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