve movies. When a customer reserves a movie, a button pops up on your screen to let you know you need to get that movie and put it behind the counter, then one click will automatically send your customer an email confirming their reservation.

If you don't want customers to do online reservations, you can turn them off, and you can turn on or off the online waiting list. Customers will need to sign up for a username (their email) and a password at your store. This prevents a lot of security issues. Although you could turn this into an online business, it's real purpose is to bring customers into your store, and use the online system as another promotional tool.

Here is a link so you can try it out.. if it is not turned on, call us and we'll turn it on so you can play with it.

Click for Online Reservations

Auto Web Maker

This is a system. You use our Inventory Utility to select and export your movie or sales information, and a 3rd party utility program called 4webmerge to automatically create and upload web pages to your web site (required). We will give you templates to get you going. We are now offering services to help you get a web site, build some web pages for you, and/or update the templates for export.

You can now add pictures, text, and Internet links (URL's) to your item descriptions/titles (not each number so you only have to add once)

You can view some sample web pages by clicking:

Movie Web Pages

Graphs for Quick Views

Graphs / Bar Charts / Pie Charts.. are a great way to view your data and have it make sense to you without having to read a bunch of numbers. They are also a great way to make good decisions about what items to keep and what items to sell, or not re-order. Video Shoppe has several graphs in convenient areas of the program

Take a look at just some of graphs by clicking on the graph below: