Guided selling and product demonstration

Some sales need the salesperson and the customer to look at the same screen and work through it together. For example, choosing between models, configuring a room, or stepping through the few questions that decide which product suits.

You can build that sequence as a set of POS views, so the screen carries the expertise instead of the salesperson having to remember it. A salesperson does not need to know an entire range, a compatibility matrix, or a specification sheet to give a good answer, and every customer gets the same explanation.

What the two people choose together becomes the cart, and then the order.

Use cases

• A kitchen, bathroom, or furniture retailer configuring a room with the customer, adding each component as it is agreed.
• A specialist retailer walking a customer through the three or four questions that determine which model suits them.
• A showroom demonstrating a product working, for goods too large or too few to keep on the floor.
• A trade counter pricing options with a builder and printing the result as a quote before anything is paid.

How it works

1. A POS Action Item opens the first POS View in the sequence.
2. Each view is a Liquid template, so a step can hold images, video, comparison tables, diagrams, or a form.
3. A view reads the current cart and the record it is attached to, so a later step can be shaped by an earlier answer.
4. As choices are agreed, the view calls cart actions to add a component, change a line, or set a deposit. See the POS actions reference.
5. When the sequence ends, the result is an ordinary POS cart.

Build the sequence

A guided sequence is a set of POS Views. The buttons that move between them are POS Action Items, held in a POS Action Group. See POS layouts and POS action groups.

Because the steps are records rather than code, you can change the sequence when the range changes, without waiting for a release.

Save the choices to the order

A configurator is only useful afterwards if the reasoning survives into the order. There are two ways to keep it.

• Capture the choices as custom fields on the cart line. These carry through to the order item, so the order says what was chosen and not only what it cost.
• Capture a note per line, where the detail is free text rather than a fixed set of options.

Consider the limits

• This is not built for unattended use. A kiosk is the same idea with the staff member removed. Where a customer is genuinely serving themselves, a customized storefront page is usually the better fit, because it is built for unattended public use. Use POS where a salesperson is driving the screen, because everything the register knows about stock, pricing, and the customer is already there.
• A sequence does not change prices. It assembles a cart, and the prices it uses are the ones the register would use anyway.
• It needs a connection. Views render from synced data, and any step that calls another system is unavailable offline. See Take payments while the POS is offline.

Results

The salesperson and the customer finish the sequence with an ordinary POS cart holding the agreed items and the reasoning behind them. You can take payment, set it aside, print it as a quote, or arrange delivery in the usual way. See Create a POS cart print template.