Twenty thousand
titles. Most of them
sitting still.
A bookshop's problem is not speed at the till. It is that almost everything on the shelf is slow, a little of it is not, and the money is tied up in telling those apart. That is a stock question, and this plugin is mostly a stock product.
The shelf
that never moves.
Three copies of a title arrived four years ago and two are still there. Nobody knows, because nobody has counted this section since the last stocktake and the last stocktake was a weekend nobody wants to repeat. Meanwhile the one title everybody is asking for went out last Tuesday and the reorder has not been raised.
What stops happening
- Thousands of lines nobody has counted in a year
- Dead stock discovered by looking at a dusty spine
- Reorders raised from memory rather than from what sold
- Special orders for customers with nothing recording who they are for
- Cash tied up in a shelf nobody can put a figure on
General
retail.
A book has no size, no colour, no expiry and no recipe. The general retail profile adds nothing you would not use, which on a catalogue this size is exactly what you want — anything extra is another field on twenty thousand records.
You choose · General retail
Nothing you will not use
No size matrix, no batches, no kitchen. The screens stay as short as the trade allows.
Barcode scanning at the counter
Every book already carries a barcode. Scan it and the line appears; that is the whole interaction.
Multi-outlet stock, if you have two shops
One title, two branches, two figures — and the ability to see both without ringing the other shop.
Anything the choice leaves out is hidden, not removed. You are not locked out of a thing by picking wrong at setup — a clothes shop simply is not shown expiry dates it will never use, and a grocery is not shown a size matrix. Change your mind and it is all still there.
What actually
helps here.
Stock takes that can be done in pieces
Count one bay on a phone against the figure already on screen, save, come back tomorrow. A catalogue this size is never counted in one go, so the count is built to be interrupted.
Stock valuation on the dead shelf
The cost of what is sitting still, as a number rather than a feeling. That is the figure that justifies a sale table, and it is the main reason a bookshop would pay for the plugin at all.
Suppliers and purchase orders
Orders raised against a supplier with lead times, received against what actually turned up, and the cost carried through to what the stock is worth.
Scanning, stock takes and purchase orders are in the free plugin. Stock valuation is in the paid one, and on this trade it is the feature worth paying for.
What we
do not do.
Bookshops usually ask about the same three things, and the answer to all three is no.
No ISBN lookup
Scanning a book we do not know about does not fetch the title, author, publisher or cover from anywhere. There is no Nielsen, Bowker or distributor catalogue behind this. New titles are created by you, or imported from a CSV your supplier gives you.
No special orders
A book ordered in for a named customer, held behind the counter and collected later, is not modelled. You can record it as an order and take a deposit as a payment, but nothing links the arriving stock to the person waiting for it.
No sale-or-return to publishers
Returns to a supplier are handled as ordinary stock going out. There is no consignment model, so stock you hold but do not own is counted as though you own it.
We would rather lose the sale here than in week one.
For this trade.
Will it look up a book from its barcode?
Can I import twenty thousand titles?
Is the till fast enough with that many products?
How do I find dead stock?
Count the shelf.
Price the dust.
The counter is the easy part of a bookshop. The money is in knowing what the back three bays are actually worth.