FAQ - POS

That depends on your requirements and the size and efficiency of your organization.

For an enterprise-size POS solution, replacement can typically take 1½ years from the contract is signed until the new POS system is fully in operation across your organization.

However, also count in time for formulating requirements and use cases and discussing them with your potential POS vendor before you sign a contract. That initial phase can take time, and the POS vendor will typically need up to three months to provide implementation suggestions, but the time you initially spend on this will greatly help you run a more efficient POS replacement project later.

Yes. A good POS system implementation plan involves a gradual rollout of the new POS system, first on a limited number of POSs in a small number of stores and then on a larger scale. That way you can keep your business in operation, and any issues with the new POS system in production will be discovered early and only affect a small number of POSs in a small number of stores.

Generally, you shouldn’t worry about double licensing costs while your old POS system and new POS system are both in operation during a gradual rollout of the new POS system, because license costs for the new POS system will typically only be added as you begin using its components, including the individual POSs.

Make sure that you’re in control of your organization’s internal POS system-related processes during rollout of your new POS system because potential delays can be caused by unexpected issues inside the retailer’s organization, for example with non-standard POS peripherals hardware that no one realized was used in some stores.

When you look at integrations, you can most likely split them into two types: backend integrations and peripherals integrations.

Backend integrations are typically mainly related to ERP systems, but may also concern, for example, various types of PIM and loyalty systems. If you’re happy with your backend systems, find a POS system that supports integrating with them. A new POS system can also, however, be a welcome chance to wave goodbye to old backend system integrations that your organization hasn’t been fully satisfied with, so that you can switch to a modern backend system integration where, your ERP system communicates in real time with your POS system – and other sales channels in a unified commerce environment – via APIs.

When it comes to peripherals, the same scenarios apply: If your organization issatisfied with its current EFT terminals, scanners, etc., look for a new POS system that supports them. If not, use the chance to get rid of them when you implement your new POS system. Note that you may not be able to reuse old hardware for a new POS. However, it is also very likely that you will not need some types of peripherals from your old POS system when you switch to a new one: Modern POS systems typically run their user interfaces – including virtual keyboards – in standard browsers, so you’re likely to not need to integrate with any of your old keyboards and terminal monitors on a new POS system. If you’ve previously used physical keys to grant access to special features on POSs, you’ll probably be glad to learn that such keys are typically applied digitally on modern POS systems.

One entirely new type of integration that you might need to think about is for mobile POSs: If you want to offer your staff and customers the freedom and flexibility of not being tied to stationary POSs on your new POS system, you’ll need your new POS vendor to be able to recommend mobile devices that suit your organization’s needs when it comes to built-in scanners, sturdiness, etc.

POS systems differ greatly in functionality, complexity, etc., but even a powerful new POS system with lots of features should not require more than an hour’s training before shop assistants can begin to use the POS system to serve customers. If it requires more time, the new POS system’s user interfaces are not easy enough to work with. Short shop assistant training times are vital in busy store environments where staff turnover can be high.

Look for a new POS system that you can put into training mode, so that pseudo-transactions that shop assistants make during POS training aren’t sent to your backend systems, which could otherwise affect sales figures, automated stock reordering, etc.

For training of super users, such as store managers, who must learn not only how the new POS system works for frontliners, but also how the new POS system’s backend features work (that’s everything from user rights management to being able to set up time-limited local campaigns, etc.), we recommend that you allocate time for training. The amount of time will depend on the training needed.

Good POS system vendors will typically integrate training, including train-the-trainer training of POS system super users, in the delivery model you agree upon.

Scalability comes in many forms. That fact is a good reason to consider scalability very carefully. After all, your organization is most likely in business to grow and expand, be it physically (for example aiming for a higher number of stores), strategically (for example through possible mergers or new chains), technologically (for example through cloud-based mobile POSs), or a combination of the three.

When you look for proof that a new POS vendor’s system can scale, look for customer cases and references that back up the POS vendor’s scalability claims in scenarios that are comparable with yours.

Then look for the POS vendor’s system architecture: Is it rigid or does it allow for the necessary flexibility? Can you manage it both store-wise and on an enterprise level? Does the POS system handle bursts in trade well (think Black Friday) or will large numbers of transactions result in unbearable response times? How does the POS system handle potential network errors? Does the POS system offer redundancy features that let you continue business during outages? Will the POS system work in a unified commerce environment, where campaign prices must instantly be available across all relevant sales channels? Does it have APIs to facilitate fast and flexible data exchange with other systems, for example your ERP system, gift card services, etc.?

Also consider the POS vendor’s licensing: Can you easily get the required number of extra licenses as your organization grows, without having to pay up front for excessive numbers of licenses that you’re not going to need? Perhaps you even occasionally want to scale your POS system down for short periods of time. In that case, is the POS vendor’s licensing flexible enough to let you do that?

Finally, look at the POS vendor’s deployment methods: Is the POS vendor’s system essentially an on-premise solution that was made for old physical servers? Does it allow for virtual servers? Is it fully cloud-based (which may not always be as advantageous as it sounds)? Or does the POS vendor support hybrid deployment, where you can, for example, reuse existing on-premise store server setups and combine them with cloud-based POSs for scalability?

Ideally you don’t need to migrate data because your master data about articles, prices, discounts, campaigns, customers, etc. resides outside of your POS system, typically through an API integration with your ERP system.

However, many organizations don’t have such integrations in their current POS systems, so many POS vendors have experience with exporting POS-related data from proprietary formats on old POS systems to their new POS system offering. If your data resides on your current POS system, you should as a minimum select a new POS vendor that has experience in importing it into your new POS system.

We highly recommend, however, that you aim higher with your new POS system, so that you can store your and manage your master data independently of your POS system and benefit from a proper API solution that integrates your master data in real time, not only with your new POS system but also with your other sales channels, like eCommerce or click-and-collect. That may still require exporting of data from your old POS system, but it’ll ensure that you have system independence and flexibility in the future.

Whichever option you go for, make sure to run small-scale pilot tests of the data transfer before you begin to transfer production data. Good POS vendors will include small as well as large-scale tests of data in their delivery models.

That’ll depend on the new POS system and the other systems that you use. Generally, the more API-driven integration options the new POS system offers, the easier it’ll typically be for your organization to integrate with your other systems, provided that your other systems are also able to interact that way.

This will wary from POS vendor to POS vendor, but most vendors work with a pay-as-you grow model, where you pay an amount for your head quarter setup, and then a number of licenses depending on number of stores and/or POS units. On top of that, there will typically be a one-time-fee for workshops, implementation and hyper care support when you go live. You would typically pay some of the startup fee upfront, and the rest when the solution is delivered. Subscription on licenses could be invoiced monthly our quarterly up front.

If you focus on cost, cost comes in several shapes: There are obvious costs like the price of new software licenses and support plans. Then there are solution-dependent costs like fees for custom development and consultancy. And then there are hidden, or at least less obvious, costs like the amount of time and effort your organization puts into waving goodbye to your old POS system and saying hello to your new one.

It makes sense to focus on costs – it’s irresponsible not to – but remember that there’s a reason why you’re looking for a new POS system. That’s why you should focus equally much on the benefits of your new POS system and the savings (in money as well as time) and improved customer experience that it’ll bring you.

With a new POS system, you’re making an investment, so always look at the return on your investment (ROI) and not just costs.

With that said, let’s look at which monetary costs you can expect:

• POS system software licenses
• POS system software maintenance (support levels and agreements, access to upgrades, etc.)
• Licenses for associated equipment and services (for example servers, hosting, cloud storage, operating systems, EFT terminals, …)
• Project management fees
• Custom development fees (if you want non-standard features)
• Consultancy fees
• Installation and setup fees (if not included in consultancy fees)
• Training fees

We recommend a process that covers all of the following: Customer needs definition > Pre-analysis > Detailed analysis > Agree terms of reference > Planning > Development & setup (iterations) > Test (iterations) > Delivery > Rollout and hypercare > Project closure.

That depends on your type of organization. Generally, your POS replacement project team should involve people from relevant parts of your organization who have the power and resources to say Go.

Furthermore, we recommend that you include someone from your HQ who has recently worked on the floor and in the backoffice of one of your stores to liaison between theory- and practice-oriented parts of your organization. That role can greatly facilitate sharing of important knowledge that can prevent time-consuming misconceptions.

From the IT part of your organization, include people with an understanding of your network infrastructure, including firewalls, and integrations with 3^rd-party systems. When it comes to 3^rd-party systems (ERP, PIM, etc.), also include ad-hoc representatives from each 3^rd-party system that you’re going to integrate to, for example a financial controller who works with your ERP system daily, so they can advise your project team about processes that the integrations must support. It will also be important to involve your decision makers such as your CTO or CIO who at some point needs to sign off on the project team's decision.

It is also important to involve your commercial business drivers because they typically have requirements for the shopping experience. An example could be how the shoppers experience your cross-channel user journey or how they enable their loyalty status to get special discounts or similar.

Finally, don’t miss the opportunity to get input from the stores in relation to work processes and flows.

The most important thing is that your organization has carefully identified and agreed on what it needs to achieve with the new POS system (See Q: How do we uncover our specific needs for a future POS system?). That will greatly help you during the POS system replacement process (see Q: What is the process of replacing a POS system?) and help you involve the right people from your organization in the process (see Q: Who from my organization should be involved in the process of replacing our POS system?).

No. If it does, it’s not the right new POS system for you. A new POS system should always reduce the number as well as the complexity of manual processes.

By making sure that it matches your organization’s workflows (that you’ve considered carefully and potentially optimized in connection with implementing the new POS system). Good POS systems will have UI templates for browser-based layouts that your organization can customize to suit exactly your needs.

You’ll first and foremost need a support setup that matches your organization’s current and future needs, regardless of which support setup you’ve had before.

With a carefully selected new POS system that matches what your organization wants to achieve, you can typically expect much less hassle with your new POS system than with your old one, but especially during the onboarding period you will of course need access to hypercare.

Depending on the size and nature of your organization, you may yourselves provide up to 2nd level POS system support for your organization’s stores during their opening hours, in which case proper training of your in-house supporters, and keeping their knowledge up-to-date, is vital. In other scenarios, you may rely more on a support agreement directly with your new POS vendor.

When looking at 3rd level support from your POS vendor, remember to not only look for support opening hours, but also for response times and statistics about time to resolution for typical error scenarios. Also remember to agree who provides support for the many peripherals associated with a POS system. If your thermal printers or EFT terminals don’t work one morning, the last thing you want is to be driven from pillar to post in order to get support.

Always consult potential new POS system vendors’ system requirements. In many cases you could reuse but it will depend on the age of your current hardware and your future requirements.

When you look for a new POS vendor, the best thing you can start with is to look at your own organization: What are your current challenges? What works for you? What do you want to achieve? Then define your overall success parameters for a new POS system. Examples of possible success parameters:

• Ease day-to-day workloads in stores
• Reduce manual sales-related procedures
• Open up for new features so that your new POS system will support your growth ambitions
• Open up for unified commerce opportunities where your POS and other commerce platforms integrate to support as much of the total customer journey as possible
• Improve integration between POS and loyalty program
• Improve integration between POS and backend/ERP systems, peripherals (EFT terminals, scanners, scales, etc.), and services (payment, receipt repositories, etc.)
• Improve data intelligence and reporting
• Ability to use mobile POSs
• Get a user experience that’s optimized for your frontline staff and their workflows

When you’ve defined and prioritized your organization’s overall success parameters, you can begin to benchmark potential new POS vendors to find the ones that potentially match your needs.

Then it’s time to dive deeper and look for evidence that your selected potential POS vendors can deliver what you want from them: Look for customer cases, references, and testimonials. Look for proven ability to deliver, with proven service models and clear project implementation phases and processes. Look for evidence of stability and scalability. Look for evidence of configuration flexibility and customizability. Look for proof of third-party integration abilities and APIs, not least for smooth integration with backend ERP and PIM systems.

Then, only then, is it time to write up an initial requirement specification and request information (RFI), demos, quotes (RFQ) and proposals (RFP), and ultimately agree on a contract with your selected POS vendor.

See also How do we uncover our specific needs for a future POS system? in the following for information about which pre-analysis and estimation methods we recommend that you require from your POS vendor.

To uncover your specific needs, you first need to agree on what your organization’s overall success parameters for a new POS system are (see How do we choose the right POS vendor?).

When you’ve agreed on your organization’s overall success parameters and researched the POS vendor scene to find potential vendors that match your ambitions and have proven track records on delivery, stability, scalability, etc., you can write up an initial requirement specification and request information (RFI), quotes (RFQ) and proposals (RFP), and ultimately agree a contract with your selected POS vendor.

During those request phases – here comes the important bit­ – we highly recommend that you require your POS vendor to help you evaluate and delimit your requirements as well as spot any undiscovered needs, preferably through a series of pre-analysis workshops where relevant people from your organization spend time with relevant project managers, development leads, support leads, consultants, etc. from the POS vendor.

Such workshops form an important basis for formulating user stories (“as a [role], I want to [need], so that I can [objective]”). User stories are vital for the POS vendor to be able to estimate development, implementation, and service delivery tasks realistically, which is important for you to assess the expected quality, timing, and cost of your new POS project.

Fiscalization, the mandatory reporting of transactions to the authorities, plays a vital role when you choose a new POS system because if you don’t live up to the requirements in your country or region, it could potentially close your business.

Make absolutely sure that your new POS vendor is able to live up to fiscalization requirements in the areas that your organization operates in (and plans to operate in). Also make sure that your potential new POS system automates fiscalization procedures, so you don’t end up introducing unwanted new manual procedures.

Remember that POS peripherals like EFT payment terminals can play an important role in your organization’s ability to fulfill fiscalization requirements, so make sure that you scrutinize any integrations to such devices, especially if you plan to get new ones in connection with adopting your new POS system.

It must. If you already have a loyalty program integration with your current POS system, you’ll expect to be able to integrate your loyalty program with your new POS system as well. If you don’t have a loyalty program integration in your current POS system, make sure that your new POS system supports loyalty program integrations because loyalty programs are simply a fact of today’s retail environment.

When you think about loyalty program integration, remember to think beyond your POS system, so that the loyalty program integration will cover all your potential sales channels in a unified commerce environment.

If you’re going to integrate with a 3^rd-party loyalty program: To prevent potentially time-consuming misconceptions and technical issues, team up with an accessible contact person at the loyalty program provider who can fix unexpected challenges for you quickly if necessary. The same applies if you’re going to integrate with other 3^rd-party providers for, for example, gift card solutions, digital receipt repositories, etc.

It must, provided you want to keep using them (a change of POS system can occasionally be a welcome chance to get rid of unwanted payment methods or payment method implementations).

For you to avoid potentially big hardware peripherals investments in new EFT terminals, your new POS system should be able to reuse such equipment. Should you require new EFT terminals, it’s important that they live up to fiscalization requirements in your country or region, in which case you should choose a POS vendor who knows their way round the maze of various fiscalization requirements.

Also consider new payment methods, for example new mobile payment options. Or maybe you want to go cashless on some POSs?

Remember that payment methods can also include gift cards, vouchers/coupons, account payment with credit limits (especially relevant if you have B2B customers), and payment card types that can’t be used to pay for all types of articles. If you use such methods or plan to use them, make sure that your new POS system supports them.

No, some POS systems don’t support B2B customer handling at all, and others don’t support B2B customer handling very well. So, if you plan to have B2C as well as B2B customers, your new POS system must fully support both.

Support for B2B customers is likely to require your new POS system to be able to handle VAT exemption, onboarding of new B2B customers, credit limits and extensions, invoicing, blocking of overdue customers, customer access to statements, etc. Therefore, do ask your potential new POS vendor critical questions to make sure their POS solution covers all your current and future B2B customer handling needs.