Enter orders on a roaming tablet

Staff sometimes need to serve a customer away from the counter, at the shelf, on the salesfloor, or at a table. Some retailers call this clienteling.

You can run POS on a tablet so a salesperson stays with the customer and builds the order as the conversation goes. This saves the customer queuing, and saves the salesperson repeating the conversation at a till.

Because POS runs in a browser, the same register software runs on a tablet. There is no separate mobile product to buy or deploy.

Use cases

• A shop floor where staff advise rather than ring up.
• A restaurant or venue taking orders at the table.
• A showroom where the conversation happens away from the counter.
• Any business where the customer should not have to queue to buy.

How it works

1. A tablet connects to its own Register on the Outlet, the same way any other device does.
2. The salesperson signs in as themselves, so the Order is attributed to them wherever it is finished.
3. They attach the customer’s Contact to the cart, which brings that customer’s pricing, credit, and history to the screen.
4. They build the cart on the floor, then take payment, set the cart aside, or arrange delivery.

Ways to finish the sale

A cart built on the floor does not have to be paid for on the floor. Choose the ending that suits how the visit is going.

• Take payment there and then. The salesperson charges the customer on the tablet, using a terminal paired to that register or any other enabled payment method.
• Set the cart aside. Park the cart and resume it when the customer is ready. A parked cart is saved to the store rather than to the tablet, so any register in the store can pick it up, including a counter register when the handover is planned. See Park an order.
• Ship it, to one or more people. The delivery step captures a Recipient Name and address separately from the buying customer, so an item can go to someone other than the person paying. You can give each item in the cart its own delivery, so one visit becomes one order shipping to several addresses, with the rest carried out of the store. See Arrange delivery fulfillment at POS.

What the salesperson can see

Attaching the customer to the cart gives the salesperson that customer’s history, not just a blank cart.

• Their account pricing, credit balance, and terms apply from the moment they are attached. See Add a customer to an order.
• Their past orders are searchable from the register, so the salesperson can refer to what the customer already owns. See Look up a customer’s order history.
• Stock shows as an exact count or a qualitative tag on product cards, so answering “do you have this in blue” does not need a trip to the stockroom.
• Product media renders in the view, so the salesperson can show a product the store does not have on the floor.

You can add whatever else the conversation needs, such as a fitting history, a wishlist, or a membership tier, by putting a POS Layout over the object that holds it.

Setup steps

1. Add a register for each tablet on the relevant Outlet, named for the role rather than a position, for example Floor 1 or Personal shopping. See Add a register to an outlet.
2. Add each salesperson as an Outlet User, with an Outlet User Type that carries the discount ceiling you want them to have on the floor. See Add a POS user.
3. Give the tablet register a layout set suited to a handheld screen, and put the actions a floor conversation needs on its home grid. See POS layouts and POS action groups.
4. Pair a mobile card terminal to the register if payment is taken on the floor. See POS payment devices.

Connection quality

Tablets roam into parts of a building where the connection is worse than it is at the counter. Check what your staff need before relying on a tablet in those areas.

• Cash and manual card sales continue offline, and so does pay on account for customers whose details are already synced.
• An integrated terminal payment, a voucher redemption, and an account credit payment all need a connection.
• Resuming a set-aside sale needs a connection, because the register checks with StoreConnect that no other device has started its checkout.

See Take payments while the POS is offline for what to do when the connection drops mid-sale.

Results

A salesperson signed in to a tablet register can build a cart anywhere in the store. The resulting Order is attributed to them and appears in Salesforce alongside every other sale.