Shopkeep POS system

Do any folks have experience with Shopkeep POS system http://shopkeep.com/? If so, can I get some feedback? It is cloud based, designed by a wine retailer who might even be on this board. I am looking at it for a new retailer.

Thanks,

Justin

Justin,

I’m a little surprised that there’s no feedback. I haven’t heard of it before and checking their website for program content, it wouldn’t fit for our store for a number of reasons. Primarily we are set up in such an archaic way, the migration of data and associated costs aren’t justified for our witch and underling, (mom & pop), store. For a start up business, it might work pretty well.

I hope you can get some feedback and share it with us.

Not to semi-hijack, but is there a consensus “best POS system for a brick-and-mortar wine store” at startup? What about QuickBooks POS Pro? It seems to have all the necessary bells and whistles plus some really innovative features too. Thoughts?

When it comes to software I tend to be scared of anything that doesn’t have a long track record with many releases\revisions under their belt.

we’re running Quickbooks for our winery accounting and manufacturing side, looking at vinnow for the retail since it hooks in for inventory updates and has the club & compliance tools and other niceties that a general program won’t.

We also use Quickbooks for our accounting. Migration to a complete POS system including inventory management would be:

  1. Very time consuming entering our existing inventory.
  2. Continuing time spent manually updating the high volume of new inventory.
  3. Time spent creating a booklet with scan-able UPS codes for cigars.
  4. Time spent creating UPS coded tags for the myriad items that don’t come with UPS codes.

Without using the inventory control feature, I could eliminate item 1 and 2.

If we had just two employees it wouldn’t be hard to create and maintain a QB POS system with inventory control. For a start up business it would probably work very well. A couple of days spent prior to opening to set up the system including inventory. Teaking the system to efficiency would probably take a couple months with anything major cleaned up at the end of the calendar or fiscal year for the next year’s operation.

When you switch you have options for data migration:

  1. Manually enter yourself. It’s “free,” but prone to errors. Rebuild inventory–maybe you can scan everythinbg in? How much inventory do you have–you may have lots of old stuff you’re not actually using? Do you need to migrate customers?
  2. Move yourself with Excel or something else. Only works if the old and new systems accept spreadsheet data.
  3. Hire IT help to convert and move.


    I worked for a POS company doing winery installations using RMS. Depending on the old system and the quality of their data we could often get it converted and moved in a couple hours, but that’s also because we knew RMS and what format things had to be in for it to work. There’s usually a little manual clean up afterwards.

So if you have a lot of data you may want to find an IT company that knows the application you are moving to and get an estimate.

Way late to reply here - but hope that the detailed info below is still helpful.

Having checked out the complete ShopKeep tour, I can say that for a starting POS for a single store of “local” ambitions, it will likely be all that you will ever need. It’s very strong in the things that it does well, and the company is not trying to make the product be all things to all people. (always a good thing).
They’re the clear leader in the SAAS POS (software as a service point of sale) market especially for the wine business and the solution i’d choose if I were starting a small shop from scratch. However, those of you with more complex requirements (multiple sales channels besides web & walk in) will find some drawbacks.

More about SAAS:
In general, I’d recommend against any new business buying any software when there is a SAAS / subscription model available, given the current increase in velocity of software development and rabid competition out there.

In a worst case scenario, a SAAS solution is covering 90% of the functionality that you need and after a few months you change to a client-server software package. Luckily, you’re you’re only out the monthly fees.

In a better case scenario, you use it for the first 2-3 years and the product grows with you, or you outgrow it – either way, it’s better than
a) dropping a ton of change on an expensive solution that’s way to advanced for you
b) dropping less cash on an archaic 5 year old(+) technology like RMS that is going to be left in the dust by new service-based solutions.

Quick Background:

  • I was the GM of Crush Wine & Spirits in New York from 2005-2010 – but in my life before that I was in the software industry.
  • I’ve never installed and used ShopKeep but have seen both demo and live implementations as I was checking out SAAS POS a a favor for a friend’s brick and mortar bike shop (totally off topic, but a great shop … http://www.nycvelo.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)
  • I have installed and used QuickBooks, Microsoft RMS, Great Plains, Everest, and a few other packages and am, in general, not impressed with their quality/price ratio.

Key ShopKeep advantages include:

  • The ability to ring up cash purchases even when the internet is down

  • Easy inventory management

  • No servers, no install, no maintenance, etc.

  • Works with standard POS (Point of Sale) Hardware

  • Direct, personal, US-Based support from their small team

  • Easy integration with Shopify for a basic website, including pushing store inventory directly from ShopKeep.

  • Easy integration to MailChimp

  • REST-ful API – so you can leverage the platform if you have developers that want to write additional functionality

  • Pay as you go pricing – yes over time, you may end up paying a bit more for the software portion of something like RMS in the long run, but remember, the monthly charge includes tech support & maintenance

  • Multiple location support being added as of Dec 2010

  • Reasonable fee structure / no Credit Card % games like some of their “free” competitors that I looked at.

Key Drawbacks include:

  • One single field for Producer, Wine Name, Cuvee information. Easily searchable, but makes filtering and reporting a bit of a challenge. No “department” field and no way to create a custom field to store specific inventory information, though most of this can be worked around with tagging feature and your ability to create additional info for the web in Shopify … however, that can be a bit time consuming.

  • SKU data import is finicky and must be performed by someone at ShopKeep

  • No Purchase Order functionality or “Pre-Arrival” features (yet) (i.e. if you haven’t taken delivery of an item it is difficult to track selling it)

  • No vendor invoice tracking so you’ll be double entering your payables into an accounting system as well

  • No Sales Order / Work Order functionality so there’s no way to manage & track deliveries or shipments without additional software. Note that you could try entering shipping/delivery orders manually in Shopify to work around this problem.

  • No BigCommerce integration (yet) BC seems to have some better functionality than Shopify (at least in Dec 2010) and is priced in a more compelling way

  • Stock take functionality is basic and needs improvement

Happy to answer any questions on any other aspects that i may have missed…

-Tom

Hi Tom, thanks for your excellent analysis. Here’s the story, I was selling French wines for a distributor/importer in DC and its Maryland suburbs. I approached the owner of a new store that hadn’t opened yet and he needed a manager so I took the plunge. He gave me carte blanche to develop a beer and wine store. I looked at many POS systems and I have seen many in action. My conclusion was that these POS systems were not good for the average small retailer. They seemed to run on old technology, and seemed to be very hard to use for small business owners who do not know much about computer.

This was an opportunity to craft a thing from the beginning. I signed up for Shopkeep and started to use it six weeks before we opened. It has totally lived up to my expectations. It is perfect for a small business. We only have about 450 SKU’s. Most of them are either beer or wine, with other general merchandise such as corkscrews and a few non alcoholic drinks. The program is amazing. We know in real time everything about the store. Inventory, prices, gross sales, number of transactions, sales tax liability. It’s $49.00 monthly and we can quit at any time. The hardware all belongs to us and they simply pointed us in the right direction about what to buy such as a touch screen monitor, hand held scanner etc. The only thing they push you on is their credit card service provider. I tend to think they get a commission from them but the provider is also integrated with the service so that we can track customer data, customer loyalty and other things. I won’t say anything bad about the program. I will only say that, like all software, there are some features that I would like to see which aren’t there yet. For example, there is not a lot of versatility in the reports. But I can basically massage any of their canned reports to fit what I want such as which vendors have which products. I feel that these guys are going to do quite well. They are first to market in a huge field. Cloud computing is an excellent way to go for me. I can check on things all of the time from anywhere. I can also do back office things from anywhere very easily. I do not think that other POS systems have this functionality. Plus it lets you have a great on-line store with Shopify which I have not done yet.

Anyone can send a private message to me for more information.