Question : Combining retail store AND online sales – controlling inventory?
I have experience starting online stores, but for my next venture, I want to have a brick-and-mortar store as well.

If I already have a whole bunch of stock sitting around, it seems a waste not to let local customers shop directly with me. I like interacting with customers in person, but the bread-and-butter of sales comes from the internet.

Here’s the catch, though: the industry I’m in, there is a huge variety of items available. This means that I don’t usually have a whole lot of EACH item on hand. Sometimes as little as 1 or 2 of a particular item. That means that it would be impractical to have items on the retail floor plus more items in a warehouse, without investing a huge amount of money into doubling my inventory. Also I can’t afford to rent a warehouse, and a retail storefront, and employees for both locations.

I’m envisioning some way to stock the retail store and essentially use the store itself it as the online “warehouse” as well. So that when items sell on the website, they’re picked directly from the sales floor. Yes, I know doubleselling might be an issue but again, the huge variety of products makes it unlikely that two customers are buying the same exact thing at the same exact time, and I like to underestimate my inventory in the computer slightly to avoid problems like that.

Are there any software or retail programs that can integrate both a Point Of Sale AND real-time online inventory, in one system?

I’ve dallied with the thought of using Yahoo Stores for both online sales AND as the Point of Sale by running each live sale through its checkout just for the ease of tracking inventory, but I don’t savor the idea of handing more money over to Yahoo for sales which are not actually Internet based.

Anyone have some pointers on this? is there such a software out there? Or a way to integrate two different systems so they talk to each other?
retail sales software

Best answer:

Answer by Ashok
Take a look at free open source OpenBravo POS:

http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/

This is mainly being used for brick-and-mortar stores. However, this being open source, you may be able to integrate it with an online store system, with the help of a techie.