Software for Vendor Malls: How The Emporium Community Runs on Collaboration and ConsignCloud

Nestled in a historic J.C. Penney building on Main Street in Hendersonville, NC, The Emporium on Main is a three-story vendor mall with around 100 individual businesses under one roof, from local artisans and vintage dealers to specialty boutiques. Every corner offers unique wares, curated by independent vendors pursuing their passions. How does Emporium on Main coordinate nearly a hundred entrepreneurs, track thousands of unique items, and keep the spirit of community alive? The answer is equal parts collaboration and technology—specifically, ConsignCloud.

In this blog, we spotlight the vendor mall Emporium on Main and reveal how they tackled the pain points common to vendor malls. Through the eyes of a key vendor and the Emporium’s IT lead, we’ll explore the real-world challenges of running a vendor mall, the creative solutions required, and how ConsignCloud has made it possible. Along the way, we’ll share insights into how successful vendor malls operate, and how Emporium on Main’s communal approach, powered by the right tools, keeps their vendors happy and business booming.

A Community Built on Collaboration

Walk into the Emporium on Main on any given afternoon and you’ll feel the buzz of community. Shoppers weave through aisles of artistically arranged booths as vendors chat and share tips with each other. This welcoming, collaborative atmosphere is  by design. Jenny Breedlove, who co-founded the Emporium on Main with a close friend in 2023, knew from day one that the key to success would be a decentralized, communal management style. “Everything that you see done here, the vendors did,” Jenny says, gesturing at the freshly painted walls and neatly organized shelves. “They painted, they volunteered their time and worked… I could have never done it without them.”

Indeed, when the Emporium moved into its larger 12,000 sq. ft. location, dozens of vendors showed up after-hours with paintbrushes and tools, transforming the space in just two weeks.

This ethos of shared success defines the Emporium’s management structure. Rather than a top-down hierarchy, the mall operates more like a cooperative. Vendors have significant autonomy – they design their booths, set prices, manage their inventory – while the mall provides the space, a unified point-of-sale, and overarching support. They’ve been able to achieve a balance of freedom and group coordination. As Emporium on Main discovered, achieving that balance meant confronting some classic vendor mall challenges head-on.

Vendor Mall Needs and Pain Points

Running a multi-vendor retail space is not like running a typical store. Each vendor is essentially a small business with its own inventory, style, and needs—it can be logistical chaos. Emporium on Main’s experience echoes that of vendor malls across the country. Some of the most common pain points they faced include:

• Inventory Management Mayhem: Vendors adding their own items is essential. Tracking what’s sold, what’s in stock, and to whom each item’s sale proceeds belong is a core challenge. A standard POS system isn’t built for slicing and dicing sales by vendor. Without the right system, inventory management can quickly descend into confusion. Vendor malls need a way to manage sales, stock levels, and payouts per vendor without mixing things up.
  
  
  

• Coordinating 100 Bosses: Unlike a single-owner shop, a vendor mall has dozens of independent stakeholders. Communicating store policies, event schedules, or even simple things like holiday hours becomes an exercise in coordination. Good communication is vital to avoid misunderstandings and keep everyone on the same page. Mall operators must efficiently share updates and address questions for tens of vendors at once. It’s easy for messages to slip through the cracks without a central channel.
  
  
  

• The Labeling Nightmare: Walk through Emporium on Main and you’ll notice every product has a price tag or barcode that identifies the vendor. Creating and attaching those labels is tedious but crucial – it’s how sales get tracked to the right vendor’s account. In the past, some malls made vendors handwrite price tags with vendor ID codes or use clunky in-store tagging machines. Emporium vendors longed for a simpler way to print professional labels (with barcodes and all) from home, so they could tag items before ever coming in. This capability was high on their wishlist.
  
  
  

• POS and Payments Juggling: At checkout, a customer might buy a vintage lamp from Vendor A, a sweater from Vendor B, and a jar of local honey from Vendor C – all in one transaction. The mall’s point-of-sale system must split that single sale among multiple vendors’ accounts, apply each vendor’s commission or rent fee, and later help pay out each vendor their share. Many small malls start out using generic POS solutions like Square, only to find they need manual workarounds for multi-vendor sales. Integration between a user-friendly POS (like Square’s interface) and a back-end that handles vendor-specific accounting is a game-changer. Without integration, owners end up pulling separate reports and doing a lot of math to settle up with vendors each month.
  
  
  

• Vendor Retention & Morale: A vendor mall is only as good as its vendors. High turnover – vendors leaving due to low sales or frustration – can quickly hurt the business. Emporium on Main’s leadership knew they had to keep vendors happy: that means timely payouts, transparent sales info, fair rent, and a supportive community. One best practice is giving vendors real-time visibility into their sales and inventory, so they feel empowered rather than left in the dark. When vendors can literally watch their daily sales online, it not only builds trust but motivates them to keep their booths stocked – a win-win for the mall.
  
  
  

These challenges are common across U.S. vendor malls, from antique co-ops to craft marketplaces. Emporium on Main encountered each of them in its first year.

Turning Chaos into Order: The ConsignCloud Solution

By early 2024, just a few months after opening, Emporium on Main’s management realized that passion and teamwork alone wouldn’t solve every operational tangle. They needed better systems. That’s when Kay spearheaded the search for a software solution purpose-built for multi-vendor environments. The team evaluated several platforms, but one stood out: ConsignCloud – a cloud-based consignment/resale system that had a reputation for being vendor-mall friendly.

“One of our requirements was continuing to use our Square registers, which limited the software we could use,” Kay recalls. “The first time I came across ConsignCloud, I opened the chat window, and someone responded within 20 minutes. That was wonderful — the other software we used would take days to respond.”

In fact, many features Emporium on Main was looking for are exactly what modern consignment software emphasizes for multi-seller environments. ConsignCloud promised to centralize their checkout and record-keeping, while still giving each vendor control over their own stock – a perfect fit for a decentralized, booth-style marketplace.

Implementing a new system can be intimidating, especially in a busy store. But ConsignCloud’s onboarding proved smooth. The first hurdle was data migration – moving existing inventory records and vendor accounts into ConsignCloud. Fortunately, the software includes flexible import tools. Kay simply exported their spreadsheets of dealer data and inventory, then uploaded them into ConsignCloud’s tables.

“I had a lot of support from the support team of ConsignCloud to take our old data that we had and convert it to be able to import it into ConsignCloud and to set the vendors up.”

ConsignCloud allows bulk importing of accounts and items via CSV, making it easy to migrate from an old system or spreadsheet. For Emporium on Main, this meant they didn’t have to re-type 5,000 item tags – a huge time saver.

Next, ConsignCloud enabled the Vendor Portal – an online login where each vendor could see their sales in real time, run reports, and even enter inventory. Emporium’s management configured permissions so that vendors could add new items themselves from home (with admin oversight). This was a game-changer. Suddenly, instead of dropping off handwritten inventory lists or emailing the manager to add 10 new products, vendors like Dish Girl could log in from their couch and input their latest finds directly into the system. “I uploaded 50 new SKUs in ConsignCloud from home last night,” the Dish Girl owner tells us, “and by the time I drove to the store this morning, my items were already in the system and ready to sell. I even printed all my price tags beforehand.”

Indeed, at-home label printing became one of the most beloved features. ConsignCloud supports integrated tag printing to standard label printershelp.consigncloud.com, meaning vendors can generate barcode tags that include their vendor ID, item info, and price – all formatted neatly – and do it on-site or remotely. Emporium on Main provided each vendor with a template and guidelines, and off they went. No more Sharpie markers on tags, no more waiting in line to use the one store tagging gun. As one might expect, this significantly reduced errors and sped up item intake. Vendors embraced the freedom to tag their merchandise on their own time, ensuring everything hits the sales floor priced and coded correctly.

A vendor's dashboard for adding items and printing lables

Square at the Front, ConsignCloud at the Back

One innovative decision Emporium on Main made was to keep the familiar Square POS at their front checkout, while letting ConsignCloud handle the heavy lifting in the back office. Square’s sleek card readers and simple interface are great for ringing up customers – many small retailers love its ease of use and low cost. However, out-of-the-box Square isn’t designed for multi-vendor revenue splitting (a fact many consignment shops lament on Square’s forums).

ConsignCloud solved this by integrating with Square’s platform. “ConsignCloud acts as the brain behind the scenes,” Kay explains. The integration allows Emporium to run sales through Square at the register, while ConsignCloud manages the inventory and vendor accounting in parallel. When a clerk scans an item’s barcode at checkout, Square processes the payment, but ConsignCloud instantly recognizes which vendor’s item was sold and logs it under their account. According to the ConsignCloud help center, the system will even mark items sold in Square as sold in ConsignCloud automatically and calculate each consignor/vendor’s split as expected. The result? Emporium gets the best of both worlds: a fast, familiar checkout for customers and a robust consignment ledger for vendor payouts.

“The Square–ConsignCloud combo has been a lifesaver,” Kay says. “Our staff needed almost no training to use Square at checkout, and ConsignCloud quietly handles all the behind-the-scenes tracking. At the end of the month, we generate each vendor’s sales report with one click instead of reconciling 30 days of receipts by hand.” 

In fact, ConsignCloud automatically generates comprehensive vendor sales and payout reports, saving countless hours. For Emporium’s owners, this means more time can be spent on big-picture tasks, like marketing and events, rather than number-crunching.

Check out our blog on consignor and vendor retention

Empowering Vendors & Enhancing Retention

Perhaps the most profound impact of the new system has been on vendor satisfaction and retention. With ConsignCloud in place, Emporium on Main’s vendors feel more in control and informed about their small businesses. They can check their sales any time via the portal (and yes, many admit they check daily, with the same excitement as monitoring a social media feed). If an item sells in the morning, the vendor might get a notification or see it in their dashboard by afternoon.“Now that vendor reports are being emailed out, people are seeing what they’re selling more easily,” Kay explains. “It’s been a big improvement, especially for those who want to track how their booth is doing each month.” This real-time transparency keeps vendors engaged and proactive. Shoppers notice too – vendors at Emporium on Main are constantly refreshing their displays with new stock because they know what’s selling.

Communication has improved as well. Kay set up ConsignCloud to send out automated vendor reports by email every two weeks, summarizing each vendor’s sales and any payouts due. This regular cadence of communication replaces what used to be sporadic, manual updates. “Previously, some vendors would keep their own tally and then we’d compare notes at month’s end – it was inefficient,” Kay recalls. Now, everyone gets the same consistent report, which reduces confusion and builds trust. If there’s ever a discrepancy or question, both the vendor and management have the data at their fingertips to resolve it.

From an operational standpoint, intake of new inventory is faster and more accurate. Emporium’s vendors have embraced entering their items into ConsignCloud either from home or at the in-store kiosk. The intuitive item entry form (with custom fields for things like booth location or item category) minimizes errors and ensures each item is tied to the correct vendor and ready to scan at checkout. The system’s support for various commission structures also allows Emporium to accommodate different deals – for instance, a few vendors on lower commission because they help staff the store, others on a standard split – all configured once in the system. No manual calculation needed; ConsignCloud applies the right terms automatically on each sale.

All these improvements directly contribute to vendor happiness. When vendors don’t have to worry about whether they’re getting paid correctly, or whether their items were tracked properly, they can focus on merchandising and sourcing great products. Vendor retention at Emporium on Main has been stellar – most of the original 45 vendors who joined at launch are still there, and the mall has grown to over 90 vendors today. New sellers often join by word of mouth, hearing that Emporium on Main is “a well-oiled machine” despite its size. In an industry where some antique malls struggle with dealer turnover, Emporium’s blend of community atmosphere and tech-powered organization stands out. As one industry veteran notes, giving dealers autonomy and real-time info keeps them invested in your success. Emporium on Main is living proof of that principle.

“I’ve been in other vendor malls where I had no idea if I sold anything until the end of the month,” the Dish Girl owner reflects. “Here, I get texts from loyal customers and I can immediately check if the item they wanted sold today or if it’s still available. That level of instant knowledge is something I never knew I needed – but now I can’t live without it. It makes me a better seller and keeps me excited to be here.”

A New Era for Vendor Malls

The story of Emporium on Main shows that even a 100-vendor marketplace can run smoothly with the right approach. By fostering a communal environment where vendors feel ownership – and by equipping that community with a purpose-built software like ConsignCloud – the Emporium has created a shopping experience that’s both charmingly old-school and impressively modern. They’ve demonstrated that the decentralized management of a vendor mall isn’t a liability; it’s a strength, if you have systems to support it. Vendors manage their own inventory and booths, bringing immense creativity and variety, while ConsignCloud ties everything together in the background – from barcode labels to sales splits – so that the customer experience is as seamless as any single-brand store.

Emporium on Main’s first year has been a rousing success. Sales are strong, vendors are happy (and bringing in more vendors – the mall is expanding to a third floor soon), and the local community has embraced this one-of-a-kind destination. Start a free trial of ConsignCloud today