Many store owners come at this problem in the wrong way. They look at the problems of starting a business and prioritize them according to what they think is going to be the most important, and usually the cash register falls into a low priority category, when in fact it is one of the most important choices you make. While a wide selection of products is important, while a good looking store, well organized, with a comfortable atmosphere is important, the trouble that a bad Point of Service can cause makes it at least as important as all the other factors.

The Point of Service, or Point of Sale, software and hardware you choose is going to either make your life better, or worse, depending on a few main features:

The quality of the hardware
Stability of the software
Customizability and Features of the Software
Ongoing development

Quality of the Point of Service/Sale Hardware

In the POS industry, the common wisdom (you get what you pay for) is usually false. Expensive Point of Service systems are not necessarily better, neither are cheap POS systems. There is no real standard for comparison, mainly because it is a small and specialized field with few companies servicing the industry. The sad truth is, with very few exceptions, Point of Sale hardware is universally sub-standard and overpriced. POS Stations, even those sold by well established manufacturers like Toshiba are often made with left-overs from 10 years ago. Be prepared for USB ports that die when you look at them wrong, wide and pointless support for Serial Devices, low cheap RAM(512 mb), and second rate hard drives.

When we first started servicing the Retail and Restaurant market, many of our customers wanted to get our system working on their existing hardware due to the large expense of each system, paying upwards of $4,000 per system. We said sure, and soon enough they delivered their Toshiba systems to our door for installation. When we opened them up, we almost cried. In order to even install onto the system, we had to find and download an older version Linux that would support the antique hardware and drivers. In order to support their serial product scanners we had to write a custom C application to read the serial input and convert it to X11 events. All in All, it was truly a learning experience.

What we learned from this experience is that buying a self-contained POS station is just about the worst choice you could make. You are better off purchasing a desktop computer and the software independently and installing it yourself, or finding someone to install it for you. Your local computer shop could be of help in this.

The main selling point for self-contained POS systems, or custom POS systems is size. But people often forget that there are many Mini computers, or Mini towers that you can purchase for 1/5th the price. Also, the screen and keyboard have long coords, so it is easy to stash the main computer under a counter, and only have the monitor and input devices showing.

The other thing to consider is upgradeability and serviceability. If something breaks, which it always does, you can take your desktop computer to any shop and get the hard drive, ram, or USB ports replaced, with a self-contained POS, almost everything is fixed(called onboard) and if it goes, you’ll have to buy another complete Point of Service system.

The average life expectancy of a desktop computer is maybe 2 years, though ideally you would upgrade it about every 8 months to increase its life span. With POS hardware, the average life expectancy (from the customers standpoint) is about 10 years. Realistically, the best you can hope for is about 4-5 years before things start to go wonky and you have to start accepting reduced performance and increased amounts of downtime.
Stability of the Point of Service/Sale Software

This is usually not much of a problem, while software often has bugs, when it comes to Point of Service/Sale, the functions needed on a day to day basis are constant, once the bugs in these features get ironed out, you can generally count on some degree of stability, or consistency. Even if things are wrong, they will usually be consistently wrong.

As a general rule, older software is more stable, but less feature rich. Newer software is usually slightly less stable, but has all kinds of whizbang features. Depending on what you need for your business, and how you plan to expand, you may or may not need new and innovative features, you may prefer old stable software.

The downside with old, stable software, is that it was or is usually designed to deploy on older hardware, and older operating systems. There are some DOS based Point of Service/Sale software that is uber stable, but you are limited to running it inside a DOS emulator most of the time.

As a general rule, clinging to the old will generally get you into trouble down the line because you will end up with lots of sales data stored in obscure proprietary formats, so that when you are eventually forced to update to a new system, which you will have to at some point, you will have to keep that system around in the back of the store for awhile in case you need access to that old sales data.
Customizability and Features of the Point of Service/Sale Software

Customizability comes down to 2 main methods of changing the behavior of the software. The first is user customizability. It has to do with how many checkboxes and dropdown lists the software has that lets you alter the way the system makes calculations or displays or prints sales data. The second method is how easy is it for you to pay someone to add in some new feature to the “code” of the software.

For non-open source software, which is about 99.9% of all POS systems, this generally means that you can only pay the software vendor to modify the “codebase”, and if they will (most actually won’t), will it be prohibitively expensive to do so?

Many new POS products are written for either Windows(via the C#.NET platform) or iOS. Each has its limitations and both are unlikely to be open to source code alterations or the additions of new features. In fact, as far as I know, we are one of the few companies that consider source code alteration to be part of the product. When you buy a POS from us, we expect you’ll need some twiddle here or there.

Generally, you want a Point of Service/Sale software that is extensible, and what that word “extensible” means is going to depend a lot of the type of business or businesses that you run.

If you have multiple cash registers, and multiple stores, configurability and exstensibility are going to mean something completely different if you have only a single Point of Service/Sale in your store.

A common problem that smaller businesses run into is the inability to synchronize the items database on two Points of Sale. In our opinion that’s a pretty essential feature. Other features that are important are remote access. Can you access the Point of Sale database on the go, or from home? Prices tend to change often, they need to be updated, and that means coming in late or early to work on the Point of Sale database. With remote access, you can be working on the database as sales are taking place, or being doing it from the comfort of your own home.

A key feature in a Point of Service/Sale software is the ability to import CSV data. Price lists from suppliers come in many different varieties, so being able to convert that list to a CSV via Excel to import it into your POS system is very very important.

One feature that is often overlooked by POS buyers is the ability to Export their Items database. The sad truth is, sometimes you have to change Point of Service/Sale software, and making that transition easy is the last thing on the Software Vendors mind, they want to trap you into using their software, and they want to make it not worth the effort to change. Many softwares offer import features, but have no useful export feature. A useless export feature is something like Export to PDF. PDF’s are nice for you to read, but they are useless if you need to move your items database, or sales data to another machine for processing.
Ongoing Development of the Point of Service/Sale Software

The worst kind of software is the one that isn’t being actively improved. Software Vendors who aren’t up front about how often they update the software probably aren’t updating it at all. There are many POS softwares out there that haven’t been actively developed in 20 years, or more.

New features are important, fixing bugs are important, updating and streamlining the interface and workflow are important. Unfortunately, with most POS Software Vendors, this is the least important thing to them, they are interested in sales only, not in development and long term customer satisfaction.
Summary of Choosing a Point of Service/Sale Solution

The key things to look for are up to date hardware, a system that has less than 2gb of memory is bad. Windows Embedded is incredibly stupid for a POS system, because a POS is not an Embedded System. Embedded Operating Systems are meant to work on small devices, like smart phones and tablets, a Point of Sale computer is sufficiently large to be a real computer. It should have real computer specs. At least 2gb of RAM, a decent hard drive, USB 2.0, never buy Serial peripherals, even if they are cheap, Serial is dead, buy USB. There are USB alternatives to every POS peripheral, from Thermal Printers to Table Top scanners.

When it comes to buying POS hardware, it’s better to go to a computer shop and put together a PC, as your computer shop about what deals they have, and what they can do for you. Ask them if they know of any POS software.

Personally, we would suggest that you stay away from iOS and Android POS systems. While it sounds cool, iOS and Android are not the best platforms for POS systems, and connecting them to peripheral devices is a real headache. You might think it’s cool to walk around your store with an iPad and take orders, but after the first few are swiped while you aren’t looking, you’ll think differently.

Networking is very important for POS systems, when you buy POS software, make sure it can be synchronized with additional POS systems, and that it can be remotely accessed. Make sure that the company selling the software, or making the software is actively updating it. Ask them about how often updates are given, how much do updates cost. If you have a special need with the software, one that you know they don’t support, ask if their software supports 3rd party development, or if you can request development of the feature, and how much it would cost.

By: Jason Martin

Contact us for your Point of Sales Software Development: 08066801898, 07016941612

Thanks for sharing.

Post is informative.

We sell and program point of sales hardware and software.... for supermarket,eateries,pharmacy etc visit follyyem.com of call 08094398371 or e-mail; sales2@folly-yemltd.com

Contact us for your point of sales needs; 08066801898

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