studiesrule
February 15th, 2007, 09:22 PM
I was considering making a stable POS suite targeted at small - med shops and supermarkets. The mode of business may not necessarily be online, though support for it may be included. It would handle the following tasks:
* Inventory management
* Accounting (perhaps integrating with osCommerce or something else)
* Barcode reading, and printing
* Managing slave systems (with possible branch support)
* Managing customers
As far as I could search, I have found only 2 OSS for this:
* TinaPOS (http://tinapos.sourceforge.net): Is more targeted towards restaurants, and is not geared for higher loads of supermarket inventory.
* PHP Point of Sale (http://www.phppointofsale.com/): Is too online orientated. One of the main target users are supermarkets that don't have online support. It also is not very much orientated about quick and fast processing of goods. This is intended for supermarkets.
I think that Linux and OSS in general would be suitable for smaller end markets that won't waste capital on OS and a lot of the proprietary software that accompanies it. I have a close relative who owns such a supermarket, and the software for it is just pathetic. The interface is pretty terrible, it is really buggy. And it is not at all scalable. It uses MS Access for its database, which is rather huge. And it's pretty expensive.
At this stage, I'm pretty sure I can provide a better interface than that, and I think I can produce a good application. However, there is no way I can give true support for end-users, who will need help to set up the systems and no one is accountable for errors. This a major concern for anyone owning a shop, and personally, I think one of the reasons that OSS hasn't made such a large presence in businesses.
I am asking whether it's worth my time to make this, if I can't give any customer support, other than walking people through with this, along with any advice. I don't want to start a project that will inevitably die on SF. Thanks for your time and thought.
* Inventory management
* Accounting (perhaps integrating with osCommerce or something else)
* Barcode reading, and printing
* Managing slave systems (with possible branch support)
* Managing customers
As far as I could search, I have found only 2 OSS for this:
* TinaPOS (http://tinapos.sourceforge.net): Is more targeted towards restaurants, and is not geared for higher loads of supermarket inventory.
* PHP Point of Sale (http://www.phppointofsale.com/): Is too online orientated. One of the main target users are supermarkets that don't have online support. It also is not very much orientated about quick and fast processing of goods. This is intended for supermarkets.
I think that Linux and OSS in general would be suitable for smaller end markets that won't waste capital on OS and a lot of the proprietary software that accompanies it. I have a close relative who owns such a supermarket, and the software for it is just pathetic. The interface is pretty terrible, it is really buggy. And it is not at all scalable. It uses MS Access for its database, which is rather huge. And it's pretty expensive.
At this stage, I'm pretty sure I can provide a better interface than that, and I think I can produce a good application. However, there is no way I can give true support for end-users, who will need help to set up the systems and no one is accountable for errors. This a major concern for anyone owning a shop, and personally, I think one of the reasons that OSS hasn't made such a large presence in businesses.
I am asking whether it's worth my time to make this, if I can't give any customer support, other than walking people through with this, along with any advice. I don't want to start a project that will inevitably die on SF. Thanks for your time and thought.