Point-of-sale Recommendations
I’m working with a regional company that has 20 retail locations and is using a cryptic, difficult point-of-sale system. I feel like the current POS system is dated by at least ten years. Writing reports is tedious and syncing with the web requires a lot of ‘hacking.’ Does anyone have experience with point-of-sale systems for medium-large retail businesses? I know Microsoft makes something, I know there’s probably a bunch out there I’m just having a hard time finding what is needed.
Any suggestions? Thanks.
At my last gig, one of the things I did was I built a point of sale for a cashless slot machine system, in a casino (i.e. you buy a ticket from a cashier, then enter a code to play the game). It was a Perl/Catalyst web app backed by MySQL with an on-site server. Printing was done with Java/OpenPOS and an ethernet thermal printer. Cashier stations were mac minis with USB barcode scanners running Ubuntu that booted direct to a Firefox you couldn’t escape.
We rolled our own because nothing was available commercially to do what we were doing. Reports were also Perl/Catalyst web apps and could be accessed via the VPN.
I don’t know what system you should buy, but you should almost certainly buy an existing system. Features I would look for would be easy integration with a central database for real-time reporting, and some seriously good usability. Just survey everything thats out there and pick whatever is the best fit. I would recommend going to similar businesses that are run really well and find out what they use and the determine if they can meet your reporting requirements as well.
The OpenBravo people have a very functional POS app.
There’s also the Adempiere/opentap solutions, but they’re not quite as good, imo.
All open source, though, so you can play around with them.
Been there done that, @ my last job I was stuck wuth using an ancient POS system running on db4 tables. I ended up using access to integrate and sync with my mysql web databases.
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The OpenBravo people have a very functional POS app.
There’s also the Adempiere/opentap solutions, but they’re not quite as good, imo. All open source, though, so you can play around with them. |
Wow, openbravo looks VERY interesting. Open source is great too, every POS system I’ve seen, you had to bend over and pay $250/hr (usually @ 3-4 hours for a 10 minute job) for every minor little modification you needed done
It looks promising, but I wonder if they’ve nailed ease of use since it looks ERP oriented? Anyone run it?
I’d be interested to hear from someone running it in production too. There’s no way it’s any worse than that piece of shit software I had to develop around. I know whenever I had to use it myself I’d end up sitting there writing SQL queries with the customer or vendor on the phone vs trying trying to find my way around the UI .
Check out all my "African" engineering in the queries list pic above
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