Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#2Adding a clear button to the product search might boost productivity.
Editing quantities from cart will also be helpful.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#3I really like your pricing plan design. Hope it works well for you.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#4I really like this, looks very nice! Well done!
Also I've heard that using establishment-provisioned tablets results in greasy screens, this solution alleviates that by using the patrons own devices :)
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#5Two perspectives: I worked and coded out on alternative POS solutions right when iPad POS solutions became popular. But it's a dead end. It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it.
For example, you may or may not have finally got this done, got it shipped, all those things are great. But your workflow and marketing are meant for tables. This is now dead on arrival.
Second perspective as a restauranteur: $219/mo is crazy expensive. I pay $300/mo to Revel and $180/mo to Clover for two different types of businesses.
With the $300/mo to Revel they process thousands a day and I have 24/7 phone support that within 2 min a live human handles my problems.
With the $180/mo to Clover they process hundreds a day and I have an easy to use, to easy to service system that I can hack into and custom build Android apps to do whatever I want.
Your $219/mo don't come close to delivering value like that.
Sorry.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#6I have to say that I was in the early stages of designing something similar. Although POS is complex by nature I think most of these systems are pretty static. I'm curious if you had feedback from potential customers and how you got to your pricepoint. Feel free to reach out ralph.das[]gmail
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#7I have to say that I was in the early stages of designing something similar. Although POS is complex by nature I think most of these systems are pretty static. I'm curious if you had feedback from potential customers and how you got to your pricepoint. Feel free to reach out ralph.das[]gmail
I built the inital version for my own university project. Now, after a few years I got it out of the drawer, adapted it and now it is publicly available. It was mainly built for events.
Part of the university project was to make a quantitative survey, ask the staff of events what they need, ask the customers what they need. Then I built the application and made an event to test it. This enabled me to collect a little feedback.
From my survey I know that organizers pay more than $ 200 for a order management system (e. g. about $ 300 for the system and more per device needed).
Until now only leisure clubs used it for events.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#8Two perspectives: I worked and coded out on alternative POS solutions right when iPad POS solutions became popular. But it's a dead end. It's too complex and resource intensive for an indie shop, it's not worth it. For example, you may or may not have finally got this done, got it shipped, all those things are great. But your workflow and marketing are meant for tables. This is now dead on arrival. Second perspective…
You keep saying "it's a dead end", what is your point here?
Why is it "dead on arrival", why would it be bad to market for tables. Seriously your comment is an incoherent mess.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#9I have no experience with POS solutions, especially not for catering and restaurant. So tak my opinion with a grain of salt.
General: As the site came up in German, I assume you at least think of targeting this market was well. Germany made invoice copies for customers mandatory this year, on top of the already somewhat crazy requirements regarding auditability and compliance for POS systems. Quite a barrier for new systems, but from what I heard out of the local start-up scene here, there are not that many certified solutions out there yet.
I would talk to a tax consultant to get an opinion from that angle. And I would aim for official tax certification, that will make life for your customers so much easier and would be a true selling point.
Pricing: Kind of tied into the above, obviously a solution that gets tax authorities of your clients backs has some inherent value to them. For the upper range, 219 USD doesn't sound to abusive, depending on service levels and support. I would just add a couple of tiers between hte free version and the Pro one. And maybe limit functionality for the free version instead of tables, by limiting tables lacals with less than 10 tables will never convert to paying customers. And you are incentivizing toying the set-up to work with 10 "tables", depending on what exactly is a table.
I don't agree that a table based solution is dead on arrival, een if restaurants are forced to close. Sure, a delivery, contactless, solution would be great by now. But things will get to normal one day. And then an affordable, certified POS solution like yours will certainly have value.
Marketing might be an issue, so. But maybe the corony crisis akes care of that when a lot of competitors relying on VC money to get customers, well, leave the market.
Re: Show HN: I made a point of sale system with self-service for mobile devices
#10We've been using uniCenta at our restaurant for 4 years (the open-source version).
It's barely usable, all our employees hate it, the UX (and UI) gives the impression that all the people working on it have never actually used it themselves. It's dead-slow and sometimes you need to log into the mysql DB directly to clear some tables..
The reason why we use it? We're not in the US - there's not too much room for a commercial $$$/month solution for us at the moment and the switching costs (retraining people, integrating our custom reporting and monitoring) would be way too huge.
I'd definitely consider a different solution if I'd ever start a new restaurant (highly unlikely though - it's hell. Much harder than running a startup of a similar size :)) but I'd much prefer a % revenue-based approach (with an upper cap) than a fixed pricing model.