Perrine Prieur, owner of Perrine's Wine Shop in Atlanta, GA, is thrilled with her new Mac-based POS system that allows her to ring up sales any- where in the store.
POS ON THE GO W
Point-of-sale systems continue to expand what they can do — and where they can go.
By Cheryl Ursin
hen Perrine Prieur was trying to get her new wine shop in Atlanta open last year, she ran into trouble setting up a point-of-
sale (POS) system.
"I started working with a company with a point-of- sale system for wine retailers and it was the worst expe- rience ever," she said. Twenty boxes of POS equipment and software arrived, without instructions. "And there was no one to help me install it," she said. "A friend helped me. We couldn't get it to work, and when I called the company, they told me I'd have to pay $150 per hour for help. That wasn't in the contract. And I had already paid $5,000." With two weeks to go before Perrine's Wine Shop was due to open, Prieur started working with a comput- er consultant named Meredith Anton. And Anton intro- duced her to a Mac-based product called Lightspeed from Xsilva Systems.
"When I asked 'Can I do this, and this, and this?, the answer was always 'Yes, yes, yes … and you can also do this,'" Prieur said, adding that the system was no more expensive than the one she had originally tried. And one of the coolest things she could do, which she added later, was what is called "mobile POS." Prieur
and her staff can ring up sales anywhere in the store, using handheld devices, such as an iPhone or an iPod Touch, that run the Apple operating system iOS . These devices are fitted with a "sled" or "jacket" containing a credit-card swipe and a scanner. "This is super-important when I am building cases with a customer," explained Prieur. "Rather than have to bring the customer – and all the bottles – to a cash reg- ister to scan them, we do everything right there." What if the customer wants to pay with cash or a check? "Then the mobile device can send the transac- tion to one of the store's other registers, where it pops up on the screen in a bubble, ready to be completed," said Dax Dasilva, CEO and vice president of develop- ment for Xsilva Systems.
And when a retailer is using an iPhone, which uses its telephone reception to connect to the system rather than a wireless network, which is what the iPods use, then the retailer can even leave the store and ring sales, on the store's POS system, using his or her cell phone. Todd Klaus, owner of Off The Vine, a wine and home-decor shop in Overland Park, KS, does that, with his Cashier Live POS system. The actual brick- and-mortar store is only open three days a week, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but Klaus, who teaches
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