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Ask HN: Do you think there's room for a Point of Sales webapp?

9 points| davidjairala | 14 years ago | reply

I've been working the past couple of months on a Point of Sales webapp, and it's getting to the point where it's almost good to go, however, I'm beginning to wonder about the actual business potential for it.

I've been looking online for possible competing business or other webapps that do similar things, but so far I've been unable to find anything really up the same alley.

So what do you guys think? Could this be a good lifestyle business if executed correctly? Have you noticed a need for this on your field?

Thanks!

25 comments

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[+] gallerytungsten|14 years ago|reply
I think the two prior comments about having a robust system with 100% uptime are on the money. It definitely can't be laggy, either.

I'd suggest the following reality check. Set up a "head to head" test vs. a cash register. Give someone basic training, and have them run through a list of transactions. Is your app as snappy and responsive as the hardware of the cash register? How does it compare to the cost of a cash register? I'd suggest doing this competitive analysis of the cost and performance before going any further.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
The head to head test vs. a cash register is a fantastic idea, thank you! Basically, from what I've seen thus far, cost-wise I'd like the webapp to be the affordable solution, 'cause most of these POS setups can get really pricey from the get go.

Speed is pretty snappy right now, but this can vary once it's running with a couple of actual clients on, so I'll have to look into it a bit more carefully, start caching whatever's possible to, and so forth, so thank you for that suggestion as well.

[+] rick888|14 years ago|reply
You need to make sure you have near 100% uptime. If someone is using this as a PoS and it's down, they will lose money. You may also need to get some sort of insurance.
[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
Thanks, will definitely be looking into various forms of reliability and maybe have some mirror servers just to provide 100% uptime.
[+] pierreminik|14 years ago|reply
Having researched potential PoS systems for a local shop I can say there is a lot of room for improving the PoS products but I'm far from convinced it's actually lucrative to provide such solutions.

As rick888 is pointing out you will definitely need a solution that is forgiving towards system threats. The system needs to be functional in all sorts of conditions.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
I was looking at a suscription model, kind of like what the 37 signals guys do, but with more affordable pricing. I was thinking something like $20-$30 a month for the basic package.

Thank you for your pointer about functionality and system threats, I hadn't really thought about that and will be looking into it very thoroughly.

[+] juliancox|14 years ago|reply
Take a look at Vend: http://www.vendhq.com/

They are a cloud-hosted, browser-based POS system with full offline service. And they've just announced series B funding so others also believe there is a market there.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
Thanks julian, definitely hitting up many of the same areas as my idea, but hopefully there's room for another option in the market. As they say, always nice when someone else validates the idea.
[+] Yesh|14 years ago|reply
Not sure of the market you are targeting. It has been my past experience developing and selling stock/sales system in India that it's very hard to break in with a browser based remote model (vs. FoxPro, curses) based interaction model. The main reason being adoption. Some of these adoption issues are.

- Hot keys

- Popups (like FoxPro) and selections.

- Local vs remote (availability) vs sync later. Syncing has to be automatic with extremely good fail over mechanism.

- Install once and forget about it. What I mean here is that retailers (at POS) are not thirsty for new features/functions.

- Forgiving.

My2Cents worth.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
Hi Yesh, thank you for your comment, it raises some very good points and concerns I've been having lately.

The target market is pretty much small to medium retailers who are looking for an affordable POS solution.

I love the idea of having hot keys on the webapp though, it would really make the whole processing faster.

[+] mark242|14 years ago|reply
I hate to break this to you, but for any larger merchant, you're going to be SOL, for one basic reason: PCI compliance. Unless you spend a ridiculous amount of time and money researching and implementing things like key management, credit card tokenization, and the like, no level 1 or level 2 merchant will look at you.

For level 3 and level 4 merchants, you may have a shot-- especially if you can seamlessly upgrade the application to add more functionality, allow for customization, etc. Basically a Shopify for the real world.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
Hi mark, thank you for your comment. The product is definitely more geared to smaller shops, level 3 and 4 as you said. However, I'm beginning to think that maybe looking into PCI compliance wouldn't be a bad idea.

Thanks again.

[+] redguava|14 years ago|reply
I think multi-site stores would be a good target for this kind of app. Removing the need for networking/synchronisation across multiple sites can be handy. Especially if you show stock levels that let them easily look up accurate numbers at other stores.

I am not convinced 100% uptime is a showstopper, shops can revert to a paper receipt book temporarily if needed. Internet outages are inevitable, even if your server is still up.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
Hi redguava, thank you for your input.

As you mention the app currently does allow you to run a multi-site setup, as well as a multi-company setup for those lucky people running more than one company.

Seeing the concern for 100% uptime I will be looking into offering as high uptime as possible, maybe adding some EC2 instances ontop of my Linode servers or something of the sort.

Thanks again!

[+] ottoid|14 years ago|reply
I'd be happy to look into trying it out for a retail store of general merchandise, like a local grocery store.

The only issue is some kind of guaranteed connectivity on one hand or just good uptime and is it a real time database or is it using push changes from the client?

Would need 2.

[+] davidjairala|14 years ago|reply
Thanks ottoid, I'll let you know via private message or email as soon as I have a beta setup online, which should be coming in a couple of weeks tops so you can give it a go. It would be tremendously helpful to have someone actually try it out with real data.

The database is real time, and I'm definitely beginning to look into some sort of setup that would allow me to offer near 100% uptime.

[+] Anthony_qraving|14 years ago|reply
OP, care to share an email? I have been floating this idea around for a long time, and have a ton of experience programming/installing PoS systems etc.