EPOS and OScommerce

[tigger]

Hi
I have recently found my back into the family retail business - its a high-end sportswear & equipment retail business with stock imported seasonally which cannot be easily reordered or replenished when sold out- We run a very successful online shop based on OScommerce open source. We are lucky to have an experienced web person on the team to tweak & update the site. Other than an office, we have only one site (a physical shop) which also supplies the stock for the online orders.
The website is not really my remit, but I have come from a public library background where databases & stock control is king, and am a little frustrated by the lack of joined up thinking here....My issue is this : We operate this beautiful online shop for which we do a lot of data entry, but we have to monitor sales in the physical shop manually (by recording them on labels) which we then manually remove from stock levels in the online shop. It seems like a lot of additional work. (All our physical shop sytems are basic - old fashioned cash register, pricing gun labels etc, although almost all the stock we sell has manufacturers barcodes on it. ) Unfortunately because of the nature of our single premises with little storage and also the fact that we order only in limited volume (although a vast range...) we cannot keep stock separate to supply our online shop.
I feel sure that an EPOS system - if it could 'talk ' to the OScommerce system would eliminate the need for all this manual stock control - any feedback on this please guys - especially those with experience of open source or OS commerce, which is very much favoured by our webgirl!
Many thanks in advance

[m8internet]

Any integrated software is going to cost you money
What you need to work out is it going to be of benefit and/or cheaper, or does the existing setup work just as well

Take a look at CyberTill.co.uk

You can use your existing hardware AND website
You then integrate both, with online orders taking priority

[retailworld]

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

Are you looking to update your tills then, the idea being your stock control links to your online store?

[tigger]

Hi

Thanks for responding - If I could demonstrate that a useful time saving could be made by moving to an EPOS system or something else a bit more high tech - then I'm sure I could talk the team round to going for a hardware update. ( Our online shop is really important to us as it has nearly doubled our business since it was launched, but the physical shop is the home of our business and an important part of our brand as it has been established for 40 years and it is where we can deliver the expert part of our service from. )

What happens currently is that in order to ensure that stock levels remain accurate on our online shop , when stock is recieved we manually tag every item with text based labels with product name, size etc. We then physically remove these tags when an item is sold in the retail shop, in order to then go back to the database in the online shop & remove each item from stock. This is done throughout our ranges for consistency. Unlike the High Street, we don't hold huge numbers of the same item in the same size- so we need to update our online shop if the last size 14 is sold on the retail premises, to avoid abortive sales and giving poor service. Obviously items sold online are automatically removed.
Intergrating EPOS and the online shop may not be the way forward , we don't really need the EPOS to improve the customer experience in the shop, but we do need to ensure that what we sell there is removed from stock on the online shop- I suppose I am really wondering if there is an easier way of doing this? Is there something we can do with the existing manufacturers barcodes and a barcode scanner without going for full blown EPOS ?
(sorry to prattle on!)

[m8internet]

The website has stock control
The shop does not
Then any sales in the shop are going to impact the integrity of the inventory

The solutions are to either have split stock or a single EPOS

As stock is removed from the stock, either from sale or website, it is then removed from inventory
However, you would also want live inventory on the website

This could be easily added to your existing setup, without the need for much extra hardware

You could either :
complete the shop sale, then deduct from the website as a nil value sale
or
complete the shop sales at the end of day

It really depends on the volume of sales and how much stock capacity you have

[tigger]

Yes - that's about the strength of it! But knowing nothing about EPOS really YET (and neither does my web person - who is part of our own team & not outsourced) it's a job to know where to start. We are both coming from other professional backgrounds back into retail and hoping to bring something to the game! I have come from public sector libraries (hey, it's secure!) and whilst I haven't used an EPOS sytem i'm sure the bespoke systems I have used have many equivalent functions...

To explain why we have gone for open source e-commerce so far , our webmaster has been in webdesign professionally and favours the open source route for ecommerce as not only is it free but she can tweak the source code significantly to personalise the site for us. There has been a lot of work put into developing the site (in fact 2 online shops with different sports) and she would be reluctant to move away from OScommerce onto a new platform as it would involve a lot of work.
So thanks m8internet, it sounds possible... any idea now of EPOS software that might be compatible with OScommerce - or am I better off finding an OScommerce forum now?

[m8internet]

But knowing nothing about EPOS really YET (and neither does my web person - who is part of our own team & not outsourced) it's a job to know where to start
That's quite a major short coming, having someone that is running your website that has little or no IT experience
Probably fine for a small club or personal website, but I do hope they know about some basic business essentials when it comes to your website or they have at least made you aware of them!

EPOS is essentially just a box of hardware that brings together an old tll and barcodes
You can then add to that things like inventory control, credit cards, a website, ecommerce, and so on

Any good EPOS software should integrate with your website
However many replace the ecommerce side, very few are compatable with existing OScommerce coded websites

[tigger]

That's quite a major short coming, having someone that is running your website that has little or no IT experience
Probably fine for a small club or personal website, but I do hope they know about some basic business essentials when it comes to your website or they have at least made you aware of them!

Well - little or no IT experience is taking it way out of context - our website design & management, including our online shop is done by a family member who was a website designer for both a country council and HE College for over 8 years - the online shop has been up and running smoothly for over 3 years. We simply have no experience yet of EPOS on the retail premises (being still stuck in the dark ages) and are trying to drag it into the 21st century , whilst needing it to come in line with the website. So IT experience -YES , IT experience in E-Commerce - building on it, IT experience with EPOS , not as yet!

I'm glad to say that not being familiar with EPOS systems doesn't necessarily equate with not knowing how to run a business. Our family have done so successfully for 40 years but it's time for some changes...

Like I said before - It's a family business so we are all trying to bring our own strengths and experience from different sectors in, for the good of the business.
Cheers
Tigger

[jrc2005]

Hi, just picked up this thread as i think i can help. We run OSc and have done since we started, our till system is based on a neat bit of software called ollacart-pos (their website doesnt seem to help much now though, seems to have changed and not for the better - shame) and is linked realtime with our main shop database - its such a simple and effective solution which costs next to nothing, i come from a web design background so was able to tweak it quite heavily to make it work as we needed it to. We have a in-shop barcode scanner with the barcode held in the database as an extra field for each product. If you need advice on this, please ask. I know our system inside out.

[jrc2005]

Ah, just found this. http://www.rocketdownload.com/scripts/program/ollacart-point-of-sale-7456.html

[tigger]

Oh bum - thanks jrc2005 for your helpful reply & REALLY SORRY i didn't come back to you on it ....

I hope to come back to you in the summer , unfortunately (or fortunately for us) it is our really busy season from Oct to March and things have become somewhat too busy to think about tweaking stuff at the mo - thanks for your support though & good luck!

[tintin102]

When you say that your product is held in your shop database is that online or is it in access.