We have a case in France, a user who is managing a buying group with three pick-up point is opening a physical bar/restaurant/store, and even if it’s not the more practical, he wants to use the OFN to manage inventory and payments.
Do you know any other case using OFN to manage a physical store?
I guess it should be possible to sell the products in the physical store, and when the client arrives at the cashier, instead of scanning products, selecting them in the virtual shop and having the customer pay with any payment system (maybe not connected at the beginning, but that should be added if some budget I guess)
The store can be a “producer” for all the coffee/cakes/courses they propose.
And I guess the inventory feature will enable to manage the physical inventory of the store, overriding quantities.
It would be an interesting use case, and interesting to see what would be the need for this usage. Any previous experience on this elsewhere?
Lynsey - one of the previous Stroudco managers did allow shoppers to call in on the food drop days and buy products off the stock shelves in the shed. But she just recorded sales and receipts on a piece of paper and then entered them as one ‘sale’ to an admin account. This was using the old Stroudco software and she found it too fiddly to enter each sale into the software. I am not sure if @Oliver is taking ‘drop-in’ customers on food drop days or how he is managing it with OFN.
I don’t sell off the shelf but I think if I did have a shop-like setting, I would use a POS (point of sale) system. I think you need something quick and simple for a shop and instead of a checkout procedure and a good-looking website you want something that tells you how much change to give and that allows you to take card payments quickly and easily. I guess depending on the circumstances you could keep all your stock on OFN and adjust it at the end of each day.
@oeoeaio could you perhaps comment here, on the stuff you’ve done / are using and what you were saying the other day about where OFN should stop on this, and interface to POS?
@oeoeaio I’ll be interested to get your viewpoint on this.
I just talked to our user who is willing to use OFN to manage his POS. The user already uses OFN to manage 3 hubs. He has made some modelization trial and talked to POS providers, and he really believes that there is not so much differences between POS traditional softwares and OFN, and for him, he wants to use only one tool to manage POS and his 3 hubs, as he will have only one inventory. So the inventory comprises all what he can sell, wether if be in the POS or in the hubs.
He plans to have a tablet that the user can use to order in the shop what he buys directly in the shop. And for the “bar/restaurant side”, he says it’s not longer to make an order for the waiter than clicking on some other menu software, and the guy behind the counter can receive automatically the order and prepare it. There might be great to adapt some functionalities at some point (like be able to jump the checkout page as no info from customer to collect and payments collected on site) but he can start with the existing, he believes.
Just on thing he needs (apart from VAT issues addressed elsewhere) is to be able to print the invoice as a receipt (you know like in a shop, the small rectangular paper). Is it possible to develop a feature to print a ticket format? I open a discussion here: Print a receipt in a POS use of OFN
As @Kirsten mentioned, I have been working on a basic POS-like screen, which sounds like it will suit your user quite well, I’m very interested in finishing work on it as soon as I possibly can. We really need this for our hub, so that we can load up customers orders quickly on the computer when they come to collect their veggies. The version that I am working on will allow checkout staff to email a copy of the final receipt to customers from the interface, rather than printing it out, because this is a far task than setting up communication with a thermal printer, and there are no laws for us which require printing of receipts (as far as I know).
I have done a little bit of looking around at ways to integrate direct communication to a thermal printer into such a system. Looks like we will need to use a third-party library like this: https://qz.io. It should be do-able, but it is beyond anything that I have tried to integrate into a web app before, so I don’t have a good idea of how big the task is…
I am running my hub in India, as a physical store, without any link to digital. And billing is the most time consuming part for us, and it doesn’t give a great experience too, and as we run our hub on volunteer basis, for a new volunteer to take to billing counter quickly is also difficult.
So I would definitely pitch in to test whatever @oeoeaio has worked on !!
p.s : I am still running my hub as an informal weekly bazar, so I don’t have taxes and all yet, so need to figure out how to give standard receipts, or need to figure out more legal issues around getting hub into formal taxation !!
Just this week I’ve had 3 requests from smaller scale co-operatives who run relatively small stores in addition to doing on-line sales. So - just a vote for a basic POS tool as @oeoeaio is developing.
For info here is what is about to be merged soon: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1207
So that’s going to be possible to print a receipt.
Also I’ll be able to share a real case soon as a user is going to experiment with it in France in less than a month for a cooperative shop
I’m re-reading your post @oeoeaio and fun to see you were recommending what @pierredelacroix actually did, I don’t know if you has a look here PIerre
I’ll be curious to know more about your POS-like screen Rob, do you have anything to share?
Cheers
