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

Post by davidjairala » Mon, Aug 15, 2011, 5:20 AM UTC

pierreminik wrote: post #17

davidjairala wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my case suscription models with somewhat absolute pricing were attractive because it provides a way to even out the money cost over time. But the price was not the only thing in consideration when it came to costs. The concerns my client had with suscription model was if the provider would still exist and provide same service in a year, or in five years for that matter. The amount of time they had to invest for th…

Post by davidjairala » Mon, Aug 15, 2011, 5:52 AM UTC

Yesh wrote: post #22

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 a…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 15, 2011, 2:27 PM UTC

vrikhter wrote: post #24

A few potential competitors from a list I had built earlier this year (unrelated project): http://www.getpose.com/ http://www.erply.com/ http://www.vendhq.com/ http://www.cashierlive.com/ http://www.merchantos.com/ http://www.camcommerce.com/ http://www.posterita.com/ http://shopkeep.com/

Post by ottoid » Mon, Aug 15, 2011, 9:41 PM UTC

davidjairala wrote: post #9

ottoid wrote: post #5

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.

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.