Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Tough year for retail chains and franchises searching for POS systems?

Many of the retailers contacting me have between 4 and 25 locations. Nearly all of them have expressed frustration due to a lack of affordable point of sale options on the market. They generally find that they are too complex for the tablet solutions like NCR Silver, Clover, Lavu, and Shopkeep but don't have the sales volume/budget to invest in LightSpeed or Dynamics 365/AX.

Retail Management Hero (RMH) with RMH Central will be a great solution come later in 2018 (for anyone - not not just Microsoft Dynamics HQ users). Cloud Retailer is also moving forward with more of the e-commerce and accounting integrations that chain retailers want. Microsoft is also working on a retail specific POS solution but licensing and deployment costs may fall in to the AX/365 category.

Lets not overlook that NCR continues to improve their CounterPoint point of sale solution. Retail Pro and Bindo are also players in the small chain and franchise concept market.

My main advice to small chain and franchise retailers contacting me is to see if they can hang on another 6 months to a year as more options should be available as 2018 progresses. If they can't wait, then a staged implementation might be acceptable starting with a core POS system and then waiting for additional features, functions, and integrations to be added.

Need retail or restaurant point of sale advice? Contact me at 208-340-5632 or kevinantosh@gmail.com

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