Our POS hardware should be the last thing that we have to worry about in our store. It should be rock solid, easy to repair (this means that service and parts are easy to come by), fast and durable. You don’t get all this by paying the lowest price! Receipt printers should be ultra fast and today, thermal is often the way to go. Scanners should be laser and be able to read a bar code from at least six inches away, keyboards should be heavy duty and have a built in card swipe for credit cards. Many retailers are also not providing customer pole displays and this is often a mistake. Today, customers are very interested in what items are scanning at, and a customer display is a great service to the customer. How many of us have to wait to read the receipt to know that we were charged the wrong price?

A great POS system can add a substantial amount of money to a retailers bottom line. By reducing the time for customer check out, we can sell more customers with less staff time and in high transaction environments, even with fewer lanes. Additional benefits will also come from fewer items mis rung, lower maintenance and repair costs, less down time, faster inventory turnover and better replenishment of sold merchandise. A study that we did a few years ago demonstrated that automated POS increased profitability by over 25% in a gift store.

Point of sale is where it all takes place in a store. If I can’t quickly and efficiently collect the sales dollars from my customers, they will go elsewhere. Have you ever wondered why the major retailers have those great big, heavy-duty cash registers at point of sale? You might figure that they could just get away with a low price PC and cash drawer. What the big retailers have discovered is that well made POS equipment and software pays for itself in a very short period of time. They seldom have any bottlenecks at point of sale and their hardware and software stands up to very tough use. This quality and reliability costs money. A good PC and cash drawer configuration is only about 50% more expensive than the low price models, but the peace of mind and service to the customer is always worth much more.

Recognize that quality costs money and training takes time and money. We often do not ever compute the cost of all the breakdowns on the cheap products and the extra time spent self teaching ourselves the wrong way to do something on our machines. If we spent a little more for hardware, software and training we would be amazed at how much productivity we would gain. Expect to pay up to five to eight times the price of software to learn how to use it properly and up to 50% higher for better quality hardware. Then you can and will get huge increases in productivity that will more than pay for this small investment.