Just before Christmas last year, we had the honor and privilege of being the POS system of choice for British boyband phenomenon One Direction. The boys were in New York City as part of their tour across America and teenagers from all over the tri-state area were flocking to their pop-up store in Penn Plaza, snatching up t-shirts, pajamas, keychains, and pretty much anything sporting the band’s logo.

The store was a raging success and we’re happy to say that ShopKeep stood up to the challenge of serving thousands of screaming and demanding fans. This year we’ve seen a run of similar stores and even larger scale pop-up events putting the ShopKeep POS system through its paces. To give you an idea of what this means, we asked a few of the merchants running these events to share their experiences with the ShopKeep POS community.

US Open Book Store

Rick Rennert, Director of Publishing, US Tennis Association

The US Open attracts an audience of over 700,000 devoted tennis fans out to Flushing Meadows in Queens, NYC. In the past, we’ve used a basic traditional cash register and credit card machine to run the book store. This year, however, we decided we wanted something that would also track inventory, so that was the big initial attraction of ShopKeep POS. I have 150 items of inventory so it took a little time set up in the BackOffice, but once that was done it made managing my store a whole lot easier.

The most important thing for a pop-up store like me is that ShopKeep was really easy to set-up and operate. I watched the online instructional videos and thought: that looks easy – I can do that! I also have 2-3 staff using the register, so I wanted something easy for them to use.

The customer support was also really important to me. Operating a cash register is not my main occupation, so it’s nice to know that I had a number I could call when my staff or I had questions.

Telluride Film Festival

Muffy Deslaurier, Director of Support Services

The Telluride Film Festival is a 5-day presentation of diverse film screenings hosted at multiple locations across Telluride, Colorado, attended by more than 4,000 movie lovers.

We started using ShopKeep POS a few years ago and the change was noticeable straight away. The fact that we were now accepting credit cards made it so much easier for people to start spending more money. Our average ticket size went up significantly helping us double revenue the first year and triple it the next. It’s always nice to see the transaction size going up, but perhaps the biggest win overall however, has been the ability to track inventory accurately from venue to venue and from year to year. Knowing which items to order and in what quantities has saved us thousands of dollars in potential waste and that’s going to put us on really sure footing in the years to come.

The simplicity and mobility of the system are really the other key features that make it the perfect solution for Telluride. We operate using a huge temporary staff and the training required to get people up and using ShopKeep is practically non-existent. It has saved me a huge amount of time. Also, we have a lot of outdoor merchandising spaces so we love that ShopKeep is quick to assemble in the morning and take down at night. We can store things safely overnight and be back up and running in the morning in no time at all.

Monterey Jazz Festival

Steve Culver, Director of Operations, Dreamer Media

At Dreamer Media we provide professional merchandising support to musical acts like Jackson Browne, Melissa Etheridge and Bob Dylan. We have used ShopKeep POS at numerous events, but the most recent was the Monterey Jazz Festival in California. The festival is a large-scale event attracting upwards of 35,000 visitors over one weekend. Often we operate with just small merchandising stands but at the Jazz Festival we put up a 20-ft by 100-ft tent and the whole operation is much more like a permanent store.

We’ve been supporting the Monterey Jazz Festival for 9 years and we decided to make the switch from Square last year to ShopKeep POS. At our busiest point we were putting through upwards of 350 transactions per hour across three registers, so we needed something that was more robust. We processed over $100,000 in sales over the weekend this year and we didn’t have a single problem. On top of that, we work using a lot of temporary staff so we wanted a system that was really intuitive. ShopKeep allows us to spend more time training people on customer interactions and less on working a point of sale system, which is great. It’s that marriage of reliability and simplicity that I really enjoy.

Paul Nugent

Paul Nugent

Paul Nugent is a small business advocate who uses his background in the startup space, along with his POS system expertise, to allow small business owners to make informed decisions within their specific budgets.