POS and retail

What this category covers

Selling face to face and running the shop behind it: the till itself, payment hardware, stock, staff, customer records and reporting.

Requirements differ enormously by trade. A cafe needs speed, modifiers, a kitchen ticket and a tab left open. A clothing shop needs sizes, colours, returns and a fitting room. A workshop needs quotes, parts, labour and a job history. Products specialise more than the category name suggests.

Selling online belongs in e-commerce. Stock across warehouses sits in inventory, and card processing generally is payments.

Speed at the counter is the product

Everything else is secondary to how long a transaction takes when there is a queue.

Watch a full sale during a trial: finding an item, applying a discount, splitting a payment, and issuing a receipt. Count the taps. A design that adds three seconds per sale costs a busy shop hours every week and irritates both staff and customers.

Returns and exchanges deserve the same test, since they are more complicated than sales and are usually handled worse. So are the awkward cases: a refund to a card that is no longer present, a sale voided after the drawer opened, a customer who wants half on one method and half on another.

Hardware, and what it will really cost

• Terminals, whether a tablet, a dedicated till or a phone.
• Card readers, usually tied to a specific processor.
• Receipt printers and drawers, often reusable from an older system.
• Scanners and label printers, if you carry more than a handful of lines.
• Network and backup connection, because the shop stops when it fails.

Card readers are the piece most likely to be locked to a vendor. Confirm compatibility with hardware you already own before comparing software prices, since replacement can exceed a year of subscription.

Offline behaviour belongs here too. A till that stops selling when the connection drops is a business risk, not an inconvenience, and the only reliable way to check is to disconnect it and try.

Behind the counter

The back office is where a point of sale becomes a retail system.

Stock is the core: counts that stay accurate, purchase orders, supplier records, and variants handled properly for anything sold in sizes or colours. Multi-location retailers need transfers and a single view across shops.

Staff features matter next. Individual logins rather than a shared code. Permissions covering discounts, voids and refunds. A record of who processed what. That record settles disputes and deters the quiet losses every retailer eventually meets.

Customer records and loyalty are worth having when repeat business matters, and worth ignoring when it does not.

Connecting the shop to everything else

A shop that also sells online needs one stock figure, not two.

Check how quickly a sale at the counter reduces online availability, whether products are managed in one place, and how returns from either channel are handled. Systems that synchronise hourly will oversell during a busy weekend.

Accounting is the other connection. Daily takings, tax breakdowns, tips and payment method splits should reach the ledger without anybody retyping a summary, and the reconciliation should match what the bank actually deposited.

What it costs to run

Software is charged per till or per location, with tiers by feature and sometimes by turnover. Payment processing is separate unless the vendor requires its own, in which case the rate is part of the software decision.

Add hardware, support, and any per-location fee for reporting across shops. Then compare on annual total at your real transaction volume rather than on the monthly headline, which is the arithmetic set out in what pricing pages hide.

Trial it during a busy period

Point of sale software demonstrates well in a quiet room and reveals itself on a Saturday afternoon.

If a trial is possible, run it during real trading with real staff rather than a manager clicking through screens. The measures worth watching are how long a transaction takes, how often somebody has to ask for help, and what happens when a customer changes their mind halfway through.

Test the disruptions deliberately: a card reader that disconnects, a network drop, a receipt printer out of paper, a refund on a payment method that is no longer present.

Then check the end of day. Cashing up, reconciling takings against the bank, and producing the figures your accountant expects are what a shop does every single evening, and software that makes that awkward will annoy somebody three hundred times a year.