How to Automate RAIN POS

Rain runs the shop and the website as one system

RAIN POS, which its own site also calls Rain Retail, is a point of sale for specialty shops: yarn and quilt stores, music stores, bike shops, dive shops, jewellers, ski and outdoor stores. The kind of shop where the person at the counter knows what you are making.

What makes it unusual is that the website is not bolted on afterwards. The product record behind the till is the same record the online shop sells from, so a bolt of fabric sold on Saturday is gone from both.

Those shops do more than sell things. A music store rents band instruments to school families, repairs them on a bench out the back, and teaches lessons upstairs. A yarn shop runs classes and holds the materials for them. Rain carries all of it in one place: stock counted by the yard or the ounce, instruments tracked by serial number, work orders, rentals and class sign-ups.

Every special order has somebody waiting on it

A specialty shop sells a lot of things it does not keep. That is the model, and it is where the work is.

Somebody wants the wide backing in a colour the shop had in spring. A student needs a clarinet and the school year starts in three weeks. A repair needs a bridge from the one distributor who ships on Thursdays. Each of those becomes an order on somebody else's dealer site, and then a promise made across the counter with a date on it.

So the owner's evening goes on finding out whether any of it moved. Eleven or twelve distributor logins, each with its own orders page. A warranty claim on a manufacturer's site for an amp back for the second time. The marketplace listings, to see what the same used guitar is fetching this week. A note to ring three customers back, which does not happen, so they ring the shop instead.

RAIN POS

Special orders with an answer Where each customer's order actually is, read off the distributor's site rather than promised again from memory across the counter.

Repairs that report themselves Parts tracked to the day they arrive and finished bench jobs collected into a call list, with the message written and waiting.

Restocked before the class The yarn, strings and kit a booked class needs, checked against the shelf the week it fills rather than the week it starts.

Rain covers the counter, the website and the repair bench

Rain automates a surprising amount of a small shop, and most shops use about half of it.

The e-commerce website shares the same inventory as the till, so selling online is not a second job with a second stock count. Work Order Management handles repairs, with job types you set up once, several work orders on one transaction, and a status to look up while a customer is on the phone. Rental Management covers rent-to-own with recurring billing, online contracts and rental credits, which is precisely how a school band programme works. Retail Marketing sends text order notifications, service check-ins and class reminders, automated emails, on-sale alerts and birthday coupons, plus loyalty points, gift cards and review requests. Vendor catalogues fill in product data and images so new lines are not typed in by hand. There are connections to Shopify, QuickBooks Online, Notions Marketing and Clientbook, and to Reverb for music stores.

Every one of those runs on what is inside Rain, or on a partner it has already connected to.

The dozen distributors a shop actually buys from are not on that list. Their sites hold the answers that matter: whether the order shipped, when the backorder is due, whether the warranty claim was accepted. Rain has no way in.

A shop this size can still know where every order is

Those distributor sites get opened every morning, and not by the owner at nine at night. The promises made across the counter start holding up.

Every open special order carries a status against the customer waiting for it, checked each morning, so the call about the clarinet happens before the school year starts rather than after it. A backorder that slipped gets flagged the day the date moves, leaving room to source it elsewhere.

The bench gets the same treatment: parts ordered against each ticket and followed to the day they arrive, and finished jobs collected into a call list with the message already written. Warranty claims lodged while the paperwork is fresh, which is where most of the expired ones went.

Used prices checked on the marketplaces before a trade-in gets valued, so the number offered over the counter is this week's number. Class rosters checked against the materials each class needs, with the shortfall ordered while it can still arrive.

Keep the customer contact yours. Checking a portal and building an order list can run overnight on its own. Ringing somebody to say their instrument is ready is half the reason they shop with you, and it stays a person's job.

Small shops do not get a back office

Nobody is hiring a purchasing assistant for a shop with four staff and a repair bench. So the checking either happens in the evening or it does not happen at all.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens each distributor's dealer site, finds the orders that are yours, reads the status, and brings it back next to the customer and ticket it belongs to.

Runs happen on a schedule you set, in your own private environment, and you can watch one and stop it part-way through. Anything that goes to a customer or commits an order is drafted and waits for you.

Each workflow below is already built, and says which sites it opens and what it brings back.