Consignment Store POS: Intake, Labels and Consignor Settlement

A consignment shop lives or dies on two moments: the day an item comes in and the day the consignor is paid. If intake is sloppy, you cannot find the item or prove what you owe. If settlement is sloppy, you pay the wrong amount and lose a good consignor. Retailer OS covers the selling, labeling, stock and money-handling parts well. It does not have a dedicated consignor module, so we show what to do with the tools it has and what to check in any POS.

What should happen on intake day?

Intake is the process of accepting an item from a consignor, deciding if you will sell it, pricing it and recording who owns it. It is the most important process in a consignment shop because every later problem traces back to it. A missing tag, a guessed price or an unrecorded split turns into an argument months later.

Run intake by appointment if you can. Ten minutes per bag is realistic. Walk-in intake on a Saturday ends with rushed decisions. For each item, you need the same six facts, every time:

• Who owns it. A consignor name or number, written the same way each visit.
• What it is. Brand, size, condition and any flaw, in a short description.
• The price. Set from what similar items sell for, not from what the consignor hopes.
• The split. The percentage the consignor earns, such as 50 percent, or 60 percent for higher-priced items.
• The date in. This drives your markdown and end-of-term rules.
• Where it goes. A rack, a shelf or the back room, so staff can find it.

Say no to items you cannot sell. A polite, written list of what you accept saves awkward conversations. Many shops limit consignors to a set number of items per visit, such as 20, so the floor does not fill with one person’s closet.

Write the rules into a one-page consignor agreement and have each consignor sign it at their first visit. It should state the split, the term, the markdown schedule, what happens to unsold items, how and when you pay, and what you do about damage or loss in the shop. Disputes almost always come from something that was assumed and never written down. Keep a copy with the consignor’s record, and give them a copy too.

How do you label one-off items so they can be found and sold?

In a normal store, a hundred units share one barcode. In a consignment store, every item is a unit of one. That means each item needs its own tag, and the tag has to scan at the register. A tag that cannot be read at the counter slows every sale and invites manual price entry, which is where mistakes and theft creep in.

A tag should carry the item code, the price and, for your own use, the consignor number and date in. Keep the consignor number on a part of the tag that comes off at the sale, or in the system only, so shoppers cannot see who consigned what. Print tags in batches at intake, attach them while the item is in front of you, and never tag a bag of items for later.

Retailer OS supports SKUs, barcodes and label printing, and barcode scanners at the register. You can create each consigned item as its own product, print its label and sell it by scanning. Imports help with a big first intake, and our CSV prep guide for importing products shows how to lay the file out. The consignor’s identity and split live in your own naming rules, such as a SKU prefix per consignor, because the product does not include a consignor field. Test that approach with ten items before you commit.

How do split percentages work in practice?

The math is simple. If an item sells for $40 and the consignor’s split is 50 percent, they earn $20 and the shop keeps $20. Where it gets hard is sales tax, discounts and returns. Decide each in advance and put it in the consignor agreement:

• Is the split on the sale price before or after discounts? If you run a 25 percent off sale, does the consignor take the hit? Most shops split the discounted price.
• Is tax excluded? Almost always, yes. The split applies to the price before tax.
• What happens on a return? If the item comes back within your return window, the consignor’s earning is reversed.
• Do card fees come out of the split? Some shops deduct them. Most do not. Pick one and say so in writing.

Card payments in Retailer OS run on your own Stripe account, and Stripe charges its fees directly, so a card fee is a cost to your shop that you can decide to pass on or absorb. The register also supports discounts, mixed tenders and returns and exchanges, so each of those cases leaves a record you can read back when you settle. See our post on sales tax setup for a retail POS for the tax side.

How do markdowns and end-of-term rules work?

We covered markdown schedules in our earlier consignment post. The part that deserves its own section is the end of the term. A consignment term is the period an item may stay in the shop, often 60 or 90 days. When it ends, the item is either picked up, donated or becomes the shop’s property, depending on your agreement.

Without a rule, aging stock piles up. With a rule, you run one simple routine each week: list items that hit 60 days, discount them by a set amount, and at 90 days contact the consignor. Retailer OS gives you reports and saved views, and a movement ledger that records when each item was received. Date-based automatic markdowns are not something we claim, so run this as a weekly task and keep a saved view of your oldest stock.

How do you settle with consignors and pay them?

Settlement is the statement and payment you give a consignor for what sold in a period. A good statement lists each item sold, the date, the sale price, the split and the total owed. It also lists items still in the shop and items due for pickup. Most shops settle monthly, with a minimum payout such as $10, and roll smaller balances forward.

Because Retailer OS has no consignor module, the honest answer is that you will build the statement from your sales data. The reports and full data export give you what sold. Your naming rule, such as a SKU prefix per consignor, lets you filter it. A spreadsheet then does the split. That is manageable for a small shop with a few dozen consignors. If you have hundreds, check whether a dedicated consignment tool fits better, and be clear with yourself about that before you buy.

For the payout, offer two choices. Cash or check pays the consignor the amount owed. Store credit pays more, often 10 to 20 percent more, and keeps the money in your shop. Retailer OS supports store credit as a tender, and vendor bills let you record, pay and void amounts you owe and see what is overdue. Whether you treat each consignor as a vendor for this is a decision to talk through in a demo, so you pick the approach that fits your volume.

Count the floor every month, even in a small shop. A consignment store has no supplier invoices to check against, so the only proof that an item is missing is a count. Walk each rack, scan what is there, and list what the system says you have but you cannot find. Items that vanish are your liability under most agreements, so find out early, while the trail is fresh. Our guide to running a physical inventory count gives a step-by-step method that works for one-off stock.

What does it cost, and what should you test first?

Retailer OS costs $99.99 a month per store and $9.99 a month per user seat, so an owner and one employee pay $119.98 a month. Point of sale and inventory come with each store. The online store ($99.99 a month) is an optional paid add-on, useful if you want to photograph and list your best pieces. There is no platform fee and no cut of sales, and card payments run through your own Stripe account. The pricing page has the details.

Before you decide, run a small test. Take 25 items from three pretend consignors. Tag and scan them, sell ten with a mix of cash, card and one discount, return one, and then try to produce a settlement statement for each consignor from the reports. If you can do it in under 30 minutes, the system will work for a small shop. If you cannot, you have learned that before paying for hardware.