How a popular POS provider's promises didn’t meet expectations
In 2023, Bexley Natural Market found itself under new management, and one of the first orders of business was to modernize its POS system.
Toast was adopted by other stores in the area, and after a visit from a sales rep, they decided to implement the system, too.
However, it quickly became apparent that Toast was not a good fit for grocery stores, as they claimed.
“Toast made a lot of promises on how it would help our business out, which we later found out was not necessarily the case.”
With stock that’s constantly changing, adding new inventory on the fly with Toast was counterintuitive — and it was difficult for John and General Manager Charles Ott to keep track of category sales and other essential data.
Checkout with Toast was also slower than expected, with weight-based sales having to be handled manually with a calculator. Most importantly, Toast didn’t have a built-in way to track co-op membership and membership discounts.
Not only was Toast more complicated to use, it was more expensive. After three years, leadership decided something had to change.
Making the switch to a cost-effective system built for grocery and markets
Bexley Natural Market found Markt POS after researching grocery-specific systems. Not only did they find Markt POS has the inventory and membership features they needed, but changing POS systems would also save them hundreds of dollars a month. Better yet, with Markt POS, they could keep using most of their existing hardware.
The switch to Markt POS was carefully coordinated so that the store didn’t need to shut down, and both John and Charles praise the support team at Markt POS for the smooth transition.
“The transition to Markt POS was very smooth. Our onboarding person was extremely helpful and very generous with their time. They made sure that we had everything ready and set to go before we went live. Any little problems we found after that, the Markt POS team was able to help us right away and get everything figured out for us.”
Easily managing unique local products and weight-based sales with Markt POS
Switching to Markt POS had an immediate positive impact on Bexley Natural Market’s leadership, staff, and customers.
Where Toast struggled with managing nonstandard inventory, Markt POS drastically simplified intake. Markt POS is designed for adding unique inventory, tracking weight, and setting pricing on the fly. “We have a very dynamic inventory,” John explains. “It changes every day — it'll change several times this week — so the ability to easily put inventory into the system is very important.”
Integrated weight-based sales also ensure pricing is accurate and time is saved at the register. It also supports bulk sales, like selling 25 pounds of grain — something the store’s customers often need.
“Keeping track of inventory when you're selling things by weight is tricky because it’s not going to be exact.
Now, I can take these bulk bins back to a scale, and sit there with my laptop, and weigh them — and make sure that what's showing in the inventory matches the actual weight that we have. The ability to be flexible with our inventory, the ability to put new things in and take things out has been really, really helpful.”
Improving the shopping experience with simple membership and sales history
As a co-op, Bexley Natural Market relies on memberships to stay profitable and connect with their community. Markt POS’ built-in loyalty management makes it easy to track co-op members and apply their standard 5% discount. Customers also enjoy earning redeemable points the more they shop.
Better yet, Markt POS lets the store track customers’ sales history to get insights into shopping habits and quickly answer customers’ questions.
“We track all of our sales data as well as our members' sales. A lot of times, we'll get people who say, ’I bought this thing here six months ago, but I can't remember the flavor or the brand.’ So it's great for us to be able to look back at all of their past transactions and find information like that.”
Making better, data-driven decisions
As a board member, John notes how important it is for him to get visibility into specific sales data. With Markt POS, he can easily access daily sales reports, top sellers, and department-level reports.
The reports and dashboard are extremely helpful for monitoring how effective their social media marketing is, what times of day people are shopping, what they’re buying, and more key metrics.
“As a board member, I have fiduciary responsibility for the store. So I take a deep look at the sales data, what we're selling or not selling, and what the margins are. Markt POS also makes it very easy to look at what's taxable and what's not taxable because in this particular county, the sales tax is 8%, which is high.”
Taking a beloved co-op online
With the store running smoother than ever, Bexley Natural Market is looking to its next big chapter: online sales. Using Markt POS’ e-commerce integrations, they launched their first e-commerce site, offering delivery and shipment for the first time.
“We're very excited to launch our e-commerce platform. We have been wanting to get that going for over a year now and I think that will drastically help us. People like the convenience of being able to just shop online and pick it up at their convenience because people are busy,” Charles says.
John was also surprised by how easy the website was to build and setup for a nontechnical user, thanks to the helpful tutorials.
