Modern POS by any other name still needs to be…modern

If you are of a certain age, you will remember when the early days of selling online led to the rise of a bouquet of adjectives software vendors used to describe the technology used to manage commerce through multiple selling channels. If you indeed are of that certain age, you will likely also recall spending time trying to decipher the differences between multichannel, omnichannel, all-channel and cross-channel commerce.

And that time you spent looking for differences was of course time wasted: the terms we used all meant more or less the same thing.

Fast-forward 20 years, and we’re at it again. For the past few years, technology providers have been hard at work making up terms to describe the latest generation of POS technology. Some of us refer to it as “omnichannel POS” while others refer to it as “unified POS.” Others describe it as “cloud POS” or “modern POS.” And in some cases, it’s a combination of several of those adjectives.

At Aptos, we’ve also been guilty of trying on various adjectives to describe Aptos ONE, our next-generation POS solution. My personal preference is “modern POS.” Because I believe that’s what most retailers want to do: modernize the technology that powers the modern store experiences they are attempting to deliver as part of the modern shopping journey. See a pattern there?

It gives me some satisfaction knowing that I’m not alone in thinking modern POS is an apt phrase. According to our search engine management tool (or is it our search engine optimization tool?), a few hundred people are searching for “modern POS” every month. That may not sound like a lot when compared with the 9.1 million people who search for “Taylor Swift” every month, but in the retail tech industry, ~200 monthly searches is actually a pretty decent search volume.

What modern POS systems need to offer to meet the needs of the modern store

But make no mistake: simply calling something modern does not make it modern. To be capable of truly supporting the requirements of today’s stores, modern POS technology must be rich in functionality and highly configurable. It should also, despite that rich and configurable functionality, be very easy to learn and use.

Modern POS technology must be inherently omnichannel, too, with the ability to integrate every channel into the store and the store into every channel. Endless aisle, pickup in store, ship to store and ship from store orders must be easily placed, monitored, escalated and fulfilled. Omnichannel returns must also be integrated and as easy for the associate as they are for the customer.

Hardware is another important consideration. Modern POS technology must offer robust hardware flexibility that makes it easy to put functionality in the hands of associates on devices that support all the different roles they play on any given day, whether inside the store or out. As such, modern POS must be designed with mobile devices in mind to ensure that retailers can always go where their customers gather and be empowered with everything they require to convert every sale.

And speaking of what it takes to convert a sale, real-time access to each customer’s history, active orders and loyalty status must be always available to every associate on every device. Modern shoppers have been trained by Amazon’s ubiquitous shopping engine to expect recommendations, offers and options based on their history with Amazon every time they shop, and modern POS platforms must not disappoint the store shopper with uninformed and impersonal interactions.

Not to be overlooked, promotions are also a critical part of today’s retail marketing strategies, and modern POS platforms must include robust promotion management and execution tools that make it easy for merchants and marketers to design and deploy offers when, where and how they desire. Anything less is simply unacceptable.

Cloud-native deployment is table stakes for modern POS

And finally, to be truly modern, POS must be cloud native. The demands of managing, updating and monitoring hundreds or even thousands of devices across a retail store estate simply scream for POS to be deployed in the cloud. This also places a great responsibility on developers of modern POS platforms to ensure their offline resiliency models are ironclad. Despite all the advances in connectivity, outages across far-flung estates are still common. We can’t leave the stores out of business when those outages do occur, waiting for their connection to the cloud to be restored in order to start selling again.

The list of characteristics required for next-gen POS to be considered modern is indeed long. I’ve really just scratched the surface here, but I think the point is clear: call it whatever you like, but without a comprehensive set of capabilities deployed on a scalable, flexible and resilient architecture, your “modern” POS will be behind the times.