$20,000. Maybe $15,000 if you were savvy. Today – still $10,000. These are the past and present prices for a complete POS (Point of Sale) system from reputable but antiquated sellers and resellers.
But what about the future?
Virtual Point of Sale (VPOS) is the future. And it’s here. VPOS simply means that just like you log onto Facebook or Twitter to socialize, you log onto a Point of Sale website to run all POS in your store.
Benefits include no updating the software on your machine, 24 x 7 online technical service, no cost to start up and very, very easy to use.
How are they free? Easy – somebody else (in most cases they get a cut of the fee you pay for credit card processing) subsidizes the service.
The only downfall is you need a relatively fast connection and you rely on your VPOS provider to be up 99.99% of the time.
We considered a host (no pun intended) of options and decided on CashierLive.com. It’s a clean, easy to use POS system with tons of videos for training, an easy to understand interface, and free for your store with up to 3 registers.
Here’s some of the others we kicked the tires on: Bluestorelive.com, firstmerchantservices.com, intuitpayments.com, and a host of free shareware programs such as Retail Boss POS, POS 4 Business, and Retail Man POS. For this experiment we decided against shareware only because all the “free” shareware’s have 30-day trials and then cost between $10 and $250.
So now we have one of the most vital parts of our Retail Computer System – the POS. Fully functional, easy to use, lots of great management reporting and still not a penny spent.
On ward and up ward. Next step?
A retailers most important asset is their inventory. Know what is selling, how much to buy, when to mark down items, and keeping an accurate count are the basic ingredients for Inventory Management.
Tune in next time….
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