How To Run A Refill Shop: POS System Selection...

This is the third post in our series on How To Run A Refill Shop. If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out our first post — Start Your Own Refill Shop — for the very basics.

A POS (or Point of Sale) system is a crucial component of any refill shop or package-free grocery. At its most basic level, it’s what allows your refillery to accept credit cards and other forms of payment from your refill customers. Most modern POS systems offer a slew of other features, from inventory management to payroll, and each system has its own unique set of quirks and limitations... some of which are quite severe.

It’s tough to sift through it all. Especially because you usually don’t find all the quirks and fatal flaws until you have begun to use the system in your refill shop or zero-waste business.

While we don’t necessarily have the best solution for you and your particular refillery, we do have a good deal of experience to share : ) At the Re-Up Refill Shop, we have switched our POS system four times in three years! We went from Squarespace, to Square, to Shopify, and then back to Square. That involved...

• Porting all our product data between services
• Trying to stitch together reports from different platforms when we wanted to see historical sales data
• Buying new devices for checkout, etc.

It wasn’t very fun.

Hopefully you can learn from our flip flopping and choose a POS system for your refill shop a little quicker than we did for ours...

SQUARESPACE
We started with Squarespace. Why? Short answer... because everybody makes mistakes :)

Long answer is... Squarespace provides a user-friendly interface for anyone  — regardless of technical ability — to create attractive and useful websites. They’re good at this. We created our first website with them, before Re-Up was even selling products (it was a place to showcase our refillable concept and offering). Then, when we were ready to start selling our refills, we figured it would be easier to do it on Squarespace rather than recreate a new website on a different platform. Eventually, we realized that this was a bad decision. Squarespace is great with websites, but it’s newer than its competitors to E-commerce and POS. We eventually needed technical functionality that Squarespace didn’t have, so we switched to…

SQUARE
Square is a behemoth in the POS arena. It offers a robust, full-featured POS system that is used by retail shops, small grocers, and restaurants alike. It also has an E-commerce component that lets you sell your inventory online as well as in-store .

However, during peak COVID and lockdown, we were doing a lot of online refill orders, which we would deliver by bicycle, and pick up peoples’ empties along the refill route, like the classic milkman. We found that another platform, Shopify, worked much better for us as an E-commerce platform. It had a far more flexible website, which we could customize however we wanted, unlike Square, which was very limited in terms of customization. And the delivery options were easier to manage (for example: setting a local delivery radius and restricting checkout to people outside nearby zipcodes). So, for flexibility, we switched to…

SHOPIFY
We really like Shopify : ) It’s a fantastic platform overall. You can make a solid website, get E-commerce functionality that is second-to-none, see helpful reports showing your sales / analytics data, access a good ecosystem for plugins and third party applications, and pair it with a robust POS system.

However, there is one huge giant caveat... Shopify doesn’t let you sell by decimal quantities. This is a disaster for any refill shop or zero-waste market, where you’re selling nearly everything by weight (at least at Re-Up, we do). For example: 3.2 ounces of bulk toothpaste, 16.4 ounces of bulk peanut butter, etc. 

There are a few apps in the Shopify store that do allow you to sell by decimal quantity. The two most popular are:

1.  Sell Products By Weight in POS
1. This app is made by FillJoy — a great company that is all about creating tech to support refill shops (no affiliate marketing here, we just like what they do, and have had positive experiences with them when we tried out their software).
2. UnitPricer  

It’s great that there are apps to address this big issue. However, you can see from the reviews that the UnitPricer app doesn’t seem to work very well. The FillJoy app, on the other hand, has very positive reviews. So, if you already are going with Shopify, we recommend giving that one a test run. And hey, if you let them know we sent you their way, we would appreciate it : )

In our experience, we don’t like relying on third-party apps for core business functionality. Apps are never as fast as a native feature built directly into the platform. And there can be various compatibility issues as software gets updated. Plus, it’s also an extra monthly fee.

That said, every POS system has its downsides, so if you do want to give Shopify a shot, our affiliate link gives you a $1.00 trial for one month, plus $50.00 in the Shopify app store, and also supports Re-Up's ability to continue creating FREE refill shop advice on our blog: Try Shopify : )

Or, if you already have Shopify set up for your website, here’s a link to their POS system. Again, it’s discounted to $1.00 for the first month with our link.

But in our case, we decided we wanted the native decimal functionality back. And we also wanted to be able to sell CBD products, which Shopify doesn't allow. Plus, at the time we weren’t doing online ordering anymore, partly because lockdown had subsided, and partly for a number of other reasons.

So, we decided to... GO BACK TO SQUARE!

Yep…we ported all our products back to Square. And then for the next year, whenever we wanted to look at that year’s historical sales data, we had to stitch together reports from both Square and Shopify. We also had to buy all new POS devices from Square — everything from card readers, to terminals (the screen staff type on at checkout, and which also shows customers heir digital order as it gets typed), to receipt printers, to cash boxes, etc.

And… we still kept our website on Shopify. That one kind of felt crazy, but it’s just so much better than Square’s current online offering, in terms of flexibility for how you can design your refill shop's website. This means that every time we add a product in Square, we also need to create it in Shopify. One of our co-owners is a a computer programmer, and they despise this duplication. It’s inefficient and increases chances for errors where the data in one system doesn’t match the other. 

But, if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that no system is going to be perfect. And we still think switching to Square was worth it. The ability to charge by decimal has easily saved us tens of thousands of dollars. Why? You can’t overcharge a customer at checkout, so when we had Shopify, if a customer had 16.9 ounces of bulk flour, we had to charge them for 16 ounces, rather than rounding up to 17 ounces. For a product that costs five cents an ounce, this may not seem like a big deal, but some bulk refillable products can cost over a dollar an ounce. Plus, over time, it adds up to a lot, even for the cheaper products.

Some more things we like about Square...

• The payroll and time tracking integrations are really convenient for allowing staff to clock in and out, and then having all this info automatically imported into payroll. 

Some things we don’t like about Square...

• Getting good support is tough. We now do enough volume in sales to have our own Square representative, who we like. But before that, it was tough to get a real person on the line. Plus, it’s such a big company that your requests and needs may get lost. 
• The aforementioned lack of flexibility on the website.
• The lack of direct integration between a scale and the POS system. It’s inefficient for staff to read the weight on the scale and then to type that weight into the POS system. Ideally the scale would be linked directly to the POS system. Square does support this for some scales, but those scales lack features most refill shops need... most importantly, the ability to type in a custom tare weight at checkout. And the granularity on the supported scales is not super fine, meaning if something weighs 3.15 ounces, you might lose the 5.

OTHER POS SYSTEMS
A brief list of some other POS systems we've considered and our thoughts on them...

1. Clover
1. If we decided to leave Square, we would probably try this one next. We know that it’s working for some other refill shops, including Nude Foods in Boulder, Colorado and reGrocery in Los Angeles. 
2. It seems like they may have good integration with scales.
2. Octopos
1. New kid on the block. We don’t know any refills shops who use it. However, it seems intriguing. Apparently built by some programmers who also used to work in grocery. However, we did a zoom meeting demo with them, and found out that they aren’t able to dynamically input tares at checkout. Which is a deal killer. 
3. ECRS Catapult
1. Big natural food grocery stores use this. So, you know it is reliable, flexible, and can handle high volume of sales and customers. However, it’s expensive... like $50,000 expensive (or more to get set up with), if we recall correctly from when we checked it out. So, it probably doesn’t make sense if you’re just starting out.

POS SYSTEM SELECTION CONCLUSION
POS systems are tough... especially when you are considering one for your refill shop or low-waste grocery store. There are so many integrations, quirks, and so on, that it’s often hard to know how something is going to work for your refill shop, or what the major hiccups are going to be, until you’ve tried it first hand. And trying out a bunch of POS systems is expensive and time consuming.

So, if this post hasn’t answered the question for you, we recommend seeing what other people in the industry are using, and either asking them about it, or just trusting there’s a reason for it! Hopefully, this post helps you get a POS system that works for you and your soon-to-be refill shop on the first (or at least on the second) try.

See You At The Shop,
The Re-Up Refills Team : )