Reliability has always been high on retailers’ list when it comes to choosing POS systems. If your POS goes down, business grinds to a halt, with the inability to process transactions potentially costing tens if not thousands of dollars.

As the role of POS has evolved beyond checkout, that need for reliable performance has only increased. Beyond sales, POS systems now serve as hubs for inventory management, customer service, and loyalty programs. Stores use them to collect data for performance analytics. They run content management systems through them for self-service kiosks and customer-facing digital displays. They link to ecommerce systems so retailers can run joined-up services like BOPIS. And as more and more retailers embrace AI, POS is the natural home for that, too.

POS outages are therefore no longer just a problem for processing sales. They can bring entire in-store operations grinding to a halt. And that’s most likely to happen exactly when you can least afford it – at peak periods when systems are under the greatest strain.

As we tip over into the second half of the year, the all-important Q4 peak season gets ever closer. As part of your planning this year, we’d encourage all retailers to include a thorough review of POS resilience to avoid any unwanted mishaps at exactly the wrong time.

Here’s a quick guide to three basic steps that will go a long way to boosting your POS resilience.

Book in a maintenance health check

We get it. To most people, ‘maintenance’ is what happens when something goes wrong. The idea of ‘doing maintenance’ on a system that doesn’t have any obvious issues seems counter-intuitive.

But what you can see on the surface doesn’t always tell the whole story. Preventative maintenance is about looking for the tell-tale signs that something could be heading in the direction of going wrong, and doing something about it before it happens.

Running this sort of system health check for your entire POS estate ahead of peak season is one of the best ways you can avoid performance issues and outages.

Check performance metrics under load

Your POS is one big computerized system. That means it produces and channels a whole heap of data. A lot of this data can be used to assess current and future performance capabilities, including modelling how it will handle peak loads.

As part of any system health check, specifically ask your maintenance provider to run diagnostics of CPU utilization, database server health and network bandwidth. These are the sort of indicators that tell you whether your POS has the basic compute resources to do what you want it to do under maximum strain.

Set up offline redundancy

Because most modern POS systems rely on cloud-based software services, one of the biggest vulnerabilities is network availability. If your internet connection goes down, so does your cloud POS.

For that reason, retailers cannot afford to be completely reliant on the cloud. There has to be a back-up solution in place, or what in engineering terms we call redundancy.

There are several possible approaches. One is to have a secondary ‘failover’ network connection, so if your primary one goes down, you have a back-up option. Another is to create a hybrid system which stores critical data and services, such as product catalogs, inventory, customer data, and the transaction engine, on local servers and devices as well as in the cloud. Then if there is an outage, you can at the very least keep processing sales.

As part of this, you would need a store-and-forward (SAF) solution that allows your payment processor to temporarily store encrypted credit card data locally without needing instant, real-time bank authorization. Payments are then automatically submitted for approval once the connection is reestablished.

As the countdown to peak season starts, we strongly recommend getting your POS performance check-up booked in as soon as possible. Contact us today and we’d be happy to make an appointment with one of our specialist Field Services engineers in your area.