Specialty grocer Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace, headquartered in Melville, New York, turned to ECRS for its point-of-sale solutions about three years ago. Tom Waibel, VP of technology for Uncle Giuseppe’s, said the change occurred just prior to him joining the grocer.
Uncle Giuseppe’s is a family-owned independent whose 11 locations all feature kitchens, which prepare a variety of foods daily. This includes fresh mozzarella, pizza, pasta and a variety of deli and bakery goods. Most locations also make fresh bread daily.
The stores range in size from 20,000-30,000 square feet for the older locations to 50,000-plus square feet for newer ones.
An emphasis is placed on the produce departments, as the family started in produce distribution before moving into retail. 
Waibel said the company utilizes ECRS’s CATAPULT software for its POS across all registers at its 11 locations. About a year ago, Uncle Giuseppe’s switched to CATAPULT WebCart as its online purchasing platform.
According to ECRS, WebCart is an e-commerce solution that allows brick-and-mortar stores to seamlessly step into the digital realm without giving up their fundamental rights of owning their transaction data.
Within WebCart, Waibel noted the company also uses ECRS’s integration with Red Pepper for the company’s digital circulars. The circulars are clickable and integrated into WebCart, he said.
Red Pepper’s offering consolidates customer-centric marketing and equips retailers with a 360-degree view of shopper insights and analytics by integrating marketing and sales data between ECRS’s CATAPULT and Red Pepper.
Uncle Giuseppe’s also is accessing another ECRS integration, CoupDog, for digital coupons through WebCart. Waibel noted that this year the retailer will be using WebCart for e-gift cards, as well.
This integration allows ECRS retailers access to CoupDog’s blockchain-powered coupon platform.
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Uncle Giuseppe’s also employs ECRS’s Cognition solution for reports, along with Artemis, its AI machine learning component. It uses Gateway, ECRS’s EDI platform, for ordering and receiving.
Waibel, who has worked in the IT world for many years, said he likes that once ECRS builds an integration, its customers can easily activate it.
“Once it’s built and it’s available, you’re up,” he said. “Your time from starting to uptime is drastically faster than I’ve had with pretty much any other software vendor in my past, because they’ve already done the partnership with whoever that vendor is that they’re working with. We had the clickable circulars, once we started up with them, within two weeks.
“I’ve found that all of the integrations, once they’re done, are very quick and work very well. Same thing with Gateway and the EDI.”
Using the Red Pepper digital circular as an example, Waibel said it would probably take one to two months minimum with another company.
“It was because the integration was all done. They knew what they were doing,” he said. “There was some configuration between ECRS, ourselves and Red Pepper, and once that was done … we went pretty much from two weeks, from starting with them, to actually having a live circular on our website.”
He also noted that many of ECRS’s integrations are customizable. “When they’ve already built the integration, it just makes life so much easier because you can do everything that much quicker,” Waibel said.
Looking ahead
Waibel said Uncle Giuseppe’s also is looking at ECRS’s AutoScale solution. It currently is working with two of the scales, and he hopes to pilot a program in the first quarter.
“It would be a larger project because we have, through all of our stores, upward of 250 scales,” he said.
Also, he noted that WebCart has a feature for multiple order types. Uncle Giuseppe’s currently uses Shopify for its gift baskets and ships through UPS or another shipper other than the postal service.
“We are hoping to take advantage of [ECRS’s] ShipStation integration for that line of business and also bring that into WebCart,” Waibel said.
The grocer also is beginning to use ECRS’s CATAPULT Passport API, which was released in the last year.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of different software companies through the years … The one thing I do like with ECRS is that once they built an integration, and most of the things that they release, I don’t find a lot of issues with stuff,” Waibel said. “They’re also very available if you need help with anything, whatever that issue might be that comes up.
“I’ve liked working with them. I find them to be a very easy company to work with and a very helpful company. I just find them to be a good organization in general.”