Care-O-Sell

156 S. Oregon St.

Ontario, OR  97914

541-881-1178

 

November 3, 2011

 

Re:  SBS Solutions Consignment Software

 

To Whom It May Concern:

 

Care-O-Sell is a Women’s Consignment store in Eastern Oregon.  It had been a children’s resale store since 2000 and June of 2010 we converted it to 90% women’s clothing and 10% children’s clothing / equipment.

 

I gathered as many reference materials and gleaned tips and information from established consignment shops to help us get off on the right foot in our new consignment business. The one important tip I adhered to was to start this business from scratch; doing the bookkeeping and consignment records by hand.  This approach gave the consignment staff a full understanding of the workings of a consignment shop.  From one year we learned the consignment business, recruited over 700 consignors and doubled our sales. 

 

May 1, 2011 I was ready to convert our record keeping to a system that could track inventory and sales electronically. 

 

I am a member of N.A.R.T.S (National Association of Resale and Thrift Stores) so I used the NARTS newsletter as a starting point and called the Consignment Software companies advertising there.  Out of seven phone calls, I received four callbacks. I took down references for some of the companies and also canvassed the local shops to compare what they are using. 

 

When I contacted SBS Solutions, LLC, consignmentsoftware.biz, I got a real person on the first try.  They offered me the demo copy to “play with” and contacted me several times to see if we had any questions.  My staff and I compared the Consignment Shop software to the others we had seen on visits to various stores and on the internet.  Every phone call with every question for SBS Solutions was always answered in person on the first call.  I called references here in the Northwest that are currently using the Consignment Shop software and got nothing but good reviews.  I know how unreliable online good reviews are, but the bad reviews I found about the other software products informative.  There were no bad reviews on SBS Solutions.

 

I purchased the software package, the bar code scanner, thermal receipt printer, cash drawer and the thermal label printer through Joan Couch, sales and support for SBS Solutions.  I have nothing but praise for Joan.  She worked with me on what would be necessary to complete the system, computer requirements, printers, etc.

 

We received the hardware and software in June and Joan started walking us through its different applications and helped us get familiar with procedures for all our transactions.  She even did our training on speaker phone in the evening so all my staff was present and we were closed so she could have our undivided attention.

 

John Breidling of SBS Solutions is amazing in the help department also.  We have only had to call him twice for help and both times he narrowed down what we had done within 10 minutes and had us back up running.  (Our issues were with operator error, not technical problems)  The software has not given us any technical challenges and starts up every morning and closes the register every night just as it should.

 

I have four employees and at our staff meetings since June 20, 2011 we have discussed our system and we rave about how much time it has saved us, how user friendly it is, and how our customers like it so much better than the old way.

 

The Consignment Shop has saved my company at least 16 hours per week.  That is two business days.  I was logging sales by hand 3 evenings a week, totaling at least 9 hours each week.  The extra bookwork that my employees were doing in paid outs and sales totaled at least 7 hours per week.  We are a much more productive store now that we have the Consignment Shop software.

 

There is not a report or a transaction that John Breidling has not thought of so far.  Everything we need is included in our software and some of the reports are awesome, ie; what our best selling brand is, consignor paid outs with summary or detail, sales with summary or detail.  Setting defaults is simple and self explanatory. Layaways, account credits and debits and cash drawer reconciliation all make sense.  And the training period for all of us was very short.

 

I would like to recommend to any consignment business that is looking for a good software system to download the demo copy of the Consignment Shop and see how user friendly it is.   And then contact Joan or John and let them tell you what they can do for you.  I really appreciate them and I am so glad that we partnered with them.  They have made my world a lot more efficient and happier (me and my employees). 

 

Please feel free to contact me if you would like more information about my system, what I needed to do to get started and how we are doing with it now.  I am very pleased with my investment.

 

Sincerely,

 

Chris Kodama

 

 

Chris Kodama

Owner, Care-O-Sell Consignment