Retail Software

If you’re new to the exciting world of running your own business, you might find it a challenge just to tackle the everyday things. It’s understandable; running a company – even if it’s just a few people – means spending considerable time for what sometimes seems trivial.

Say, for example, you have a shop selling gifts and small decorative items you either resell from suppliers or that make yourself from materials you buy. This could be just a simple one man shop but we’re already talking about tracking products, materials and two types of suppliers while at the same time there are your customers and their orders of course, your collaborators, your accounting and so on. And that’s all assuming everything is under the same roof – not always the case if you have a warehouse or a shop in another city.

You could try to keep track of everything using pen and paper or a spreadsheet or a combination of the two but ultimately you’ll find that that system doesn’t scale. You have to be professional about it and get yourself a proper solution.

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Retail’s BIG Show
Convention: January 15-18, 2012
EXPO: January 16-17, 2012

“There is no place like New York and that’s why we’ll be back in 2012 for the NRF 101st Annual Convention & EXPO. Join us to be inspired, to connect with your colleagues, and discover new solutions to better your business.”

Come visit Erply at NRF Booth # 1783!

Click here for more info

Love Lane Market in Mattituck N.Y. Author: Progressive Grocer

As if it weren’t enough running a restaurant and sourcing products from all over the world, Avella is also the entire IT staff for Love Lane Market, taking advantage of his former IT career on Wall Street. His music and POS information is all run from servers in an office above the restaurant, and piped across into the market from below ground. The store’s music can additionally be controlled by Avella’s iPhone, through which he can also make store announcements.

Avella’s POS system is a Web-based solution from New York-based Erply that he found ideal for a small market like his, at a price he couldn’t beat: just $900 per point-of-sale station for hardware, and $99 per month for hosting and maintaining the POS software.

Indeed, wearing so many hats keeps Avella busy most of the time, and he admits to working seven days a week for much of the year. But for him, it is truly a labor of love, which after all, is quite fitting for a man with two businesses on Mattituck’s Love Lane.

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By providing companies with niche software via the Internet cloud, a group of NY startups is expanding, according to Xconomy. Technology companies are leveraging the lower cost of offering Web-based software in order to reel-in new business customers.

GramercyOne recently closed $14.5 million in a recent funding round, as the capital is intended for technology developments and new hires. GramercyOne, as well as other cloud-based software providers such as Profitably and Erply, are expanding their businesses by offering flexibility to their clients.

Erply, another provider of point-of-sale software and inventory management via the cloud, is also burgeoning. The company, whose subsidiary Point of Sale is based in NY, raised $2 million in March 2010 from a multitude of investors. “People do not like to be 100 percent Web-dependent at the register.” Robert Jacob, the US vice president of sales with Point of Sales, told Xconomy. “[For some] it is too big of a risk to have registers go down for 20 minutes.” Erply has released a Windows-based application that lets merchants operate sans an Internet connection and then update sales and inventory when a connection is reestablished, in addition to providing software from the cloud.

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ERPLY, AN ESTONIAN company, has created an innovative ecommerce solution for big box retailers as well as medium and small retailers. “Our background is in building RP (retail payment) systems for enterprise level businesses,” says Robert Jacob, Erply’s U.S. vice president of sales. “In 2009 we decided to develop an out-of-the-box solution. It just made sense that we should take the tools we customized for the big guys and revamp them for the small to mid-sized retailers.”

Using an app for the iPad, Erply’s ecommerce solution transforms the tablet computer into a cash register. An additional $50 card swiper that fits on the side of the tablet allows the retailer to use the iPad to take cradit card sales. While competing with companies such as Square and Verifone, Erply’s solution offer significant advantages over other POS systems on the market.

Erply’s system runs off an Internet “cloud,” or a collection of remote servers, not requiring the retailer to have an investment in hardware. “There’s no need for a server in the back,” Jacob says, explaining that Erply hosts the back end systems. “No information is stored on the register,” he adds. “If the iPad or cash register goes downm everyting is being pushed to the cloud, so you can pop up a browser on a computer and keep going.” The second system advantage is the robust design, which includes a complete ERP solution for big retailers. “We have a powerful suite of tools that is much deeper than the point of sale. In the web-based space, there are not amany provers who are taking it to that level,” Jacob notes. “Our back end is much more complex, including inventory management, customer databases and reports that are all combined into one and hosted in the cloud,” he adds.

See pages 40 to 44 for the full article. WebWholesaler October 2011 Edition

There are plenty of start-ups that have worked out of the spare room in someone’s house, or in the case of Google, famously out of a garage. But few actually own an entire house and garden. But Tallinn-based Erply does.

In a suburb of the city, not far from some of the brutal architectural reminders of Tallinn’s more recent past, the small grey house hosts the engineering talent of this poster child for the Estonian start-up movement.

Erply make cloud-based low-cost electronic point of sales software for shops. Although they have mainly targeted smaller shops, maybe chains of 2-3 stores, according to CTO Alari Koppelmaa, they are working with a few large chains with over 100 stores or more.

Their story is a typical one. A group of friends get together for about 10 years to do a bit of coding, building some websites, and almost by accident they stumble across the solution that has taken them for a few guys working together into, well, it isn’t really clear where they are heading.

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Kristjan Hiiemaa, the founder of Erply

“Erply is a model example that to be successful one needs a good idea, an effective team and courage to take an idea to a large market such as the United States of America,” said the President, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, yesterday in New York, when visiting the office of Erply, a business software company that was established in Estonia.

Back in 2009, Erply took part in a business idea competition, organised by Seedcamp, to test the value of their economic software model with the assistance of top international specialists, and they won. IT specialists are now describing Erply as the “Skype of economic software”.

Erply credit-card reader.

Erply, a company that specializes in retail management software, is introducing a new mobile credit card reader that will face off directly against existing readers such as those made by Square and Verifone, and indirectly against mobile payment systems such as Google Wallet.

The device, unveiled today, will transmit a customer’s encrypted credit card data to process payments, and it is designed to connect to an iPad when it launches, and will work with the iPhone within the next three months. Priced at $50, with a 1.9 percent per-transaction fee, the Erply credit card reader can also be used for near field communications (NFC) payment options, which are just coming to market.

Erply

Since the now ancient history of the 1970s, Epicor has been an industry leader in the business technology field. And today, Epicor just inched itself forward yet again, by making public its newest plans for improvements to the Epicor(R) Retail Store Point-of-Sale (POS).

That means, much like other point of sales technology just emerging on this landscape, people will be able to make convenient and quick purchases from their respective Apple or Windows-enabled mobile devices.

And, as according to the company’s breaking press release, they will also be setting up a new “dedicated retail mobility team provide targeted professional services resources to assist retailers in transforming their operations via the power of mobile technology.”