Show HN: We made a web-based cash register | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We made a web-based cash register

facecash.com

75 pointsthinkcomp54 comments

This is a great idea in part because of the incredible stagnation in the upgrade path for a restaurant's POS technology. In my experience the entire hardware+software system gets upgraded only once every 5-10 years at a typical restaurant. Probably because the two (hardware and software) are sold together, making upgrades a big investment.

Welcome to the club, my company Cashier Live (http://www.cashierlive.com) has been at this for about a year now. We're focused on retail, and from what I can see here you're focused on restaurant/quick serve. This is a great idea to help get your payments product adopted.

One thing you'll run in to when you have merchants actually using this is a crushing load of feature requests and support. Since you're using Authorize.net for card payments, right away you'll have store owners complaining that their fees are higher than they used to be. (Maybe that's good for you, just tell them to use FaceCash) We've integrated directly with a few of the processing networks now to get around that. This will be a great tool for getting people on board with FaceCash, but you'll have to keep support/dev in mind or you'll be dragged away from it.

When I did a Show HN a year back, connectivity was one of the big question marks from everyone. I can report back that you'd be surprised how much of a non-issue it really is. MiFi cards and wireless hotspots are an almost bulletproof backup, it might be a bit slower but the store is open for business. With traditional POS, card processing is down when their connection is down so they're just as bad off as a web-based pos.

Point-of-sale software is well suited for SaaS, despite what many think, so I'm not surprised to see another join the club. Aaron: If you plan on sticking to restaurants/QSR shoot me an e-mail, have an idea I'd like to run past you.

I spent 2 years in the POS industry (about 3-4 years ago since I left). I've thought about this a couple times, but it keeps coming down to the same thing; if your internet goes out, you're hooped.

Maybe use HTML 5 local storage if an internet connection isn't available, then sync up with the server when it is?

yeah. But I imagine there might be some stickiness with multiple terminals...I guess if each terminal has it's own queue of order to be sent it wouldn't be a problem. There def would be issues with credit card processing though.

Credit card processing isn't the only problem. That goes down with the internet right now too. The problem is communication between the terminals, kitchen, bar, ect.

The way POS systems work is if you ring food and drinks in a terminal, the drinks get sent to the bar, and the food gets sent to the kitchen. If your using a web based point of sale system and your internet connection dies, none of this can happen. All the sudden you're running the orders around the restaurant by hand (which would _never_ fly).

cool app. From a conversion perspective, might want to try and show the product a bit more on the landing. Too much text for my taste. $0.02

Very interesting. Do you have a demo?

This is kiosk mode, so it's designed to let merchants place a kiosk in-store in order to decrease lines. It's a restricted version of the full application. You'll have to sign up your business to use the real thing.

https://www.facecash.com/kiosk.html?id=3587

Bug: The "Back" button isn't removed after adding a nested item (e.g., Capuccino -> Large).

Also, you've got a typo on "Cappuccino" :)

Thanks, we'll look into it. And I'll try to find that typo!

Not sure what the typo referred to is but “cappuccino“ is the correct spelling.

The kiosk originally spelled it with a single "p" -- it's since been corrected :)

I believe I found a few bugs with the kiosk mode:

1. Items are not grouped together when the same item is added at a later time (or is this a feature?)

2. Updating an order changes the price but not the quantity.

3. When selecting the quantity of an item, there is no visual feedback to let you know what number you have clicked on. It's also not obvious that +10 means 11.

4. Orders that have more than 1 item do not contain bullet points.

See http://i.imgur.com/Onpkb.png for some examples. This was within 10-20 seconds of playing with it, there are probably many more.

Item 1 is a feature; you might want one taco with rice and one without.

We'll look at the others. Thanks!

Intelligent display grouping - if the second one added has the same instructions or modifications, group them (but keep them separate in whatever storage area you're using) would be a happy medium, although obviously more work.

I'd suggest allowing grouping of items, allowing groups like 'Drinks', 'Sandwiches', etc. It's somewhat confusing in that example because there doesn't appear to be any sort of order to how the items are laid out. That may make some sense for the actual registers (muscle memory is wonderful thing), but if the customer is expected to use that interface themselves, I'd expect it to be a bit more friendly.

Web hosted POS? What about a fallback when the WAN goes down?

My only reservation after looking at this. You could imagine the "POS" acronym changing meaning very quickly in the event of connection failure.

That said, maybe they could eventually integrate gears or some other type of offline storage.

In all honesty, this is probably fairly rare. I'd imagine about as rare as a cooking oven burning out, running out of a specific ingredient, or having your head cook call in sick. Making the system more reliable never hurts, though. A "rocket stick" or tethered phone could tag in when ever there may be issue.

Many things can occur in a restaurant that can cause hiccups, but overall I think the benefits outweigh the cons. A great idea.