Point of Purchase Systems?

[KvHagedorn]

Has anyone here ever set up one of these? I mean with multiple terminals, programmable keyboards, sales/inventory software, barcode reader, etc. for a retail business. We are planning a new store and I would like to make the shopping and purchase experience as streamlined as possible. We have been using QuickBooks since 2000 and it's OK, but I'm just wondering if there is something better out there..

[MultimediaMan]

Quickbooks is not a bad way to go, every iteration of Quickbooks Point of Sale seems to be better than the last.

Wedge-style (Those that plug inline with PS/2 Keyboard) barcode readers are driverless and work very well. A USB barcode readers are also a good way to go: most of them can be set to emulate a serial port easily so they interface as a legacy serial device.

I wonder how well Quickbooks Point of Sale would work in a Terminal Services environment... because if it were me setting the place up, it would be Thin Clients/Low Power PCs (using RDP), an Application Server (or Two) which then is backed to a NAS/Fileserver.

Lots of people complain about licensing and cost, but I can tell you this: what you spend on a terminal services package now will definitely ending up saving you money in support and hardware overhead over time. Big time. FWIW; If you are running a Terminal Services environment with USB barcode readers at the clients, you may need to enable sharing local serial ports for the inputs to work within an RDP session, depending on how the application is written.

Before Wal-Mart, I setup quite a few Video Stores. Had I known then what I know now, I could have saved everyone a lot of trouble going with such a setup, but then again, Windows NT Terminal Services Edition sucked hard. Windows 2000 Professional works much better, but 2003 Server has Terminal Services to where it truly needs to be. Now, if only the programmers would write code that follows all of Terminal Services Best Practices...but I digress.

[KvHagedorn]

Thanks, MMM. What are the special advantages of using the Teminal Services package here?

[UtwigMU]

Personally I'd evaluate Open Source for POS systems:
- chances are you will only need to run your app, sales/POS apps being common, so there's high chance of it being open sourced. Afaik SuSE also has solutions for POS. (Here small software shops rip small retail outlets and bars on high priced POS software and computers, which in a lot of cases is just a modified foreign app).
- depending on the size of shop you might save on software license costs, but you will need to evaluate how much will training/support costs amount

[MultimediaMan]

The advantage is only having one or two copies of Quicken POS installed. Also, you simplify administration of the system by only having one or two machines actually configured to run Quicken. I'm not sure how Intuit handles licensing for Terminal Services, but you may end up saving money.

If you can, Thin Clients are the way to go: No moving parts, stone simple administration, and firmware upgrades can be done Remotely or Automatically quite easily. As a matter of fact, if the thin client is plugged into a good power outlet, you should be able to wake it up (even if it has never been powered on before), via WOL. (FWIW, I administer over 60K WYSE Thin Clients, and the trouble tickets for them figure out to be less then ~0.0001% per day for hardware-related problems.)

Regarding Open Source: If you can trust yourself or someone locally to administer and troubleshoot the system, then by all means do so. But if you run into a problem where all of your POS Data and Financial Data are inaccessible, prepare to pay someone handsomely to recover your system/data. Linux is free all right, but Support is NOT. IMHO, for most Small Businesses, Open Source is only practical if the support staff exists locally or better yet, onsite.

Remember, the goal of most small business computer systems is to keep a business from being reduced to paper and pencil.

Windows may not be the end-all-be-all, but it does work, and for a Small Business (where uptime is secondary and ease of maintenance is primary) it is likely to be a better solution, just because of the support options available.

[Gurm]

I've set one or two of those up. But it was a few years back, and they were all universally terrible with the exception of the HIDEOUSLY expensive one from IBM that involved a bunch of IBM 386 "controllers" with VGA monitors and... yeah, it was for a supermarket.

[MultimediaMan]

At work, we use IBM POS controllers, too...though ours are all fast P3s and and slow P4s...FYI: the IBM SurePOS system can run ~comfortably~ on a 25MHz Machine. The Java-enabled SurePOS System uses a bit more resources: a P233MMX is enough to run an entire 50+ register store very comfortably. (IIRC, we retired our Token Ring-based 25-33MHz x86 Controllers in 2003.)

The problem with SurePOS for small business are many:
1) Register Definitions (Setup) are difficult.
2) The SKU/Item Traits/Restriction configuration is a nightmare if you don't have all of the support tools (and you won't unless you pay Big Blue yearly support fees).
3) The Cost of the system is extremely high. Most of the hardware is proprietary as well.

If you're only going to run 1-10 terminals, an IBM SurePOS system is like using a wheat combine to mow your 500 square foot lawn.

[RedRed]

(I worked for figure retail -an epos software house from a few years back)(who got bought by torex retail - http://www.torexretail.com/ -a BIG player in the UK - unhappy times )- -
I used to install IBM POS terminals. they worked fine but were quircky - the printers in them were crap - constantly jammed

http://www.pc.ibm.com/store/products/pos/4694/

I would recommend that you buy generic components, cheap PC's etc. drive a serial cash drawer - most epos software can be configured to open a drawer on a ^g escape character. An epson thermal printer is simple to set up, reliable and rock solid. We used keyboards manufactured by a company called 'alphaMeric' (they have been bought out by a company called Devlin http://www.devlin.co.uk/devlin_keyboards/pos_main.html


Buy your barcode readers from Symbol. They are a bit more expensive - but again robust, and relatively easily configured.

I would recommend PS/2 wedge scanners, especially over cirtix or terminal services - the pain of USB over terminal services is a place I would not to be.

finally, get decent code 39 fonts for barcode production. I got mine from IDAutomation. There are free ones for some symbol sets, but are a pain in the arse to calculate (unless you go the crystal Reports route (and even then.....))

[Evildead666]

I use metrologic Voyager bar code scanners, ps/2 keyborad wedge style, and for me they are great.
Mostly its the 5 year warranty, where they exchange the product BEFORE finding out what went wrong with it...yup, they exchange here if its less than 5 years old.
The supplier thinks their mad, but he doesn't have that many returns either.

We used to buy PSC QS1000 models, but they lasted about a year in general, and were only guaranteed for 1 year after date of MANUFACTURE. some of the scanners we had delivered, were less than 6 months away from end of warranty....

[Kurt]

what do you use for software?