Inventory & Point of Sale Equip/software

[Rumpshot]

The Mrs. has been unemployed since Christmas 2008. Does not leave us fiscally challenged, but she would like to be back at work with her own spending money.

We have a small business selling books on-line and to folks at Rendezvous.

We have discussed for many years opening a storefront bookstore. We both read voraciously, though not like Chris.

It looks like this could happen sometime in the near future. A storefront bookstore that is. A building that is suitable is available at a reasonable price in Chino Valley.

Inventory and Point of Sale equipment and software have come to mind. Most books today come with a barcode with their ISBN number. My cellphone has an app to log books as "in my library" or not. I need something a bit more robust that will do the inventory and double as POS data entry.

Suggestions are hereby solicited.

The storefront will primarily carry books, but will also include homemade clothing (period correct to 1800-1850), antiques, occasionally muzzle loading rifles and accessories, and other items that would be found at Rendezvous.

At this point the two "bookstores" would be separate. I need to research further on this. The reason for two separate is Transaction Privilege Tax (sales taxes) driven. My current business address applies the lowest sales tax rate in the state, the Chino Valley businesses charge $0.02 per dollar more!

[randy]

I don't know it's current status or how economical it would be for a single POS terminal, but when I worked at a book store (10 years ago or so) we used IBID.

It was specifically designed for book stores with POS, Inventory and ordering functions built in. Ours ran on a 486/low end Pentium and controlled 20 or so registers using dumb terminals (WYSE). I haven't followed development since I left the store, so again I don't know how suitable it would be for you or even if it's available. But if I were running a book store I would be comfortable with using it.

You might want to check with local independent stores and see what they are using.

[Greg]

Sorry I can't give more detailed information, it's been a while. I worked for several years in a small bookstore, in several different roles.

You don't need all that much in the way of equipment. Our store had several million a year in sales, in person, at shows and over the internet and we managed everything to do with inventory and sales with one very good PC (a P90 with SCSI disks, IIRC), several serial terminals, a couple of dot-matrix printers, some bar code scanners and a cash drawer or two. The real complication is the software to run on that PC to provide your inventory DB, querying against that DB, invoice creation, cash register functions.... We used a specialized product provided by a small and rather eccentric company. Weird guy, but his stuff worked. YMMV.

Edit: If you want to run a 'temporary store' at a trade show/convention/whatever, you'll need a separate (crappy is fine) PC to run a 'local' copy of your inventory/sales software. You can 'transfer' inventory from one store to another pretty easily, and reconcile things again later. That's what we did for all our show appearances (ask me about MacWorld '95 sometime).

We also had a small LAN and a DSL connection, for managing email (customer correspondence), but you may not need that.

Credit card terminals were (IIRC) provided by the company with whom we had a merchant account. Realtime verification was over dialup (yep, our CC terminals were also modems) for the longest time, then over ISDN.

If you haven't already, I think it would be a good idea to join the ABA. They can be quite helpful. If you're planning on selling anything that's new, you're going to have to deal with publishers (if you haven't already, if you have I'm sorry in more ways than one), or find a distributor. We preferred to go direct to publishers, but for some things a distributor was the best way. We used Ingram.