Top 5 Thrift Store POS System Features You Need

Scalable Thrift Store POS Systems: Increase Sales, Improve Efficiency, Manage Inventory and Automate Your Business

Give it to me straight. What POS features matter most to thrift store owners and employees? Check out the list below for our top 9 features for 2020.

Top POS Features Thrift Store Owners Need to Know About:

  1. Advanced Thrift Donation Processing System
  2. Color Tagging and Rotating Discounts
  3. Thrift Store POS Software that’s Easy to Use
  4. Dynamic POS Software that Boosts Sales
  5. Smart Thrift POS Software that Employees Love
  6. Custom Manager Alerts
  7. Option to Round Up the Transaction to the Next Dollar for Donations at the Point of Sale
  8. Customer Account Management
  9. Advanced Reporting

But what are these features and how will they help my thrift store? Continue reading and we’ll take a closer look into each of these features and the value they bring to your thrift store’s operations.

See Our Thrift Store POS Demo

Scalable, User-Friendly Thrift Store POS Systems

If you are using a POS for a thrift store that is only designed to process sales, your business is missing out on incredible technologies that can elevate operations tremendously. A typical thrift store processes many sales transactions each day and also accepts donations. Through these activities, inventory fluctuates regularly. Monitoring inventory as well as sales is understandably challenging in this type of environment, and these activities are made more complex because of human error from time to time as well as shrinkage related to theft. If you own several thrift stores, consolidating data, managing real-time sales and expenses, transferring inventory to different locations and other tasks requires significant manual effort without access to the right enterprise-level technology.

The reality is that you and your team may be spending much more time and energy on these and other essential tasks than you need to. A modern POS system for thrift store owners is designed with advanced features that can dramatically improve operations in essential ways and on a daily basis. If you could eliminate stress and time drains associated with monitoring inventory, processing sales, managing employees’ attendance and more, would you? These are only some of the many benefits that are available to you through the best point of sale system for thrift store on the market today. A closer look at the top features that you need to have in your thrift store point of sale software for 2020 will open your eyes to the incredible possibilities available through modernization of your thrift store management software.

Best Thrift Store POS System Features You Should Know About - Top 5 Thrift Store POS System Features You Need

Best Thrift Store POS System Features You Should Know About

Before you decide if updating your POS system for thrift store use is a savvy financial move to make at this time, you need to know specifically what the benefits of a modern thrift POS solution are. There are numerous thrift store point of sale systems that you could invest in, but many of these are not designed specifically with a thrift store in mind. Regardless of whether you operate one thrift store or a chain of stores, your business functions differently than a typical retail store.

At Bepoz, we understand your unique needs for thrift store POS software solutions, and we have developed exceptional thrift POS solutions around those needs. Our thrift software can be tailored specifically around your business’s needs, and understanding what some of the latest features can do for our business is an excellent starting point. With this in mind, these are the top thrift point of sale features to look for in your new system for 2020.

1. Advanced Thrift Donation Processing System

If your thrift point of sale software does not currently have inventory management capabilities, this is a sure sign that your business would benefit from an upgrade. Thrift store investment management software automates the donation process and related inventory tracking needs. Your team can simply input new donations into the POS for thrift store solution, and inventory is updated in real-time. This aspect of thrift point of sale software offers substantially more benefits. Through the thrift store inventory software feature, employees can receive assistance related to pricing unusual pieces that they may not be familiar with. The thrift store inventory software can also be used to print price tags immediately and to catalog the items in the inventory.

With these features, thrift software solutions can eliminate the huge piles of inventory that your team needs to process and that takes up valuable floor or storage space. These items can immediately be placed on racks for customers to choose from, which means that your inventory may move through your store faster and with less per-item time requirements. This is only one of the many essential features that you need to be taking advantage of from the best thrift store point of sale system available today.

2. Color Tagging and Rotating Discounts

Thrift store shoppers are on the hunt for a great bargain, and they may be excited about taking advantage of special discounts and promotions that your store offers from time to time. Unfortunately, an outdated POS for thrift store use requires you to manually input sale items into your system, and this requires a considerable amount of time and energy. An effective and modern thrift POS solution can dramatically reduce the administrative hassle associated with running sales and promotions, which means that your business and your customers can take advantage of more frequent or regular promotions.

Modern thrift software enables you to easily keep up with your color tagging system, but the regular discount schedule for the color tagging system is already input into the software for thrift store employee use. Once the information is programmed into your thrift shop software, the right sales prices for all items will ring up without any additional effort required. Regardless of whether you want to run sales by days, by products or by other methods, the thrift store POS solution makes this easy to do. Your employees will not need to remember your color schedule or push special keys on the register. Loss related to employees’ errors are eliminated. The Bepoz solution is the best POS system for thrift store use because of how functional it is and how simplified the interface is. This and other features in the Bepoz thrift POS solutions are accessible through a touch display screen or by using thrift store app scanner software.

3. Thrift Store Point of Sale Software That’s Easy to Use

The best thrift store point of sale system is designed to improve functionality and to help you run many aspects of your business smoother and easier. Simply having access to complex thrift software that delivers incredible features is not enough. POS systems software for thrift store use must actually be accessible and easy to use in order to be truly beneficial. This is what you can expect from a Bepoz thrift store point of sale system.

Consider your employees’ experience with your current thrift store POS solution. Your thrift point of sale system may enable transactions to be processed in the store, but the employees may need to take additional steps to manually track inventory. They may also need to process end-of-day sales reports by taking additional steps before they turn off the lights and head home. When customers drop off donations, they must determine pricing manually, create price tags and update inventory. If you have multiple locations, inventory and sales must be reconciled across the enterprise. Inventory transfers may require manual effort as well. These are all aspects of your employees’ daily efforts that can be automated with thrift shop software from Bepoz.

What happens when your employees’ activities are streamlined with an effective thrift store point of sale solution? Your store may run more smoothly, and costly errors may become much less common. Employee satisfaction may increase with new thrift store software in use, and your retention rate may bump upward as a result. A thrift store point of sale system from Bepoz delivers tangible benefits as well as intangible rewards that are essential for successful business operation.

4. Boosted Sales with Dynamic Thrift Store Point of Sale Software

You can see that modern and effective thrift shop software does far more than process sales, but you may not realize that a POS system for thrift store use can actual bolster sales and profits. Consider that labor and inventory costs are two of the more notable expenses that your thrift store is responsible for, and these can be tracked via modern thrift software from Bepoz. As a store owner, you must know where your money is flowing so that you can determine if your financial resources are being used in the most effective manner.

For example, a thrift store POS system may be used to track employee attendance and productivity. In fact, a thrift store point of sale system may provide you with real-time data in these areas so that you can take immediate action to better manage your store. If you are running multiple stores, an enterprise-level thrift point of sale system simplifies your ability to address these needs from a centralized location.

More than that, a thrift store POS system may provide you with detailed analytics regarding types of items being sold and the profit margin on various items, the thrift POS software may be used to identify how to better stock your shelves and racks for improved profitability. In some cases, thrift store point of sale analytics may reveal that some types of products sell better in specific store locations. This may enable you to take advantage of thrift store inventory software features to transfer inventory throughout your enterprise in the most cost-effective manner.

5. Great Thrift POS Software Means Smarter Employees

Many of your employees want to do quality work, and some of them may not feel confident about their efforts. Thrift POS software is so intuitive and easy to use that it takes the guesswork and confusion out of your employees’ workdays. A thrift store POS system empowers your employees to work confidently. They know that all of the sales data is entered correctly, prices are ringing up right and more.

On the other hand, some of your employees may look for ways to skirt the system, and your new thrift store point of sale solution from Bepoz can alert you to these situations. Consider that our thrift store POS system can record all keystrokes or touch-screen requests for each transaction. Thrift POS software is designed to thwart things like unauthorized discounts and other factors that you need to be aware of. Because all of the keystrokes are recorded, a thrift store POS system can even tell you when an attempt was made to skirt the system regardless of whether or not it was successful. Likewise, Bepoz thrift point of sale software can be integrated with your current security system. With this aspect of thrift POS software, you can visually ensure that employee discounts are actually being given to employees rather than to friends and family.

These are only a few of the many ways that thrift store software enables your employees to do their best work with confidence. At the same time, a new thrift point of sale system may encourage them to stay honest. Through these benefits of a thrift store point of sale solution, you can eliminate many of the managerial stressors that may currently weigh you down each day.

Other Features to Look for in Your POS System for Thrift Store - Top 5 Thrift Store POS System Features You Need

Other Features to Look for in Your POS System for Thrift Store

At Bepoz, we know that these are essential features that our customers need in a new thrift point of sale software solution. We also know that the best thrift store point of sale system raises the bar by delivering in other key areas. When you contact us about your current thrift point of sale software needs, you may also inquire about some of these features:

Manager Alerts: You do not need to be on-site to maximize the benefits of thrift point of sale software. Thrift store software can be tailored to provide notifications related to discounts, sales, employee attendance. Managers may also take advantage of a searchable audit log in a thrift store point of sale software program for simplified oversight.

A Donation Roundup Option: Thrift store software eases the time burden for your employees when they are accepting donations. Many of our Bepoz customers need a thrift store point of sale system with a donation roundup button, and you can feel confident that we can tailor your thrift store software to meet this need.

Customer Account Management: If your current thrift store software does not facilitate customer database management, you may be missing out on great opportunities to offer loyalty programs. This specific feature in a thrift store point of sale system may also be used for customized email marketing purposes.

Advanced Reporting: A thrift store POS system should provide advanced reporting and analytics – one of the most extensive and far-reaching benefits of modern point of sale software. A thrift point of sale system can send you detailed sales, expense and employee reports at the end of each business day. An enterprise-level thrift point of sale system may generate reports on a per-store basis and on a comprehensive scale. Reports can be exported to common file formats, and they can be generated on demand. Through the thrift point of sale system, you can share reports or customize them as desired.

Upgrade to Thrift Store Point of Sale Software from Bepoz

The many features available to you through a Bepoz thrift store point of sale system are not luxuries. These are essential features that your business needs in order to operate efficiently and to elevate your success and profits going forward. The best way to learn more about Bepoz solutions is through a personalized demonstration. Contact us today to schedule a product demo with our team.

Video Transcription for Thrift Store Point of Sale Demonstration

Hello this is Tim and I’m here to tell you about Bepoz point of sale for thrift stores. If you’ve got one location or many locations, Bepoz can help you centrally manage all of your employees, your products, your inventory, all of your store locations. Not only does Bepoz allow for tracking all of your sales, but Bepoz will help you process your donations very easily and label all of your products.

Logging In

The first screen that we look at here is your login screen and the login screen decides your permissions and helps us track who it is that does the operation. In this case, I could log in using a number, an employee card, fingerprint – I’ll just use a number to get into the system.

How to Process Donations and Label Products for Sale

Now what I’ve chosen to show here first is the donation processing system. So the donation processing system is how you get all of your inventory or how you label all your products. It could be used to add each and every shirt to inventory, so that you know that you have 15 women’s large shirts, or it could be just for making a label so that when you go to sell it you’d be putting a barcode on it. Now you could do all of your sales without this process, but this really makes the donation side of accepting all of your goods and the back end of your operation much more simple. Now let’s take a look.

So I have set up on the screen lots of different categories of all of the different products that you want to add. Now we can configure this a thousand different ways, whichever way you like in order for doing this. And in this case, I pick up the next item that I want to put a label on or that I want to put a hanging tag on and I can pick – it’s a men’s shirt, so I say “It’s a Men’s Shirt” and in this case I’m presented with options that are configurable and definable for you – long sleeve, short sleeve, sweater, t-shirt, tank top – and every option we have on here is configurable. But I’ll pick a short sleeve, Now I have in here options for large, medium or small. A lot of other operations might pick something like good, better or best or some quality level. They might even have a brand that they want to track – there could be all sorts of different ways to track this, but we’ll do a medium shirt. And I press that and that did two things. The first thing that did, that easily it added one shirt to inventory, if we wanted to track inventory. And it printed a label, which I’ll grab here that just came off the label printer. The label is completely configurable and programmable in the way that you want it to look. So at the top it says the store name. I’ve got what the kind of item is and a barcode and price. We could help you program that, or you could program that yourself on how you want that to be laid out.

Now there are typically in most thrift stores, there are two kinds of items that you could have in your store. There are things like clothes, like a large men’s shirt that is always the same price in your store. But there are a lot of times other items that you receive, like electronics, furniture, or other objects that you get that are really one-off, and you don’t get them consistently and every time you do get them, they are a different price and a different quality. Now you could set them all up so that it’s, you have different price levels. So I could have tables at 25, 50 and up to 100 – that’s fine. But most places uniquely price for each one. So in this case, if I pick an item that’s let’s say furniture, the way that this is defined, it gives me 40 different kinds of furniture items, and we will take a couch. And what it presents for, if I want to, is an option to describe the item, because in this case, it might be a red velvet couch, right? Nice old one. So I could type in the description on it so when it gets sold, a lot of time what happens in this place is you might have somebody that might not be very scrupulous and takes the label off of a $25 couch and brings it over to the $150 couch and presents it with that and then says, you know, “This is the label that went with it.” In this case, you would know, that’s not a red velvet couch. You here now have a brown leather couch and the description is right so that they don’t use the wrong item. Now you could have just left it as couch 1, couch 2, couch 3, and that’s fine if you don’t want to use that description. But you can do it here. So I have a red velvet couch, and then it prompts me for a price. Let’s say this red velvet couch is $50. And it prints me out a unique barcode label for just that couch. So now my barcode label says, “red velvet couch” and it says $50 and when I scan it, it will ring up that red velvet couch. Now it will save these barcodes and when we go to look at the register, we’ll ring up the red velvet couch and the shirt that we just made with using the barcodes for those products.

Point of Sale on Simple Cash Transactions

So now we have switched out the screen to be a point of sale terminal, where we’re actually selling the products. As you can see, I have this laid out in exactly the same way. Now it isn’t necessary to lay it out the same way in your donation terminal and your point of sale terminal, however, it makes it very easy for an employee to transfer from one place to the other because the buttons are in the exact same place in both locations. But we want to sell one of those products we just labeled. So I will bring up our medium men’s shirt, and I take off the label that we just printed on the label printer, and we could ring up our red velvet couch that we rang up earlier and I sold that red velvet couch for $50. Now I have a total here – its $60.42. And I have fast tender keys down at the bottom, so that you can enter in $10, $20, $50, $100 bills or I can just type in an amount. In this case we’ll type in an amount – we’ll use the fast-tender key maybe on the next transaction. So they gave me $70. Now my receipt printer prints and my cash drawer would open.

Selling Products from Inventory or without Barcodes

Now one interesting thing on the touch screen, if you use the touch screen, it is possible to show the quantity you have on hand of any single product. So we made that red velvet couch, and I’m going to go into my couches and you can see that the red velvet couch has been sold and I still have one left of a brown leather couch. And this can be every couch that I have in inventory at the time and whether it’s available or has been sold. So I could then sell my brown leather couch without having the barcode if I wanted to and if you will allow it. Ok, so I have a $250 couch, and let’s say that the person gave me 6 $50 bills, I can just hit 6 and 50, that’s $300 and my change is displaying and the transaction is over.

Color Rotation Discounting Capabilities

So we’ve changed the screen again so that we can demonstrate color rotation. Many thrift stores want to rotate colors week by week so as you proceed through different colors, your products get discounted more and more. Usually most thrift stores we would deal with would have rotation every 4-5 weeks; the colors rotate. So in this case, we’re working on a 5-rotation schedule and I’ve got 5 different colors on the screen. So you can see, at the top, there are 5 different colors and the screens match the colors and I have a no color option because those are the items that don’t rotate, we never reduce the price there – they’re always full thrift retail. Ok, and in this case, if I ring up, if someone comes up with a product – they may bring up the product and I could just scan the barcode and it will ring up the correct price no matter what and the discounted price will apply. So let’s say if clothing is 50% off, if I bring up a shirt, it will automatically be 50% off this week. But let’s say you don’t want to use barcodes – so we’ll ring up some products here. So if I go to the yellow category and ring up a product, if I ring up a women’s shirt, it automatically normally would be a dollar, but it’s 50 cents off this week. And then if I ring up an item of jewelry, and it was $2, it automatically rang at $2 at the correct price because of the schedule we have this week. Jewelry is always regular price, blouses for women that are yellow are 50% off. And we can continue that process in many thrift stores – on the 5th week it might be 70-90% off and then those might get ragged out at the end depending on how you would like to do it.

So that’s it for our short presentation of Bepoz point of sale for thrift stores. There are way more features than we could possibly cover in this short presentation. If you have questions or you’d like to talk to us, please give us a call today and we’ll be happy to answer all your questions.