What iOS software do we need for a small resale business?

March 31, 2013 12:46 PM

Starting a small business of one-of-a-kind items and looking for an iOS software package for inventory and sales.

My wife is about to start a very small business buying and selling vintage bar ware. She buys at estate sales and such, and wants to sell at summer fairs but also to have on an online presence.

She is looking for the right software to keep inventory, handle sales (online and through a credit card reader attached to her iPad), and maybe even to print bar codes and shipping labels. The idea is that she comes home from an estate sale with her loot and uses one program to record when she bought the item and what she paid for it, to manage a few pictures she takes of the item, to record her description and the price she wants to charge, and to put the item and description online at her web store (probably Etsy). The same program would print off bar-coded price tags that she could attach to the items. When she scans an item it would record the sale and remove the item from her inventory--including on the web store. The software would support a credit card reader attached to her iPad.

Does this software exist?

posted by LarryC to Technology (2 answers total)

Hey, since you didn't get any other bites I thought I'd let you know that while I'm not sure such an app exists, I have had a fairly easy time of it using a gdocs spreadsheet to keep track of my vintage inventory. It's more labor-intensive, but not badly so:

I have a spreadsheet with the item description, price paid, listed price, and inventory number, and blank fields for date sold, sold price, and profit. I hand-write a tag with the description, price, and number, and put the tagged items out in my brick-and-mortar shop. When an item sells, I look up the inventory number, fill out the blank fields, and move the line item to a separate spreadsheet for sold inventory. All told, it takes a few minutes to list an individual item and about half an hour once a week to tick off all my sold items. When I do flea markets, I use the Square reader and note the inventory number on the receipt.

If you're only doing Etsy, you can get away with just writing the inventory number on a sticker or tag and marking everything that way. It sucks that there isn't an existing tool that's tailored to the vintage business, but there are workarounds.
posted by nonasuch at 7:32 AM on April 8, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks, that is helpful.

It seems like there is an opportunity here for a smart software developer...
posted by LarryC at 8:07 AM on April 25, 2013