Why a Tablet-based Point Of Sale Solution May Not Be a Good Fit For Your Business

Tablet POS systems are everywhere, and the popularity of mobile devices continues to grow in the technology world.

We’re all for staying on top of advances in technologies. We trust and recommend PayAnywhere and Revel for our merchants.

However, we wouldn’t recommend them to every merchant or business.

Why?

Tablet POS systems are not a one-size-fits-all solution

We’re going to be brutally honest here and bring down some of the hype over tablets as point-of-sale systems. Yes we praised them highly in our earlier blog, and yes we still love them.

But they are not the best solution for certain types of businesses.

If you own a restaurant or a bar, a tablet will not meet all of your needs for a POS system.

Tablet POS systems are limited in how much they can process

If you have a restaurant or bar, or run a large retail store, a tablet will not give you the best return on investment, or help you manage your store like a traditional POS system would.

When you have multiple products to track, a tablet simply does not have the capability to manage all of the applications needed.

Let’s put some perspective on this.

Imagine your tablet POS system is a regular Tablet or iPad device. Now picture a laptop or desktop computer. You have to complete a project where you will have to use Photoshop, InDesign, and Adobe Acrobat. Which tool is going to be best for the project?

Technically, a tablet can run Photoshop, InDesign, and Adobe Acrobat, but switching back and forth between the programs will be a pain, as will running all three simultaneously.

Any tablet POS system will have some limitations

Aside from Revel, no tablet POS system can run off of an Ethernet connection. Wifi can be finicky to use at times, and it becomes impossible to run online if it goes down, meaning you could take a credit card and not find out it was declined until you submit your batch of transactions for the day to be processed.

We get that traditional POS systems are pricey compared to a tablet

Even if you want a tablet based POS, in the long run you’re going to spend the same amount as a traditional POS anyway.

If you buy Restaurant Manager, it’s going to more expensive than an iPad or Tablet POS, because it essentially comes with all the hardware you’ll need to run your restaurant or bar. Restaurant manager also interfaces with more technology hardware than a tablet system would.

You could buy a tablet based system and all the pieces needed individually, but you would have to manually interface all the hardware you bought separately with a cloud based system, and you’ll manually have to program all of the hardware to work with your tablet based POS system.

So you’ll have to spend extra time programming it, and interfacing it yourself.

Restaurant Manager and StoreTender will still interface quicker than any POS tablet combined with any miscellaneous bought hardware.

Times like these, it’s better not to DIY in businesses technology.

Want to talk to technologies experts?

Talk with our technology experts, and see what would be the best fit for your
business.