How RetailPOS Works

Four phases: one-time onboarding, daily use, end-of-day review, and offline recovery. Here is exactly what happens at each stage.

Onboarding (one time)

The onboarding wizard runs on first launch and guides you through everything. No external services required to run in offline mode.

Choose your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Sylius, Wix, PrestaShop, Squarespace) or select Offline standalone mode
Enter API credentials — tokens stored securely; products, customers, and orders pull automatically from your platform
Connect printer, barcode scanner, and payment terminal (Stripe, Square, or Worldpay)
Set store name, tax rate, and currency; create admin and cashier accounts; choose authentication methods

What happens on every shift, from cashier login to the last sale of the day.

Cashier logs in via PIN, biometric, magnetic card swipe, or RFID/NFC badge
Browse products or scan barcode — items added to cart with correct variant pricing
Apply coupon or gift card if needed — validated live against your platform's API
Process payment — receipt prints, cash drawer opens, order syncs to your e-commerce platform in the background

Manager review, reporting, and sync verification before closing.

Manager reviews the daily sales report — total revenue, cashier performance, payment method breakdown
Export CSV for external analysis or accounting software if needed
Print daily summary report directly to the receipt printer
Review the sync queue — retry any failed orders that didn't reach your e-commerce platform

What happens during an internet outage — and how the POS catches up automatically when connectivity returns.

Internet drops — the POS continues operating normally with no interruption to sales
Orders are saved locally in SQLite and queued for sync — nothing is lost
When internet returns, background sync catches up automatically with exponential backoff retry (up to 15 min between attempts)
Sync queue screen shows status of every order: pending, syncing, synced, or failed — retry or discard individually

RetailPOS solves a specific problem for each of these users.

Running a physical shop alongside a Shopify or WooCommerce store. Inventory and orders are split between two systems — RetailPOS unifies them.

Café, boutique, or pop-up needing registers to share stock and orders over local Wi-Fi — even when the internet is down.

Building a custom retail solution. Open-source TypeScript codebase with a clean pluggable service layer and 198 passing tests.

Needs a POS that keeps working during internet outages. SQLite-backed — every sale is saved locally and synced when connectivity returns.

Apache 2.0 — self-host it, fork it, customise it. No account required, no monthly fees.