Running a POS without buying any hardware

Ask a POS vendor for a quote and you will often get a hardware list before you get a price. A terminal, a stand, a scanner, a printer, a drawer. Somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand, before the software.

Some of that list is genuinely necessary. Most of it is not, and the part that is not is usually the expensive part. A small shop can be selling properly, with barcodes, receipts and a full audit trail, on things it already owns. Here is what each piece of the traditional bundle is actually for, and what you can substitute.

The terminal: you already own this

The all-in-one touchscreen till is the biggest line on the quote and the easiest one to delete.

Any device with a browser will run a web based POS. A laptop works. A cheap tablet works and is closest to the counter-top feel of a real till. A desktop that is too slow for anything else works, because drawing a list of products is not demanding. A phone works, which matters more than it sounds: it means a market stall or a queue-busting second till costs nothing.

Two practical notes. Screen size matters more than speed. Anything from about ten inches up is comfortable for a product grid; a phone is fine for occasional use and tiring for a full shift. And plug it in. A tablet on the counter should be on a charger permanently, because the one afternoon it dies will be a busy one.

What you might reasonably spend money on is a stand, so the tablet sits at an angle a person can actually use instead of flat on the counter. That is a small amount, and it is worth it.

The barcode scanner: cheap, and it needs no software

This is the piece people assume will be difficult in a browser, and it is the piece that is easiest.

A USB barcode scanner is a keyboard. That is not a metaphor. It is called a keyboard-wedge scanner, and when it reads a barcode it types the digits very fast and presses Enter. There is no driver, no configuration, no integration, and nothing the software has to support specially. Plug it into the laptop or tablet, open the till, scan a tin of beans, and the code appears as though someone typed it. A decent one costs about the same as a couple of weeks of coffee.

Well-built POS software goes one step further and can tell the difference between a scanner and a person, because a scanner types a whole code in a few milliseconds and a human does not. That is what lets a scan add a product to the basket while normal typing in a search box still behaves like typing.

And you may not need to buy even that. A phone or tablet camera can read retail barcodes in the browser. Point it at the label and the code goes into the till, no purchase at all. The camera is slower than a proper scanner, roughly a second rather than instant, so it is not what you want for a full shift at a busy counter. It is exactly what you want for a stock take, for checking a price on the shop floor, or for the first month while you decide whether you need the scanner.

If you sell a lot of items with barcodes, buy the scanner. If you sell forty things and half of them are loose, the camera may be all you ever need.

The receipt printer: use what you have, then decide

Nothing in the law of physics requires a thermal printer. A receipt is a piece of paper with the shop name, the lines, the total and the tax on it.

A web based till prints through the operating system’s print dialog, which means it can print to any printer the machine already knows about, including an ordinary office inkjet or laser. A4 receipts look unusual and they are perfectly valid. Plenty of small shops run for months this way.

A thermal receipt printer is worth buying once you are printing all day, for three reasons: it is far faster, the paper is much cheaper per receipt, and it has no ink to run out at the worst moment. They are among the cheaper items on the traditional quote. Buy one when the inkjet starts irritating you, not before, and buy a standard model rather than one tied to a particular vendor’s system.

One thing to actually test: print a real receipt, on the real printer, on day one. Printing is the part of a browser-based setup that depends on the local machine, so it is the part most likely to surprise you.

The cash drawer: a drawer

If you take cash you need somewhere to put it, and any lockable cash box does that job. What the POS bundle sells you is a drawer that pops open automatically when a cash sale completes, which is a genuine convenience and a small theft deterrent, since the drawer is shut by default rather than left ajar.

That automatic opening is usually wired through the receipt printer rather than the computer. So it is a decision that follows the printer decision, not one you make on day one. Start with a cash box.

The card terminal: this one you cannot avoid

Here is the honest part of the article, and the bit that vendor pages are vague about.

A browser tab does not move money. Almost no web based POS processes card payments itself. It records that a sale was paid by card, and a card terminal from your bank or a payment provider does the actual transaction. That terminal is a real purchase or a real rental, with a real per-transaction rate, and no amount of clever software removes it.

Two things follow from that, both worth knowing before you buy anything.

Your rate is a separate negotiation from your software. This is good news. It means choosing a POS does not lock you into a processing rate, and you can shop for the rate on its own merits. Where a POS bundles processing, the rate is usually not negotiable, and over a year that half a percent can dwarf the software cost entirely. There is more on that trap in free versus paid POS.

Somebody has to reconcile two totals at the end of the day. The POS says you took a certain amount on card. The terminal says the same, or it does not. Checking that they match is a two minute job and it is how you catch a sale that was taken on the terminal but never rung up.

What this actually adds up to

For a small shop starting out, honestly:

• Till: a device you already own. Nothing.
• Stand: optional, small.
• Scanner: the phone camera, free, or a USB scanner for very little.
• Printer: the printer you already have, then a thermal one when it annoys you.
• Drawer: a cash box you probably already have.
• Card terminal: a real cost, unavoidable, and independent of your POS choice.
• Software: a monthly fee, often free at small volumes.

The traditional bundle is not a scam. It is a shop-in-a-box, and for some businesses paying once for someone else to have made every decision is worth it. But it should be a choice you make knowingly, and not the only route you were shown.

Where StoreWave sits

StoreWave runs on whatever you have. It is a browser, so any laptop, tablet, desktop or phone is a till, and it installs to a tablet home screen as the shop’s own app so staff tap an icon rather than hunt a bookmark.

USB keyboard-wedge scanners work with no setup at all, and the app distinguishes a scanner’s burst of keystrokes from a person typing, so scanning adds to the basket while search still works normally. When there is no scanner, the device camera reads EAN, UPC, Code 128, Code 39 and QR codes straight from the label, on the till screen, in inventory, and on a return.

Receipts print through the browser to any printer the machine knows, thermal or otherwise. Cash, card and store credit are recorded as tenders rather than processed, which is a deliberate choice: your card terminal and your rate stay yours, and changing either one does not mean changing your POS.