The shop system for independent bookstores — point of sale, inventory, special orders and used-book trade-ins in a single browser tab, with no setup fee to get started.
Independent bookshops run on software built for a different era. The category incumbent wants a setup fee and a training week before the first sale rings through, and its workflows assume a back office the average shop does not have. The alternative is worse: a generic retail POS that treats a book like any other SKU, with no idea what an ISBN is, no concept of a special order, and nothing to say about a customer walking in with a box of used paperbacks.
So the counter ends up split across three places. Sales go through the register, special orders live in a spreadsheet or a stack of slips, and trade credit gets written in a notebook that only one person really understands. Every one of those is a place for a customer's order to quietly disappear — and the shop only finds out when they call to ask where their book is.
DerMar built BookForge around the way a bookshop really works instead of around generic retail. Inventory is ISBN-aware, so a title carries the author, format and edition data booksellers actually search on. Special orders are first-class: the request, the order to the distributor, the arrival and the customer pickup are one tracked thread, not a slip of paper.
Trade-ins are built in, with store credit posted straight to the customer's account instead of a notebook. Purchasing is driven by real sell-through rather than a hunch about what moved last season. And all of it runs in the browser — the counter, the back office and the laptop at home are the same shop, with nothing to install and no dedicated terminal to buy.
Rings up sales from any browser. No dedicated terminal, nothing to install, no per-lane licence.
Search and stock by ISBN, author, title and format, with the metadata booksellers actually use.
Request, order, arrival and pickup tracked as one thread — so nothing dies on a paper slip.
Buy, price and shelve used books, with store credit posted to the customer account.
Build purchase orders from what actually sold, instead of guessing at the reorder.
What they bought, what they ordered and what credit they are holding, on one record.
An independent bookshop should not need three systems and a notebook to sell a book. BookForge is the counter, the stockroom and the special-order desk in one place — and nobody pays a setup fee to find out whether it fits.
If the real answer to "where is that order?" lives in someone's handwriting, let us talk about replacing that with software.
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