Setting up Square as a record store POS with price tag labels

[asimpleseller]

We've used Square in our record store for five years. It's gone well, we now have an online site, and we are slowly cataloging all of our items, so that at checkout we can type in a title or artist or other product name, and it's automatically removed from inventory during the sale.

That part is great, and it means that we are basically using Square as a POS for both our brick and mortar and our online store.

Here's where we're having trouble. The price tags! We still use handwritten, manual tags on all of our items, and it's getting tiresome. I feel like there should be a way, when I enter a new item into Square, of printing out a price tag that has the item name and price (and eventually even a barcode, so that we can just scan at checkout).

Has anyone ever done this with Square? Is it easy to do? What sort of printer will I need?

I have an iPRT thermal printer now with 4"x6" labels that we use for printing shipping labels for the online store. I assume we'll need a totally different printer for the price tags, and some other type of removable price tag sticker.

Appreciate any help or hints from anyone. I feel like making this step of printing "official" price tags, and with bar codes that we can scan at the register, is the next big step in our store's growth.

[lazydaisies · Accepted solution]

Hi @asimpleseller! 

There are a few ways you can do this. 

1. You can upgrade to Square for Retail, it has the feature of label printing and barcode scanning. 

2. You can export your Square Inventory into a spreadsheet, delete the columns you don't want (I assume you only want the record name, artist/band name and the price), and then you can load that sheet into a tool like adobe illustrator / canva that allows for bulk editing, and print to a label maker from there. It's a scrappy way of doing it, but it should do what you need. If your plan is to eventually get to a point where your labels have barcodes, at that point you will need to upgrade to Square for Retail.

Hope this helps! 

[Summer2024]

@asimpleseller @lazydaisies is right on the mark here! 

Let us know if you have any questions about her proposed solutions. 

[ehflower]

We love our little Dymo printer(great for singles or small batches) that came with our system from square for our POS system.  We also can print up multiples labels on avery or Uline labels ( we like 5160 or equivalent uline) on our regular printer or dymo 30336 for the single little printer.  As @lazydaisies stated importing a spreadsheet into your item library, creating labels with bar codes and prices is easy. We use square for retail plus.  It is super easy.

[Getonthebus]

Great info below! Yes to Square for Retail. It will be a little bit of effort on the front end as you get all of your inventory in the system but then the magic begins... you will know exactly what you have available to sell both in person and online. The printing of labels also becomes easy and if you have each item barcoded correctly - you staff can't mess up a sale. You can have employee walk in, make a sale and you don't have to panic that they sold it for the correct price, marked the correct item out of inventory or whatever...

[asimpleseller]

Ok, it sounds like we need to do Square for Retail. Quite honestly, I don't even know what that is! So that's our next step, looking into what that is and does (and how much it will cost).

We are also at the point where we are going to need employees. Right now we're a simple mom and pop and we alone handle the checkout. But we're growing quite a bit and our store is getting bigger and better and we know we need barcodes on everything so that we can have employees doing the checkout for us.

As it is, we've been entering our new inventory into the system already, so it's all on the web site now, so I kind of feel this next step isn't going to be that much of a change. Just need to get the right printer and labels, and upgrade our checkout. We have run our store for 5 years using Square on our phones for checkout. Only late last year did we upgrade from the very basic card swipe dongle to the tap to pay bluetooth reader. It's worked pretty well, but now it's time for a "real" checkout terminal and all the rest. This is going to be a huge change...

Thanks everyone!

[Getonthebus]

Square for Retail is an app that you can download. Once you have all of your items set up in your Square then you can link the Square for Retail as your cash register. Super easy to do. You can use an iPad and a Square Stand or check out some other Square Hardware and use that. Lots of options for you depending on how wild and crazy you wanna get.