Choosing a POS for your Indian store: the questions vendors hope you skip.

A POS demo always looks perfect — the vendor's machine, their network, their happy path. The failures start on your shop floor: a billing rush when the internet drops, a return without the original bill, a weighing-scale item at the vegetable counter, and a cashier who discovers the discount button needs four taps.

Ask the offline question first and make them prove it: pull the network cable during the demo. If billing stops, the system is cloud-dependent and your shop goes dark exactly when it's busiest. Offline-first terminals that sync on reconnect are the difference between an outage being a non-event and a revenue leak.

Second: how does it handle GST on mixed carts — HSN-wise items, tax slabs per category, and a printed or WhatsApp receipt your CA can reconcile? If the demo glosses over tax setup, month-end reconciliation will be your problem, not theirs.

Third, ask who owns the data and where it lives. Cloud POS that holds your sales history hostage at cancellation is more common than anyone admits. Fourth, check multi-store reality: live consolidation across branches with per-store stock and day-close reporting — not a nightly CSV export someone emails you.

Finally, count the taps. The staff at your counter will make 200+ bills a day at peak. Watch them use the vendor's system at demo speed, not leisurely showroom speed. The POS your team bypasses with paper bills is worse than no POS at all — it just costs more.