Comparison
EstateTagSale vs EstateSales.NET
EstateSales.NET is where local buyers find your sale, and EstateTagSale is where the house gets tagged, sold down and settled with the family.
Comparison
EstateTagSale vs Square: checkout is not settlement
Square is a general purpose point of sale for businesses selling the same catalog week after week, and EstateTagSale is built for one household priced, sold down and settled inside about eight days.
The short answer
Square is genuinely good at the thing it exists for, which is taking money at a counter. If your only sore spot is checkout, keep it and stop reading. What a general retail point of sale is not shaped to hold is the part of estate sale work that happens on either side of the register: a tagged catalog of one family's belongings, a discount ladder that moves prices by the day, and a statement the heirs and the attorney can both follow. EstateTagSale runs that spine, and most operators keep processing cards exactly the way they already do.
EstateTagSale and Square side by side
| What you are deciding | EstateTagSale | Square |
|---|---|---|
| What the product is built around | One household, tagged and lot numbered, that exists for a single sale and then closes out | A standing catalog a business sells from week after week |
| The pricing pass | Price room by room during setup week, flagging the few lots that deserve real research | Priced items maintained as ongoing retail inventory |
| Markdown days | A discount ladder set per sale day and applied at checkout without retagging tables | Discounting shaped for promotions on a continuing retail line |
| Sale day checkout | Ring by tag or lot number with more than one checkout running in a garage or driveway | Counter and mobile checkout designed around a fixed store or service business |
| Holds and the will call pile | Holds recorded against the lot so the Sunday shift knows what is spoken for | Approached the way a retailer handles a customer order |
| Family settlement | Itemized statement with gross, deductions and family net, ready the week of the clean-out | Reporting written for a merchant reading their own sales, not for an estate to reconcile |
| Who else reads the numbers | Heirs, executors and probate attorneys, in rows they can check | The owner and the bookkeeper |
| Card processing | You keep whatever processor is already on your phone | Payments are the center of the product |
The right hand column places Square by scope and by the sort of operator it serves, with no attempt at a priced feature list. Software shifts month to month, so read their own pages before you commit. EstateTagSale is published by MLJ, SASU and this page is written by Jimenez Julien.
Choose EstateTagSale when
- When a sibling calls asking what the china cabinet brought, you want to answer from a lot record instead of memory.
- When Saturday goes to half price, you want the ladder applied at checkout instead of four people retagging tables at seven in the morning.
- When a probate attorney reads the settlement, you want detail sitting behind every deduction line.
- When two crew members check out buyers at once, you want both stations writing into one sale record.
Choose Square when
- If checkout really is the only broken part of your weekend, the point of sale you already know is the cheaper answer.
- If you also run a booth or a shop selling the same stock all year, a continuing retail catalog serves that better than a per-house one.
- If your crew is fast on hardware they already own, retraining them in the middle of the spring season can cost more than it returns.
Checkout is one hour of a nine day job
Count the actual hours on a four bedroom house. Two days of hauling and staging, two or three days of pricing, a preview evening, then three sale days where the register is busy for maybe five hours total. Checkout is loud and stressful, so it feels like the whole job, but the work that decides whether you made money happened during the pricing pass and shows up again in the settlement.
That is the practical reason a retail point of sale can sit in an estate sale business for years without anyone noticing the gap. It performs beautifully during the loudest hour and has nothing to say about the other eight days.
Where the settlement statement actually comes from
A statement a family trusts is not a total with a percentage taken off. It is the gross by day, the deductions the contract named, and enough item detail that an heir can find the piece she is thinking about. That only exists if the price lived on a lot record from the moment the tag went on, and if the markdown that moved it is recorded next to it.
If your catalog lives on paper tags and the sales live in a card reader, the two never meet, and you spend Sunday night doing the reconciliation by hand. EstateTagSale keeps them attached, which is why the statement can go out the same week the house is emptied instead of three weeks later.
What it looks like if you keep both
Plenty of operators do. The card reader keeps taking payment because the crew is trained on it and the hardware is paid for, and the household catalog, markdown schedule and settlement run in EstateTagSale. At close of each sale day you enter the day totals by tender against the sale, and the statement builds from there.
That arrangement is honest about what each tool is for. It also means you are not making a hardware decision in April with a full sale calendar, which is the wrong month to change anything about how your crew rings up a buyer.
Questions people ask before they choose
Do I have to stop using my card reader?
No. EstateTagSale does not process payments and does not want to. Keep the reader your crew already knows and record day totals by tender against the sale.
Can I run more than one checkout station at a sale?
Yes, and on a busy Friday opening you should. Multiple crew members can ring lots into the same sale record, so the running total and the sold list stay correct while the line is still out the door.
What happens to the catalog after the house is cleared?
It closes with the job and stays attached to that estate. When a family member calls in October about a piece from a June sale, the lot, its price and its markdown day are still there to look up.
Other comparisons on estatetagsale.com
Comparison
EstateTagSale vs HiBid
HiBid suits operators moving households into timed online bidding, and EstateTagSale suits companies who still price the house by hand and open the front door on Friday.
Watch one household move through both
Reading a head to head is not the same as seeing the same four bedroom house tagged, sold down and settled two different ways. Ask for a walkthrough and we will take a sale you closed last season, price the rooms the way your crew would have, and stop at the itemized statement so the difference is a document and not an argument. It runs about twenty minutes and nobody on your crew has to learn new hardware in the middle of the season.