5 ms·

Having worked years in high-volume retail and foodservice, as well as having extended POS and designed one, I can tell you it's not nearly as easy as it appears

Having worked years in high-volume retail and foodservice, as well as having extended POS and designed one, I can tell you it's not nearly as easy as it appears. Software must react ASAP, keeping the customer waiting at the time of payment is one of the easiest ways to lose sales (and employees will leave if it interrupts tips or the customer relationship). Hardware must also be rock-solid, for the same reason. Happy paying customers are the foundation of a business and any error or downtime is unacceptable. That is why the vast majority of retailers accept the high cost of POS as the standard cost of doing business. There are many, many low-cost and free entrants in this space. They quickly discover it is difficult to compete on features with established players: * Taxes differ by *city* (on products, alcohol, wholesale/resale, shipping, handling, and more) -- maintaining a correct tax system is a constant process * One of the top reasons to use POS is comprehensive analytics that gives great insight into the effectiveness of sales, employees, and timing (creating such a product is practically a business of its own) * Users expect to be able to customize almost any data entry, because to make a sale and happy customers often requires working 'outside' of the established system While I believe there is a place for a web-based POS using a modern software stack, the huge amount of work needs a solid business model to pay for it. If you are stuck on open-source, I would suggest doing like Gitlab, sell the service and hosting and give the source away for free.

moron4hire 13y ago
>> If you are stuck on open-source, I would suggest doing like Gitlab, sell the service and hosting and give the source away for free. That's the idea. I fully admit that I don't have all the answers. I'm hoping I can encourage competition in this field. Right now, I think there is a lot of irrational fear around payment processing and inventory tracking (seriously, they aren't that hard, once you know what you're doing. The difficulty comes from making early mistakes that you then have to either fix or live with). That fear keeps the market segmented into a variety of local monopolies. Square didn't think the local tax issue was that insurmountable to keep them out of the market. There are only just so many ways to slice-and-dice taxes. It's leg work, but it's not difficult work. I'm going to get a little cynical on your last point. All my years of consulting have taught me that users don't know what they want. Users see themselves as bosses, and like all bosses, they want to justify their existence vis a vis the system. If they don't have input, they don't feel like they have gotten their money's worth. That's part of the motivation for making it so cheap. You can drive around the corner and open your bag and realize your McDonald's cheeseburger for which you paid a whole $1.00 did not have cheese on it. And you'll still eat it, because a regular burger was only $0.99 and it's more important for you to get down the road than it is to argue about missing cheese for a whole penny. But if you're paying $15.00 for a burger, it better be the best damn burger you've ever had, exactly the way you want it, even though nutritionally it's no damn better than the slag that McDonald's is shoveling at you. I don't expect anyone but a true data and accounting geek to understand the best way to work out the data entry for a POS. There will be a lot of people who have opinions on it, but they will mostly have the wrong opinion. I've dealt with this in so many business intelligence situations: the client doesn't know their numbers and certainly doesn't know how to crunch their numbers. They will have opinions, but they will be extremely goofy notions of double-counting and comparing unlike units and dividing by magic numbers. So by making POS dirt cheap--and democratizing the parts--I am hoping to be able to say "take it or leave it". Here are the good parts, we're not beholden to you for your goofy notions of reports.
- doublerebel 13y ago
  The majority of retail sales is low-margin, so I can guarantee you that those businesses watch their numbers like a hawk. They break it down by time, user, product, incentive, and many more. Inventory and scheduling decisions track week by week and often day by day. Anyone using 'magic numbers' or 'goofy notions' will quickly be out of business. Also, it is the UI that will really sell the product. If a user can enter data 5% faster and make 5% more sales, this is HUGE for a retail business. Furthermore, if the UI is too inflexible and does not allow for enough modification, leading to the business losing or not tracking 5% of sales, this is a huge problem. I really encourage you to study your use cases in depth. There is already a ton of competition in this space, and building such a product is easily going to take months. Source: Over the years I have worked with 10+ different POS systems and built one from scratch.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    From the interviews that I've conducted with business owners in my neighborhood[1], they mostly have no clue what their businesses are doing in terms of efficiency. They know that the take from the till at the end of the day is more than they are spending every month. Some of them have been in business for a few decades, so they have an intuitive sense that the end-of-day sales should be X or else they suspect their cashier is robbing them, but ultimately they have no real metrics. They dump their POS data on their accountant every month and the accountant serves as a glorified Excel spreadsheet for them to generate a P&L statement. That's the sum total of analysis they do. As long as the tax man stays out of their business and the doors stay open, they don't care. But also, with the business owner friends that I've had, it can be a really isolating experience. When you're a business owner, you don't have a lot of peers. And you have to deal with a lot of bullshit artists, too. I see a lot of lack of trust. Sometimes, people put trust in expensive systems--a form of passing on responsibility. Sometimes, people are willing to take a chance if the chance is not expensive. A pub is a pub is a pub. It's about the markup on the drinks and wrangling the bullshit of the drink distributors' promotions. Customers expect Guinness on tap and Guinness distributors expect you to also take Harp from them, but customers don't want to drink Harp[2]. There isn't too much that you can customize in that environment. No, it's not a science, but there really should be a "currently best know configuration" for such a place that opinions to the contrary had better come with some rock solid evidence. At any rate, I want to build a cash register that Just Works, and let my experience help others make cash registers in their own vision. If someone thinks my cash register works for them, then they can take it. If they want something else, I hope there will be others available for them. I know that there is a type of business owner that would want what I'm making. That's enough of a start. [1] I've actually gone door to door interviewing strangers. I recount in vague terms my first experience here (http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/63292425072/keep-your-feet-on-the-ground http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/63292425072/keep-your-feet...), but there were many more after this that were equally informative. [2] paradoxically, Harp is a better lager than Guinness is a stout, but I digress.

moron4hire 13y ago

>> If you are stuck on open-source, I would suggest doing like Gitlab, sell the service and hosting and give the source away for free. That's the idea. I fully admit that I don't have all the answers. I'm hoping I can encourage competition in this field. Right now, I think there is a lot of irrational fear around payment processing and inventory tracking (seriously, they aren't that hard, once you know what you're doing. The difficulty comes from making early mistakes that you then have to either fix or live with). That fear keeps the market segmented into a variety of local monopolies. Square didn't think the local tax issue was that insurmountable to keep them out of the market. There are only just so many ways to slice-and-dice taxes. It's leg work, but it's not difficult work. I'm going to get a little cynical on your last point. All my years of consulting have taught me that users don't know what they want. Users see themselves as bosses, and like all bosses, they want to justify their existence vis a vis the system. If they don't have input, they don't feel like they have gotten their money's worth. That's part of the motivation for making it so cheap. You can drive around the corner and open your bag and realize your McDonald's cheeseburger for which you paid a whole $1.00 did not have cheese on it. And you'll still eat it, because a regular burger was only $0.99 and it's more important for you to get down the road than it is to argue about missing cheese for a whole penny. But if you're paying $15.00 for a burger, it better be the best damn burger you've ever had, exactly the way you want it, even though nutritionally it's no damn better than the slag that McDonald's is shoveling at you. I don't expect anyone but a true data and accounting geek to understand the best way to work out the data entry for a POS. There will be a lot of people who have opinions on it, but they will mostly have the wrong opinion. I've dealt with this in so many business intelligence situations: the client doesn't know their numbers and certainly doesn't know how to crunch their numbers. They will have opinions, but they will be extremely goofy notions of double-counting and comparing unlike units and dividing by magic numbers. So by making POS dirt cheap--and democratizing the parts--I am hoping to be able to say "take it or leave it". Here are the good parts, we're not beholden to you for your goofy notions of reports.

doublerebel 13y ago
The majority of retail sales is low-margin, so I can guarantee you that those businesses watch their numbers like a hawk. They break it down by time, user, product, incentive, and many more. Inventory and scheduling decisions track week by week and often day by day. Anyone using 'magic numbers' or 'goofy notions' will quickly be out of business. Also, it is the UI that will really sell the product. If a user can enter data 5% faster and make 5% more sales, this is HUGE for a retail business. Furthermore, if the UI is too inflexible and does not allow for enough modification, leading to the business losing or not tracking 5% of sales, this is a huge problem. I really encourage you to study your use cases in depth. There is already a ton of competition in this space, and building such a product is easily going to take months. Source: Over the years I have worked with 10+ different POS systems and built one from scratch.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  From the interviews that I've conducted with business owners in my neighborhood[1], they mostly have no clue what their businesses are doing in terms of efficiency. They know that the take from the till at the end of the day is more than they are spending every month. Some of them have been in business for a few decades, so they have an intuitive sense that the end-of-day sales should be X or else they suspect their cashier is robbing them, but ultimately they have no real metrics. They dump their POS data on their accountant every month and the accountant serves as a glorified Excel spreadsheet for them to generate a P&L statement. That's the sum total of analysis they do. As long as the tax man stays out of their business and the doors stay open, they don't care. But also, with the business owner friends that I've had, it can be a really isolating experience. When you're a business owner, you don't have a lot of peers. And you have to deal with a lot of bullshit artists, too. I see a lot of lack of trust. Sometimes, people put trust in expensive systems--a form of passing on responsibility. Sometimes, people are willing to take a chance if the chance is not expensive. A pub is a pub is a pub. It's about the markup on the drinks and wrangling the bullshit of the drink distributors' promotions. Customers expect Guinness on tap and Guinness distributors expect you to also take Harp from them, but customers don't want to drink Harp[2]. There isn't too much that you can customize in that environment. No, it's not a science, but there really should be a "currently best know configuration" for such a place that opinions to the contrary had better come with some rock solid evidence. At any rate, I want to build a cash register that Just Works, and let my experience help others make cash registers in their own vision. If someone thinks my cash register works for them, then they can take it. If they want something else, I hope there will be others available for them. I know that there is a type of business owner that would want what I'm making. That's enough of a start. [1] I've actually gone door to door interviewing strangers. I recount in vague terms my first experience here (http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/63292425072/keep-your-feet-on-the-ground http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/63292425072/keep-your-feet...), but there were many more after this that were equally informative. [2] paradoxically, Harp is a better lager than Guinness is a stout, but I digress.