need advice on POS system for new small retail business

[dbrowne9212]

dont know if this is the right place to post this but...

a small business a friends of mine has stared want to get setup with a proper POS (point of sale) and inventory system. It's a small enough shop and they jsut need a basic system to take some of the manual tedium out of their current mostly paper based sales system and also to eradicate the potential for human error in stock taking etc...

They want it done as cheaply as possible and have asked me to help. I have some experience in building databases have advised i could build them a basic system in Access or something but was wonder if anyone had any adive on a simple basic and cost effective solution that would work allow a new business to keep track of stock (in & out) customer details (if possible) and handle the transaction at the time of sale.

i have no real experience in a retail environment but here's how i'd imagine it to be setup (please correct me if i'm worng or recommend software/hardware where appropriate):

a fully fledged EPOS system with touchscreen input and all the bells and whistles seem VERY expensive from the small bit of research i;ve done so.... could They run some POS software on a PC connected to a cash drawer and barcode scanner (a PC till??) with a couple of barcode scanners for stock taking. would such software run on an access database (or whatever) or would the database somehow have to be built into the system.

as you can probably tell i'm a bit confuesd and could do with a kick start...

also could anyone recommend places to buy such software/hardware (POS software & barcode scanners)

thanks in advance.

[daymobrew]

I don't know anything about POS but did a quick search on sourceforge.net:
http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/
http://www.phppointofsale.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/retailerorg/ (this seems to be a dead project)

[Evil Phil]

I looked into ePOS about a year ago as part of a feasibility study. Most good ePOS systems come with their own software which can provide a complete solution for retail based businesses, but you need to shop around.

The quotes I got for 1 unit ranged from between €900 and €2,500 for essentially the same system - that's a huge difference. Remember, that was a year ago, you'll be able to negotiate a better price than they initially quote you. Unfortunately I no longer have the details saved so I can't point you in the direction of a company - but google and goldenpages.ie did get me where I was going.

Of course you could develop your own but tbh, if your mate spends money on a good solution it will still be working in 10 years time.

<edit>

Actually now that I think of it, I was looking for an ePOS system that would work in a kitchen environment - standard retail units would be cheaper than that.

[yop]

Used to work as a developer of ePOS systems and did a bit of work with another so I will PM the details of the companies to you to see if they will suit your needs.

Depending on your requirement/budget/skills it MIGHT be an idea to develop your own.

Thanks

[amen]

I think you are crazy to do this for a friend. Go buy an off the shelf product. It will have everything he needs (reports, stock updates, reconcilliation and support etc). there is no way you could do all of this for less than what he could buy a commerical product for.

You will be in for years of grief supporting this

[CountingCrows]

Used to be a EPOS developer myself, like others have said I think you'd be mad to try and develop this yourself.

[dbrowne9212]

yeah thanks guys.

i did a bit of reasearch and called around a couple of companies. i also got a much better idea of what exactly the guys want from the system... which is quite alot really.

they basically want an EPOS and stock tracking system with integrated some accounting -which is a lot more than they initially led me to believe.

while technically i think have a pretty good idea of what would go into developing such a system it would take a massive amount of time for me to deliver anything that would come even remotely close to servicing their needs.

right now i think the best thing i can do for them is to offer advice.

figures i've getting have been anywhere from 6 to 12 thousand depending on the completeness of the solution.

somewhat understandably that has frightened the crap out of my friends but I think it's mostly a case of non-technical people not really grasping what goes into devloping and deploying viable software solutions... and maybe not seeing the big picture interms of what such a solution would deliver on their end.

anyhow... thanks for your input.

danny.

[croo]

I just finished a project implementing the open source OpenBravo POS (previously TinaPOS) in about 40 stores across the UK & Ireland. It works very well... and each POS station (consisting of a touchscreen, small low power (15w) box on which we ran ubuntu), drawer, receipt printer, barcode scanner and a touchscreen) was just under £2k - the UK guys sourced the hardware but if you need I can find out the precise details. OB POS uses by default an embedded Derby DB but in some cases we wanted multiple POS stations so we installed the postgres database and connect them all to one central (in store) DB. But basically any db that supports jdbc is supported. There is some basic inventory management in the POS app though we integrated it with the open source Adempiere ERP.

No point in developing something from scratch when such great applications exist - with source code - already.

Let me know if I can help more.

[robindch]

Originally Posted by dbrowne9212

a small business a friends of mine has stared want to get setup with a proper POS (point of sale) and inventory system.

Don't forget that a fully-fledged POS system will also need to acquire and settle transactions from credit and debit cards.

This is something that you won't be able to develop yourself and I would imagine that few if any of the open-source apps do it either, as it requires some fairly serious experience with electronic payment systems as well as formal certification with the international card schemes (and I believe that no open-source app has been certified).

You can get by with a regular terminal from one of the banks or independent payment service providers, but it will slow things up a fair bit.

[croo]

re: credit card processing & open source
indeed this is an issue.
many open source applications do include gateways to credit card processing but the fairly recent inclusion of the pin numbers here has caused an issue. But I understood this problem is more because of a conflict between the algorithms needed and typical open source licensing - or a perceived potential conflict at least.

In the project I was working on we just used a separate device (small handhelds). It works but you are correct it would be better if this were integrated. Of course you don't have to process CC with pin numbers (web sites for example don't have access to pins) but then you face higher processing fees... so technically it's not mandatory but from a business prospective you do want this.

So in my case we didn't need to resolve this problem this time but I would like to see it addressed so have been looking at the question and I believe it is being addressed by a number of separate middleware type open projects... so now these must be integrated with the payment processing of existing POS - which being open source this is achievable.

So after saying that, the OP is considering writing a POS from scratch .. better start with an existing Open Source app in my opinion.

[croo]

after a little research I think I was misinformed about the reasons by chip & pin is not typical in open source and certification is indeed the issue.

found this an interesting article on the subject.
http://www.merchantaccountblog.com/7...pci-was-a-mess

Given the numbers of companies using open source for ecommerce I can see this will be a big issue ahead. This may turn into a bonanza for 3rd party providers like google & paypal as open source projects turn to these service providers to process payments for them without needing certification themselves.

This will be an interesting topic to monitor I think.

[dbrowne9212]

Originally Posted by robindch

Don't forget that a fully-fledged POS system will also need to acquire and settle transactions from credit and debit cards.

hmm... yes. a very good point.

once again. thanks guys, really appreciate your input.

[robindch]

Originally Posted by croo

after a little research I think I was misinformed about the reasons by chip & pin is not typical in open source and certification is indeed the issue.

There are several different classes of certification -- PA-DSS is just one of them, and typically, it's relatively straightforward. The cost of PA-DSS validation given in that article ($100k) is ludicrous and speaking from personal experience, it can be done for far less than that, though if the code is as crap as most web payment systems I've seen, then perhaps $100k may not be unreasonable.

What's much more difficult than PA-DSS is writing the code which interacts with the chip on the credit card. A programmer with significant payment experience could perhaps produce one in under a year, but that's not guaranteed. And you need to certify your kernel with EMVCO before you can acquire EMV (chip and PIN) cards. More on the EMVCO Terminal Level 2 approvals process here.

You also need to figure out what card reader hardware you're using, but there are plenty of these around and most (all?) support the PC/SC interface which does make life easier, at least on Windows. If you're going to build your own card reader, then that needs to go through an EMVCO Terminal Level 1 approvals process.

If you're going to support PIN, which you're almost certainly going to have to, then you must either support each manufacturer's PIN Entry Device separately (there are no standards for PED interfaces) or else, you've to build your own PED hardware and that will also need to be certified. If you plan to run in certain countries, then you may also be required to embed symmetric (DES) and asymmetric (RSA) security hardware in your PED, and if you're not going to buy a pre-certified chip to do this, then you've to build your own which will require FIPS certification and add another couple of years to your schedule.

You will probably need to implement a Terminal Management System which is at least capable of loading and revoking the network public keys issued by Visa, MasterCard et al (though it will probably need to do far more than that -- load and revoke hotcard lists, update terminal configuration, terminal software etc). This is another six month's work, minimum, for an industry-experienced developer.

You need to consider whether or not you're going to support contactless payment methods - MasterCard PayPass, Visa payWave etc. If yes, then add yet another interface to your growing list, and another 30% to your terminal kernel development schedule.

Finally, you need to figure out how your terminal is going to speak to the bank that's acquiring your transactions. There are no fixed certification standards on the authorization side, since every country is different, but you will be required at least to demonstrate that your support all the network-defined transactions applicable for your application and your bank won't let you acquire without going through some testing. The ISO 8583 family of protocols is your friend here, but it's not used very much here in Ireland or in the UK, where the lousy APACS 30/40 POS standard is by far the most common. Oh yes, and you need to settle the transactions at end-of-day too, so add one more interface if you're using a dual-message format, which most are.

All in all, implementing a payment system is not for the inexperienced, the faint of heart nor those with shallow pockets.

Apologies about the length of this post

[croo]

Thanks for the very informative post robindch.

I think perhaps I have misunderstood something or perhaps we have crossed wires.

Usually in all the open source apps I know there is no actual payments processing but rather an ability to define the integration with some payments gateway. I wouldn't wish to change that personally. But from the very brief article in that link I provided (as well as some others I was reading) left me with the understanding that the new PA-DSS standard meant this approach would no longer be acceptable as it would require all software (or hardware) in the entire process to be certified, e.g. if we were talking about a simple eCommerce site that collects credit card details to pass to a payment gateway then as of the new PA-DSS, the software that collects the CC details must also be certified. Now perhaps I am reading this wrong?

As for integration with the cards themselves, well it's early days for me but I had hoped to use some existing projects such as OpenSC/OpenCT http://www.opensc-project.org which looked promising but as I say it's early days.

Thanks again for the very informative post and sorry to the OP for somewhat hijacking his POS question.

[dbrowne9212]

thats quite all right. i'm finding all this quite interesting myself.