Club shop has gone digital and Eco-friendly!!

As you will all know the inception of the club shop has done well for the club over the last 7 years and in that time we have built up a formidable array of products and a spares collection beyond our initial dreams. It’s only natural that a degree of fine tuning comes with time and experience.

Initially we only had a dozen items and Mike helped out by producing some nice coloured merchandising labels or Card Tops, complete with pricing to attach to our limited products.

Very soon,,the range started to ramp up and to keep ink costs low, I revamped the Card Tops to mostly black and white text/lining with just a coloured lozenge. This has proved to work well for several years and was easy to reproduce as the range grew, using a template just changing the item details and description as required.

As we now currently have 73 OOLS club sourced items and 54 Hornby spares items, thats 127 items in total, the constant demand for 120gsm card, ink, time and patience to produce all the required labelling which has to be cut up by hand before attachment has reached its natural pinnacle of viability and with the turn around of parts being so lively, I am struggling to keep up with this way of doing things. It also uses precious paper and ink supplies which could be saved.

Looking at the ‘retail model’ of similar model business at shows, I realised I had the solution all along. Way back in 2015 I started using a barcode system on the product lines but at the time it seemed of little use practically, so I dropped the idea,,,, Just more work for little gain.

But now we have a state of the art Point of Sale software set up in Zettle, with scanner and receipt availability the barcode has come back into its own. Products and Receipts can be traced very quickly.

Initially, I was going to just add barcodes to the card tops which i have done in some cases, but soon it dawned on me that all we actually need on each product in its plastic pouch is a sticky label with the identity of the club, a short description, a part number and the all important barcode.

This would allow rapid prep of items, quick labelling, and a much improved quicker sale experience for Point of Sale customers. It would also help with price fluctuations on products without need to relabel due to a price display issue on the old card tops.

So,,,from April onwards, I am phasing out the use of Card Tops, Ink usage, Time wasting and so on. (All bottled items will retain a label for practicality but will also don a separate barcode.) Instruction sheets will still be included where needed with the relative products. This will also mean product lines take up less space and weight for postage requirements. Win win!!

Our current postage label machine produces the 60x20mm labels at the rate of one a second so its a very quick process to get the products into the shop. At shows all products sold are scanned in to the system, just like Tescos, and sales are expedited. I don’t have to fumble, drilling down for products on my iPad or phone Shop catalougue. Full quick printed receipts are also an improvement on the old slow ones we had at the last couple of shows.

Eventually I hope to be able to collate all sales digitally using the barcode system with Zettle reports merging to a database but I’m not up to speed with such high power accounting yet.

Onwards and Upwards!!!!

Nick