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Software for retailers running more than one location
Judaica, toys, menswear, housewares, electronics, footwear, appliances, furniture — the category changes and the problem does not. Two or more locations plus a website, each keeping its own count, and no single view of the business.
How it usually works today
- Each branch has its own till system and its own idea of what is in stock.
- Checking whether another store has an item means calling and asking somebody to look.
- The website sells something that went out of the shop an hour earlier.
- Transfers between branches are arranged verbally and recorded afterwards, or not.
- Buying decisions are made without knowing what is sitting in the other branch.
What replaces it
- One stock position, visible everywhere, updated as things move.
- Any location able to see and reserve what another one holds.
- The website drawing on the same figure as the shop floor.
- Transfers recorded as they happen, so the count stays honest.
- Reporting that treats the branches as one business, because they are.
The website is a location
A store with a shipping operation behind it — eight thousand square feet plus nationwide despatch, or five stores plus online — is not a shop with a website attached. It is several locations, one of which happens to have no walls. Treating the site as just another location that draws on the same stock is what stops the overselling, and it is a design decision made early rather than an integration bought later.
Retail and wholesale off one stock pool
Some of these businesses also sell to the trade — a judaica chain with a wholesale arm, an apparel retailer with its own garment manufacturing, an electronics retailer with a warehouse serving other shops. Two order flows, two pricing structures, one inventory. Off-the-shelf retail software generally does one of these properly.
What we would look at first
Usually the transfers and the reorder points, because those are where the money is sitting. Stock in the wrong branch is capital doing nothing, and most multi-location retailers we have looked at have a meaningful amount of it, entirely invisibly.
Tell us what your business runs on.
We start by drawing how the work actually moves through your business. That drawing is yours whether or not you build with us.
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