Point of Sale (POS) Application

[eluser]The Questioner[/eluser]
One of my prior businesses was the development and marketing of an EPOS (stock control, invoicing and point-of-sales) system for small-to-small-medium sized retailers and wholesalers.

It went moderately well, except that I really needed a partner to help share the workload – development/support/marketing really took a toll and was too much for one person. Constantly switching hats wore me down.

The product itself was written in VB/Access with some custom built/third-party DLL's. It utilised barcode scanners, thermal receipt printers, LED pole displays and electronic cash drawers.

I would (very strongly) suggest that you develop in a proper desktop language, such as VB.NET or C#, with an SQL Server backend. PHP is a web scripting language and is simply the wrong tool for EPOS systems.

1. Any decent EPOS system will need to integrate with all the standard EPOS hardware. The whole point of EPOS systems is they accelerate the point-of-sales stage of retailing. You cannot do this with a browser-sandboxed scripting language like PHP (e.g, integrating with a barcode scanner is critical to success).

2. Even with AJAX, web development interfaces are inferior to desktop based applications. Slower, more limited and less powerful.

3. The entry point for EPOS systems in terms of functionality is quite high (as there is so much competition). You will need to add a lot more functionality just to get on par with the standard. Look at the features of Microsoft's RMS (Retail Management System) for an idea.

4. Users will need a 100% broadband connection to the internet in order for your product to work (unless you install Apache locally on their LAN's – which is another problem). Even if their connection has a 99% up-time, that would be nearly 4 days a year with no workable EPOS system – critical to a retailer.

5. Data is sitting on a remote server, which is a potential security risk. What if the webhost falls prey to the recession? Or is compromised? Desktop-based solutions will have the database sitting locally, where they can keep an eye on it and apply their own backup and maintenance routines.