The wet Tuesday
Rain on the tin roof and one bar of signal. Three pallets of paving are sold from the local catalogue, paid by card, and queued. The customer drives off with a receipt.
Offline & resilience
The yard does not stop selling because the signal did.
A landscaping yard in the rain, a tin roof, one bar of signal. The till carries the whole catalogue, prices, tax rules and promotions in an encrypted local database, so the sale goes through and the order queues. When the connection is back, or when Magento comes out of a maintenance window, the queue sends itself and nothing is charged twice.
- Bought at the yard while the signal was down3 pallets of paving · 612.00 GBP
- Paid by card on the spot
- Order synced when the connection came back#000000130 · 612.00 GBP
Why it matters
What changes for the business.
No lost trading hours
A dropped connection or a Magento deploy during opening hours used to mean a queue and a handwritten IOU. Now it means nothing the customer notices.
Never charged twice
If a card was taken and the store later rejected the order, the cashier is told in red not to charge again. The order re-sends on its own.
Upgrades in daylight
IT can put Magento into maintenance mode on a Tuesday morning instead of a Sunday night, because the tills keep selling on cached data.
Nothing sits in the open
The local copy of customers, prices and orders is encrypted on the device, and delta sync only moves what changed.
How it works
Step by step, from the first switch-on.
- 1
The device carries the store
Products, customers, prices, tax rules and cart price rules live on the iPad or Mac in an encrypted database, refreshed by scheduled delta sync so even large catalogues stay current.
- 2
The connection goes, the till does not
When Magento is unreachable, or in maintenance mode, the cashier sees a banner and carries on. Cards are still charged through the terminal; the order waits as unsent.
- 3
The queue sends itself
As soon as the store answers again, unsent orders go up in order, with explicit unsent and failed states and a retry cron in Magento behind them.
- 4
Anything odd is surfaced, not hidden
If a payment was taken but the order was rejected, the till says so and retries. Nothing is silently dropped and nothing is re-charged.
Ways merchants use it
One yard, three mornings.
Yards, marquees, basements, stands at fairs, and any store whose Magento gets upgraded during trading hours.
The maintenance window
A dry morning, but Magento is being upgraded until eleven. The till shows the maintenance banner and keeps selling from cached prices. The orders arrive in Magento a minute after the site is back.
Close of day in the site office
The queue is empty, every order is in Magento with its payment, and the delivery notes match the orders. Nothing to reconcile by hand.
What you need
Before you switch it on.
- ebizmarts Point of Sale on iPad or Mac, connected to Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source 2
- The POS Magento module with the delta sync cron running
- Card payments through a terminal that authorises independently of Magento
- Enough device storage for the catalogue; the sync page size is tunable in the admin
Also in Point of Sale
Multi-source inventory and stock transfersLive stock across Magento inventory sources, and transfers between them from the iPad.B2B tenders and trade pricingAccount terms, layaway, store credit, split tenders and customer-group pricing at the counter.Pick, pack, ship and pickupShip from store, ship to store, click and collect and split shipments, all from the till.Endless aisleSend the basket to the customer's online cart or wishlist, or pull theirs into the till.Card payments at the tillIntegrated chip and PIN, contactless and wallets, plus a long list of regional terminals.Permissions, PINs and shiftsMagento-role permissions, PIN-guarded actions, and shifts with multi-currency cash-up.All 16 Point of Sale featuresBack to the overview.
Questions
What merchants ask before they turn it on.
Does the customer notice?
No. The sale, the receipt and the card payment all complete as normal. Only the cashier sees the offline banner.
What happens if a card is charged and the order later fails to save?
The till shows a red "payment taken, order not saved" banner and re-sends the order automatically. The cashier is told not to charge again, so there is no double payment.
How big a catalogue can the device hold?
Large ones. Delta sync with static files per product is built for catalogues with tens of thousands of SKUs, and the page size is tunable in the Magento admin.
Are prices and promotions right while offline?
Yes. Tier prices, customer-group prices, cart price rules and tax rules are part of the local database, so an offline sale is priced exactly as an online one.
How long can a till stay offline?
As long as it needs to. Orders wait as unsent until the store is reachable; the only limit is device storage.
See it on your own catalogue.
A demo takes half an hour and uses your products, your stores and your permissions, not ours.