I've been looking online for possible competing business or other webapps that do similar things, but so far I've been unable to find anything really up the same alley.
So what do you guys think? Could this be a good lifestyle business if executed correctly? Have you noticed a need for this on your field?
Thanks!
As rick888 is pointing out you will definitely need a solution that is forgiving towards system threats. The system needs to be functional in all sorts of conditions.
Thank you for your pointer about functionality and system threats, I hadn't really thought about that and will be looking into it very thoroughly.
But the price was not the only thing in consideration when it came to costs. The concerns my client had with suscription model was if the provider would still exist and provide same service in a year, or in five years for that matter. The amount of time they had to invest for the PoS (which was with inventory management) needed to be secured. They were okay with phasing in the inventory over a long period (it was a specialty store with a huge inventory) given the system didn't rely on being functional if only it knew the inventory - as long as the time investment couldn't be lost. Should the PoS provider go bankrupt or otherwise stop the service they wanted to be sure their effort time-wise wasn't worthless and could be ported somewhere else. Contracts with a minimum binding periods was okay as long as it didn't mean the time they used the system couldn't benefit them elsewhere.
Someone pointed out that the robustness wasn't a deal-breaker because you could revert to handwriting receipts. It's true that you can just do that but the point about PoS isn't just that it's slightly more effective than a calculator that can print out receipts for customers. A PoS grants valuable data. Even older cash-registers have data capabilities such as who the salesperson was and time of purchase. If you can provide great analytic tools for the data it has gathered, that'll be a major improvement of many available PoS systems.
But store owners also care about stability very much. If the system doesn't work when there's internet shortage they won't be happy. No electricity is probably only acceptable factor when it comes to having a PoS on a computer. If the system is slow and customers are waiting because there's unstable internet they will also be dissatisfied. Debit card processing all goes over the internet and when it's slow customers have bad experiences but at least they know it's because the internet is messing up and some ISP probably is to blame. If the cash-register is screwing it up they will blame the store.
I've worked in a store for a couple of years as a sales person so if you have more questions I'd be happy to help. I'm available through email: pierre@snowboardforbundet.com.
The only issue is some kind of guaranteed connectivity on one hand or just good uptime and is it a real time database or is it using push changes from the client?
Would need 2.
The database is real time, and I'm definitely beginning to look into some sort of setup that would allow me to offer near 100% uptime.
you can email me @ lrmyotherid followed by the @sign followed by gmail.com - i get enough spam already!
I'd suggest the following reality check. Set up a "head to head" test vs. a cash register. Give someone basic training, and have them run through a list of transactions. Is your app as snappy and responsive as the hardware of the cash register? How does it compare to the cost of a cash register? I'd suggest doing this competitive analysis of the cost and performance before going any further.
Speed is pretty snappy right now, but this can vary once it's running with a couple of actual clients on, so I'll have to look into it a bit more carefully, start caching whatever's possible to, and so forth, so thank you for that suggestion as well.
They are a cloud-hosted, browser-based POS system with full offline service. And they've just announced series B funding so others also believe there is a market there.
- Hot keys
- Popups (like FoxPro) and selections.
- Local vs remote (availability) vs sync later. Syncing has to be automatic with extremely good fail over mechanism.
- Install once and forget about it. What I mean here is that retailers (at POS) are not thirsty for new features/functions.
- Forgiving.
My2Cents worth.
The target market is pretty much small to medium retailers who are looking for an affordable POS solution.
I love the idea of having hot keys on the webapp though, it would really make the whole processing faster.
For level 3 and level 4 merchants, you may have a shot-- especially if you can seamlessly upgrade the application to add more functionality, allow for customization, etc. Basically a Shopify for the real world.
Thanks again.
I am not convinced 100% uptime is a showstopper, shops can revert to a paper receipt book temporarily if needed. Internet outages are inevitable, even if your server is still up.
As you mention the app currently does allow you to run a multi-site setup, as well as a multi-company setup for those lucky people running more than one company.
Seeing the concern for 100% uptime I will be looking into offering as high uptime as possible, maybe adding some EC2 instances ontop of my Linode servers or something of the sort.
Thanks again!
Thanks for taking the time!
