Seattle bakery The Confectional is now able to better understand its customers and stock its stores after switching over to a mobile point-of-sale system.

The cheesecake shop implemented ShopKeep’s mPOS in May 2012 and has since been able to better stock its four locations based on consumer preferences and other data from the mobile system. For instance, The Confectional dropped its coconut cherry chocolate and cookies and mint flavors after sales were not great for those specific cakes.

“ShopKeep has helped us greatly with our wholesale accounts and keeping track of those,” said Destiny Sund, co-owner of The Confectional, Seattle.

“It allows us to keep track of each customer in the system so that we can see who is ordering and how much, and this holiday season it’s been completely off the hook,” she said. “So we can easily track our biggest wholesalers and catering companies and see exactly what they’re ordering and what flavors they’re ordering.

“Our wholesale business has increased 35 percent this year over last year. ShopKeep helps us track it.”

Confectional upgrade
Before implementing ShopKeep’s POS, The Confectional used standard traditional cash registers. This meant that they did all tracking and managing by hand.

For instance, if someone bought a specific cheesecake, the register only took note of a general cheesecake as opposed to the specific flavor. After installing ShopKeep, the bakery was able to track individual flavors to see how each one was selling.

At first The Confectional tested out the mPOS in one store, but soon after the owners decided to roll it out in all four locations.

One capability that The Confectional has incorporated is the ability to send its customers receipts via email.

The owners are also able to check in on their shops remotely to see how sales are going.

Be prepared
The mobile POS helps The Confectional’s owners better prepare for demand. Each cheesecake is handmade and take 24 hours to make, so the owners can now better stock their shelves based on purchasing history and data, saving themselves the time and effort that went into making cakes that never got purchased.

Additionally, ShopKeep keeps track of The Confectional’s beverages and notifies them when supplies are getting low, so they can make a new order from Coca Cola.

The Confectional is also able to leverage information from ShopKeep to analyze the busiest time of day in different locations to better manage inventory.

For instance, the bakery now knows that the Single Mini Cheesecake is the best-selling cake in all four locations and that their busiest hours are right after lunch through 4 p.m. The owners can also tell that more than 95 percent of customers take their beverages to go, so they can better prepare in terms of the cups they buy.

“We knew that we need to upgrade our systems because we opened two locations in one year alone, and those old registers weren’t doing the job, so we looked into Dinerware, we looked into Square, Quickbooks,” Ms. Sund said.

“I found some YouTube videos put out by ShopKeep in my Google search — I just kind of stumbled upon it,” she said. “I watched the video and went, ‘Woah this could definitely work for our business,’ and it looked so easy.

“I’m a great baker, but not necessarily a great technical implementer. It looked like something I could do.”

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York