What “web based” means for your shop
A web based POS lives on the internet rather than on a computer in your back office. You open your shop’s own address, such as yourshop.pos.storewavepos.com, log in, and the till is there. Your products, sales and stock are stored securely online, so every device you log in from sees the same numbers at the same moment.
That changes three practical things:
- There is no software to install or update. New features arrive on their own. Nobody has to visit to upgrade anything.
- Your till is not tied to one machine. If the counter laptop dies, log in on a tablet and carry on.
- You can check the shop from anywhere. Today’s sales, low stock and the cash drawer are on your phone at home just as they are at the counter.
What you need to run it
The honest list is short:
- A device with a browser. A laptop, tablet or phone you already own is enough to start. There is a full guide to running a POS without buying hardware if you want to know which extras are worth it.
- An internet connection. Ordinary shop broadband is plenty. A phone you can tether to is a good backup.
- Optional extras. A barcode scanner that types into a text box, and any printer your device can print to for receipts and labels.
There is no proprietary terminal and no contract for hardware. If you already have a scanner and a receipt printer from an old system, try them first: they usually work.
It installs like an app
On a tablet or phone, add StoreWave to the home screen and it opens full screen, like any other app, with your shop’s name, colour and logo on the icon. Staff tap the icon at the start of the day and never see a browser address bar.
Several tills, or several shops
Every device you log in from can be a till. Each one is set up as its own register, so each has its own cash drawer and its own shift, and the stock they sell from is shared and always up to date.
If you run more than one shop, one StoreWave account holds them all. Each shop has its own address, its own products and its own team, and you switch between them from your account page.
What happens when the internet drops
This is the question every shop should ask a web based POS, so here is the plain answer.
During a short drop, a sale in progress retries by itself, a banner tells the cashier that the till is reconnecting, and the product list stays on screen so the cashier can keep building the basket. When the connection returns, the sale completes. Each sale carries its own key, so a retry can never charge a customer twice.
What StoreWave does not do is keep selling through a long outage and sync the sales afterwards. If your connection regularly disappears for half an hour at a time, a web based POS is the wrong tool for you, and our article on offline POS explains how to tell.
Your data stays yours
Every report exports to a spreadsheet file you can open in Excel or Google Sheets, and you can bring your products in from a spreadsheet in one upload when you start. Nothing is locked in.
Try it before you decide
The live demo is a real shop you can sell in, with no signup. When you are ready, the Free plan gets your own shop running in a few minutes, and Pro is 5 US dollars a month when you outgrow it.