Consignment Shop Software

The smartest investment you will make for your shop is a good consignment shop software program.

After all, the core of your business is managing numbers. It wasn't long before we were up to 300 consignors in the first few weeks and to try and do that by hand with a ledger sheet would have taken hours and days and left no time for anything else, much less our sanity.

A good consignment shop software program allows you to fully automate your shop. It is the heart of your business, and this is one area where you shouldn't skimp in the budget. There are several good programs on the market now which offer many great features. The program we bought was very user-friendly, and not once did we need to call the technical help line. It was a real pleasure to work with.

The good consignment software developers have demos you can try for free and are more than willing to answer any questions you may have. They will also offer you a fully integrated hardware and software package complete with printer, bar code reader, cash drawers, computer, receipt printer and every piece of equipment you will need to get started. In my opinion, this is the way to go. When we set up our first shop, we bought every piece of hardware separately and ended up paying out big dollars to get everything to work together. This may work for you if you're a computer techie, but for most of us it's better to have it all in one nice integrated package.

Some of the features of the newer consignment software programs include:

• Network capabilities to allow two or more PC's to share data and distribute work.
• Track store items separately from consigned items.
• Daily, weekly, monthly reports of sales.
• Automatic bar code printing on price tags.
• Automatic markdown feature of a given percentage on price tags.
  Track customer data along with consignor data, i.e., name, address, purchases.
• Automatic end-of-the-month check printing for consignors.
  Nightly Back-up Protection.

Again, I can't stress enough how important it is to automate your shop with a good consignment shop software (more detail in the manual). But shop around and see what program looks the best to you and budget accordingly. This is one of the most important things you can do for the success of your shop!