4 ms·

Do check out Vend (1) who are looking to change this paradigm. Here are some thoughts. The POS business is littered with devices that were designed for purpos

Do check out Vend (1) who are looking to change this paradigm. Here are some thoughts. The POS business is littered with devices that were designed for purpose by giant companies like NCR and IBM. Their primary customers were very large corporate retailers, the cost per unit and for development was prohibitively high and because these were giant corporate IT projects the results were awful for the end users. At the lower end the retailers got those really basic electronic cash registers (ECRs)with lots of buttons and LCD displays showing numbers only. These were out of Japan mostly and usability was not a priority. The biggest issue with these ECRs was that they were trying to solve too many end-user requirements, so they all sucked for all but the most simple transactions. With the PC a bunch of DOS and then windows based retail POs systems emerged - mostly awful usability due to Windows and DOS. The best did made it very efficient for a particular industry. E.g. for service stations their systems were integrated with the pumps in the forecourt and a back office system, all of which likely linked to the oil company. But it all stalled for years until the cloud and iOS based systems came along. Right now we are in a moment of rapid change, with the end-user experience becoming hugely better for both the customer and the retail assistant. Still plenty to come so watch this space. (Source 4 years in Mobil Oil, 2 doing payments and POS projects, 2 in the field, and I'm an investor in Vend) (1) http://vendhq.com/ http://vendhq.com/

CyberFonic 13y ago
I notice that Vend is cloud based. What happens when the internet connection goes down?
- dangrossman 13y ago
  Your inventory is synced to the browser's local storage when you open the register, and sales get recorded locally until you're back online. It works fine without continual internet access.
- mugiltsr 13y ago
  "Vend continues to work even if your internet connection doesn't. Your data will automatically synchronize the next time you connect." See http://www.vendhq.com/tour http://www.vendhq.com/tour - Online and offline section.
dangrossman 13y ago
Vend has an awful lot of stupid bugs, and pretty inept front-line support. Even with reproduction steps and screenshots, they don't seem to understand tickets reporting bugs at all. It can take multiple back-and-forths before they escalate it to someone in dev that might try to fix it. An example they just fixed after I handed them the bug and the fix -- they handled discounts on a purchase (i.e. a coupon, or F&F discount) by adding a special "Discount" product to the sale. In their database, hidden to the store owner, this "Discount" product was flagged as a taxable item with negative value. If someone wanted to buy a $10 item and handed you a $10 coupon in a state with 7% tax, the register would tell the cashier to give the customer $0.70 in change, and take $0.70 out of the month's tax you owe to the state. There were similar glitches in basic, critical calculations in inventory tracking, cost of goods sold, etc. There were oddities like if you used a barcode scanner, and had mis-typed a barcode when adding a product to inventory and lost a digit, the scanner would still pull up the product via the partial match, and it'd also add sales tax to that item even if it was marked as a non-taxable product (i.e. groceries in a state that doesn't tax them). So someone doing inventory could mess up your sales tax collection on that product for the whole year and it might never be noticed. It's not a solid product, and the only reason we still use it is its integration with our Shopify store to keep the website inventory updated as items sell out in the retail store.
- hrrsn 13y ago
  That last line is a serious dealbreaker. We run Lightspeed Pro POS at our two retail locations, and while it is great it still does some things stupid. On the bright side, it does sync with Magento for our website.
  - hexley 13y ago
    Is it still written in RealBASIC?
- moron4hire 13y ago
  I had a similar complaint about Venmo. Yes, it was pretty, but dammit, they should have known to scrub their CSV export for newline characters and commas. There was just a lot of apparent sloppiness to the actual working of things under the hood, even if the front of it was clean and smooth.
moron4hire 13y ago
I think my partner is currently using Vend for his tourist-town restaurant. I'll have to check it out. I've got a TODO task point to setup a "shop simulator", a basic Linux VM to see what exactly it takes to work end-to-end. I've been involved with all of the constituent parts at some point in my life, but I've never had a chance to see the big picture all at once. And yes, Users are the worst people from which to get requirements. You can get a rough idea of where their problems lay, but you won't get any good ideas for how to fix those problems from users.

CyberFonic 13y ago

I notice that Vend is cloud based. What happens when the internet connection goes down?

dangrossman 13y ago
Your inventory is synced to the browser's local storage when you open the register, and sales get recorded locally until you're back online. It works fine without continual internet access.
mugiltsr 13y ago
"Vend continues to work even if your internet connection doesn't. Your data will automatically synchronize the next time you connect." See http://www.vendhq.com/tour http://www.vendhq.com/tour - Online and offline section.

dangrossman 13y ago

Vend has an awful lot of stupid bugs, and pretty inept front-line support. Even with reproduction steps and screenshots, they don't seem to understand tickets reporting bugs at all. It can take multiple back-and-forths before they escalate it to someone in dev that might try to fix it. An example they just fixed after I handed them the bug and the fix -- they handled discounts on a purchase (i.e. a coupon, or F&F discount) by adding a special "Discount" product to the sale. In their database, hidden to the store owner, this "Discount" product was flagged as a taxable item with negative value. If someone wanted to buy a $10 item and handed you a $10 coupon in a state with 7% tax, the register would tell the cashier to give the customer $0.70 in change, and take $0.70 out of the month's tax you owe to the state. There were similar glitches in basic, critical calculations in inventory tracking, cost of goods sold, etc. There were oddities like if you used a barcode scanner, and had mis-typed a barcode when adding a product to inventory and lost a digit, the scanner would still pull up the product via the partial match, and it'd also add sales tax to that item even if it was marked as a non-taxable product (i.e. groceries in a state that doesn't tax them). So someone doing inventory could mess up your sales tax collection on that product for the whole year and it might never be noticed. It's not a solid product, and the only reason we still use it is its integration with our Shopify store to keep the website inventory updated as items sell out in the retail store.

hrrsn 13y ago
That last line is a serious dealbreaker. We run Lightspeed Pro POS at our two retail locations, and while it is great it still does some things stupid. On the bright side, it does sync with Magento for our website.
- hexley 13y ago
  Is it still written in RealBASIC?
moron4hire 13y ago
I had a similar complaint about Venmo. Yes, it was pretty, but dammit, they should have known to scrub their CSV export for newline characters and commas. There was just a lot of apparent sloppiness to the actual working of things under the hood, even if the front of it was clean and smooth.

moron4hire 13y ago

I think my partner is currently using Vend for his tourist-town restaurant. I'll have to check it out. I've got a TODO task point to setup a "shop simulator", a basic Linux VM to see what exactly it takes to work end-to-end. I've been involved with all of the constituent parts at some point in my life, but I've never had a chance to see the big picture all at once. And yes, Users are the worst people from which to get requirements. You can get a rough idea of where their problems lay, but you won't get any good ideas for how to fix those problems from users.