Point Of Sale: Meaning & And How Does It Work?

For more information on how much this tech could set back your business, you can learn about how much POS systems cost. Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about transaction costs, check out our complete guide to credit card processing fees. The best small business POS systems offer numerous ways to maximize efficiency and cut costs, making them a staple for retail and food businesses alike in 2025.

Returns are also a great opportunity to make more sales and increase average order value. For example, customers who buy online and return in store can be incentivized to make additional purchases when they come in for the return. Rather than view the return as a lost sale, take it as an opportunity to potentially sell them additional products and, at the very least, build a more engaged customer relationship. Whether you want to open a retail store, pop up shop, sell at events, or out of the trunk of your car, you need a POS system to accept payments and sell in person. Point-of-sale technology commonly uses barcode scanning to calculate the total cost of an order, take payment, and log the transaction.

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Modern POS systems can help you track inventory, collect customer information, manage staff, and much more. While a cash register primarily handles sales and prints receipts, a modern POS system offers additional features like inventory management, sales tracking, and customer relationship management. Instead of clunky hardware, modern POS systems often run on sleek tablets, computers or countertops, making them more versatile and easier to use.

After customers buy products in-store—especially heavy or large products like furniture—they don’t necessarily want to carry it with them. Or, if an item isn’t available in-store but is at another location, customers can buy in-store and have the item shipped to their home. Rather than viewing ecommerce and store sales data in different platforms, you should be able to get a complete view of your brand’s sales and have the ability to filter by sales channel. Having a unified view of your sales makes it easier for you to know which products are moving and which aren’t. I still do them, but before, I had to count stock at the end of each day to know how much we sold and update stock quantities customers saw on our website. Next, a receipt of the transaction is either printed or emailed to the customer and you give the customer the products they bought.

1. Now that you have a better understanding of POS systems, hardware, and software, you’re ready to find the right one for your business.
2. AI-driven chatbots will automate tasks such as inventory management, reordering, and even customer support, further streamlining business operations.
3. They may be accessed remotely by restaurant corporate offices, troubleshooters and other authorized parties.
4. Thus one may see quite a number of such terminals for different cards cluttering up a sale counter.
5. With its entry price sitting at $69 per month and its average plan costing $119 per month, the POS may exceed the budgets of smaller businesses.

How Much Does a POS System Cost?

At the back end, price and other changes like discounts to inventory items through the administration module should be secured with passwords provided to trusted administrators. Any changes made should also be logged and capable of being subsequently retrieved for inspection. Another example of how intelligent the system can be, is whether an order that has been placed but not yet been processed by the kitchen can be modified by the customer through the tablet POS.

The 9 types of POS systems

A key part of POS hardware, the receipt printer gives customers a physical record of their purchases. This plays a big role in keeping customers happy and helps businesses keep track of sales. In stores like supermarkets, employees enter each item into the POS system with a barcode scanner. This tool reads and captures the barcoded info on items, including details such as the product name and quantity. Barcode scanning speeds up checkout and cuts down on mistakes from typing in prices or product codes by hand, which boosts accuracy and productivity.

Your customer pays

1. Traditional POS systems include a full countertop setup with a customer-facing screen, scanner, and cash drawer.
2. Thus should the remote server fail, the cashier can switch over to the local sale window without disrupting sales.
3. Items near the checkout counter are usually enticing, convenient, and eye-catching for shoppers.
4. Now that we’ve covered the basics of POS systems let’s dive a little deeper to uncover the types, applications, and benefits of different types of POS systems.

(Even a simple mobile POS system requires at least a smartphone and a card reader). Most POS systems include a touchscreen monitor, along with all of the devices required to scan products and complete payment transactions. POS software, or point of sale software, is basically the programme that helps run all the tasks you need to make when you’re making a sale.

Instead, choose a system like Shopify POS that unifies your in-store and online data to one place. This will help you understand the big picture—how each channel affects the other, how customers shop on both channels, and your store’s impact on online revenue in the surrounding area. Choose a POS system that centralizes your inventory into one system so you can manage it all from one place. This will help you order enough stock to satisfy demand while avoiding overstocking, inventory shortages, or tying up too much capital with too much stock. It will also prevent you from having to manually count and reconcile inventory each day to ensure the inventory availability on your online store reflects what you actually have in stock.

A retail POS has features tailored to help merchants with a brick-and-mortar store manage inventory and orders, sell products, process payments, and manage customer relationships and staff. As self-checkout technology has progressed, more retailers what is the meaning of pos of all types have included self-checkout as an option, and in some cases, completely replace traditional cashier-operated checkout lines. A number of noted emerging cloud-based POS systems came on the scene less than a decade or even half a decade back. These systems are usually designed for restaurants, small and medium-sized retail operations with fairly simple sale processes as can be culled from POS system review sites.

For instance, a POS system might work smoothly on a test database during the review but not when the database grows significantly in size over months of usage. And this is only one among many hidden critical functionality issues of a POS system. And last but definitely not least, always perform your due diligence on the POS vendor.