POS (Point of Sale) Components

First, let's look briefly at the main Point of Sale components.

The pieces that make up POS systems are pretty straightforward. For retail businesses, you start with a personal computer, which runs the retail POS software that does all the work. You need a monitor — these days flat-panel screens, though still pricier than tubes, are popular because they don't take up as much space, and they're pretty durable, even touch-screens, which you think would get tired of being poked all day.

With some systems, you can buy your own computers and then buy the POS software for your business separately. This works best if you have technical expertise working for you. If not — and most of the time it's not — you'll buy the whole package — hardware and software — from one vendor. The advantage is they know the hardware and should be able to take care of problems. The disadvantage is you might not get as good a cost deal as if you put it together yourself. But, as usual, if you don't have the (considerable) expertise, you can't expect to get the savings. IT chief Millen was able to save his company, Elephant Pharmacy, quite a few bucks because they were in the position to actually hire a VP of Information Technology, so they got that side benefit from it. Also, Elephant plans to expand quite a bit, so cutting a few dollars from each POS terminal can add up to some serious savings for a growing retail chain.

If you decide to buy the components and peripherals separately anyway, the one thing you will have to check at each step is compatibility with your POS software! You will probably also want keyboards. Equally important is magnetic stripe readers so you can process credit cards; you can get this feature built into the keyboard, or as a standalone gadget.

You'll also need scanners to read the bar codes — this is where the efficiencies at the checkout counter really happen. Cheaper scanners are fine for most retail outlets, though they have less range and might have trouble with deformed barcode stickers. Laser scanners are more robust and have longer range, and come in several flavors of increasing speed, capability, and price, with the most expensive models being appropriate for high-volume businesses.

In the next section of this Buyers' Guide we'll talk about POS Peripherals.