Installing a POS system is a big decision. It can insert easiness, efficacies and cost-effectiveness provided that it’s the right system. Otherwise, your business operations may encounter complexities, if a wrong decision is made.
Simply put, you need it because it rings up sales. You can manage stock/inventory. Also, you can seize customers through their analysis. Besides, you don’t need to put extra efforts to track what your staff does.
Therefore, you should have a clear understanding about POS.
POS or Point of Sale:
The POS system automates selling and purchasing by an electronic cash register. It generally carries artificial brains, which are disseminated or distributed among peripherals (scanner, printer, calculator, card reader and a lot more hardware) and the terminal (main screen).
In all, it’s a system of capturing sales while streamlining administrative tasks, ranging from code fetching to routing funds and analysis of customers/ inventory/ staff performance.
How does it work?
a. Making Sales:
The software takes commands to filter the items in its inventory library and ring the sale.
b. For analysis:
Alongside, some advanced POS systems are better enough to report about sales, customer engagement, inventory management and account maintenance.
c. Making payment:
This system ensures secure routing of funds to the integrated bank account after each sale.
How can you choose the best POS system for your business?
It’s a tough decision. The market avails diverse point of sales system. Every system has a mix of some exclusive and ordinary functions. The fusion of peripherals, terminal and POS software translates into a greater understanding of what you’re selling and who are you selling to and selling with.
Therefore, you should gear up with a deep research and a crystal clear image of your business goals. Apart from that, you should consider these verticals while choosing a POS system for iPad or desktop:
a. Installation cost and time of the POS setup: The equipment that you require needs IT pros to guide you about how you operate them and what all features are. The installation may occupy a day only. But, comprehensibility of their functions and efficiency needs certain time.
b. Routing payment cost: It includes the computation of the percentage of sales with per sale bank charges. The payment processes accordingly. Let’s say a person has purchased a commodity worth $5. The swiping machine or EVM machine will route the transaction to the customer’s bank. The bank will credit the sale’s amount in the merchant’s bank account. Besides, it deducts the requisite routing payment cost, which can be 1% or more.
c. Peripherals cost/rental fee: Peripherals are the hardware, like printer, card reader, mouse etc., which configures a transaction. The entrepreneur can buy them. Alternatively, he can borrow POS system on rent. The fee structure will vary.
d. POS software fee/Maintenance/Upgrading charges: A robust POS system has a composition of related software. It can be a software to support countertop POS, retail POS and mobile POS systems. Each system has diverse maintenance and upgrading charges.
e. PCI DSS compliance: If your company accepts credit card payments, you must look into the PCI compliance. It keeps security at the top of the world through payment processing, connecting systems and managing data. Therefore, host this security with PCI compliant hosting provider.
e. Level of mobility: It determines the flexibility of peripherals to move easily.
g. EMV chip cards ability: If you want to get off the possibility of credit card fraud, install EMV to authenticate chip-card transactions.
h. NFC payment ability: Diverse modes of payment include Apple Pay, Android Pay and Contactless Card. The contactless mobile payments need interaction with the peripherals. This is where Near Field Communication (NFC) technology comes into play. It lets the devices communicate with one another.
i. Remote access: The accessibility of the POS software should be accessible from everywhere. This is where cloud-computing is required. It lets the over-looking and analysis from the remote area.
j. 24X7 support: The support team should be ready to entertain round o’clock.