A supermarket owner in Kumasi told us he had abandoned a well-known cloud POS after four months. Not because it lacked features — because his tills stopped whenever the connection dropped, and in his area that was most days.
He went back to a paper till book, which never goes offline.
The problem with cloud-only tills
Cloud POS software assumes the network is always there. Every sale is a request to a server; if the request fails, the sale cannot complete. On a stable connection this is invisible. On an intermittent one it means a queue of customers and a cashier who cannot help them.
What offline-first actually means
An offline-first till writes the sale to local storage on the device first, and treats syncing to the server as a separate, retryable step. The cashier never waits for the network. When the connection returns, queued sales upload in order.
This changes some design decisions:
- Stock levels are eventually consistent, so reorder alerts must tolerate a short lag.
- Receipt numbers are generated per device with a branch prefix, so two tills cannot collide.
- Conflicts need a rule decided up front. For sales, last-write-wins is wrong; every sale must survive.
What to ask a vendor
Ask them to demonstrate it. Have them put the device in aeroplane mode, ring up three sales, then reconnect. If sales complete instantly offline and all three appear afterwards, it is genuinely offline-first. If anything spins, it is not.
In an environment where power and connectivity are both variable, this is the single feature most worth testing before you buy.
