Last summer, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s infamous IT outage disrupted businesses across the globe. Circle K lost payment capabilities in its stores for 12 hours, said Ed Dzadovsky, global CTO & EVP, Alimentation Couche-Tard, while speaking at the 2025 Conexxus Annual Conference in January. “We lost millions and millions of dollars that day. And that’s just what we know we lost in that time. Who knows what happened because of the number of customers that we didn’t get to come back again,” he said.

A global IT outage is an extreme crisis scenario, but it highlights the most critical component of retail—the ability to transact.

“The point of sale is the core technology that runs the store. If the point of sale isn’t operating, that business is not generating income,” said James Hervey, executive vice president, head of petro and convenience at Verifone.

When evaluating a POS system, “understand what the next 10 years of your business is going to look like and optimize for that,” said Jack Hogan, SVP of sales and partnerships at Mashgin. “On a foundational level, does your system let you add on new features, new innovations and new products? What will be coming in the next 10 years to your sites that will enhance your customer experience, and how will your point of sale allow you to head in that direction most effectively?”

From automated and more seamless checkout experiences to mobile-friendly systems to how POS systems are built for longevity, here’s what a handful of POS vendors say retailers should focus on.

A Point of Sale Should …

… give you a picture of your whole business.

Think of a POS as the central part of the store that everything else connects to. When integrated, it’s the hub where operators can get an overview of their entire business and operating costs, which is especially important in a business where every cent counts, said Safi Modi, head of growth at Modisoft. “Let’s say you’re a single-store owner and you want to know what your operational costs are—how much am I paying for my products? How much am I selling them for? What is my revenue? Is my pricing correct? Am I alerted if it’s not? What is my payroll?” he said. “Plus, everything should be logged in your pricebook so you never have to manually ring up items, which also helps reduce error and employee theft. Having a POS allows operators to see the whole business, and if you don’t have a centralized POS system, you could be bleeding money that you don’t even have a way of tracking.”

… support a variety of checkout experiences.

“One thing that customers generally care about in c-stores is how fast they can get in and out, so giving customers a variety of ways to check out and options that meet their needs is the right approach,” said Hervey.

“We are definitely seeing an increase in demand for autonomous checkouts or even self-serve kiosks or machines, similar to what’s been in airports for the last few years. Self-checkout isn’t new, but many consumers now expect it as an option,” said Max Gorlov, team lead of technical design team at Petrosoft.

In February, Parker’s Kitchen added NCR Voyix self-checkout technology at 62 sites, with plans to expand to more locations in the coming years, citing the faster checkout times and optimized staffing the machines provide. Additionally, Wesco announced it would add Mashgin computer vision technology self-checkout machines to 20 of its locations.

According to Mashgin, a manufacturer of computer-vision-based self-checkout technology, younger generations want self-checkout options—more than 60% of Gen Z consumers prefer it over traditional checkout. “One thing we have moved our customers toward is an augmented self-checkout model, where a cashier can oversee the Mashgin terminals—especially considering how many c-store transactions require age verification—and also float over to the traditional POS,” said Hogan. “It helps our customers leverage labor more efficiently. If you only have two employees staffed, they won’t both be stuck behind the register and can instead focus on other tasks in the store that make for a better customer experience.”

… be flexible and easy to integrate.

Successfully incorporating different checkout options hinges on a POS system’s ability to integrate with the equipment. “If there’s not a consistent method in which that happens, then the machine is hanging off on the side as a separate, completely unintegrated system,” said Hervey. “An important thing we can do as an industry and as providers is make it easier to attach new systems and get them up and running quickly, so that trying something new [like self-checkout] doesn’t take a huge integration effort and can fit well into the store’s ecosystem. It would make the convenience industry more competitive from a consumer experience standpoint with other retail sectors.”

Verifone’s POS “places a series of APIs in front of the transaction engine,” which allows third-party checkout hardware to connect to and use its point of sale, described Hervey. “Taking a central transaction engine and then wrapping APIs around it gives us more flexibility to partner with third parties to create cool experiences for consumers. That’s one way to really improve the customer experience and allows retailers to try new things more easily without having to wait for your primary point-of-sale vendor to build those themselves,” he continued.

That plug-and-play nature of a POS technology helps define its ease of use for operators, said Josh Raha, VP, product management for PDI POS. “The point of sale is the nerve center of a retail site, and there are so many elements that hook into it,” said Raha. “As technology evolves and there are more integrations, your system has to be flexible. You want the ability to reconfigure a point of sale for a different format. If you can have a single tech stack that you can reskin as a self-checkout, a foodservice kiosk or an ordering tablet, or whatever type of format you need on a busy day, instead of having to do a software code change or a change to the underlying engineering, then that’s an advantage,” he continued.

… be mobile friendly.

Whether you have one store or 1,000 stores, mobile and smartphone access to your point of sale is a key feature retailers need, according to POS suppliers.

“You need to have some form of mobile or remote capability so that managers, the sales team or really anyone in the store can access the software without having to be in front of the device or getting on a computer,” said Petrosoft’s Gorlov.

The capability allows retailers to update something quickly without being in the store, noted Modi. “Say a manager is driving around and their employee contacts them to say the price of something is incorrect—they’re able to make the adjustment immediately. Or they want to schedule a pricing update overnight so that it’s reflected in the morning. The accessibility of a mobile app is huge for managing all sorts of business,” he said.

… have good support and training.

A POS’ uptime is a critical component of keeping the store running, but it’s also not realistic to say a system will never encounter problems, meaning good training and support from vendors will help retailers better tackle any snags.

“We can talk about all the latest and greatest leading-edge technology out there and exciting new trends, but retailers should also pay attention to what kind of investment providers are making back into their support,” said Hervey. “What is the support experience and what tools are they using to make it better?”

Hogan said Mashgin has focused on automated support and AI-based features that can help detect and troubleshoot a problem before it reaches the customer. “We fix most issues in three to five minutes, and sometimes we fix issues before they even start. We can do it virtually,” Hogan said. “We also have the ability to continue to take transactions in offline mode, which is a useful feature that has been adopted by about half of our clients.”

Vendors should also provide quality training to make sure employees know how to use the system and are able to troubleshoot small errors, said Gorlov.

“As retail staff are often dealing with bugs or solving problems themselves, good training materials are really important to provide to retailers,” said Gorlov. “It also needs to be easy for them to learn to use. We make sure all of our training modules and instructions are well documented, easy to follow and can provide staff members with troubleshooting techniques.”

… integrate with loyalty programs.

There is a lot of intricacy to integrating loyalty programs with point of sale, said suppliers, and systems need to support multiple functions and often multiple loyalty programs at the same business. And point of sale providers, Raha said, need to be able to integrate with the numerous loyalty providers in the market that are running retailers’ programs.

Consider all of the tasks a POS system has to handle to successfully log loyalty points or redeem an item for the customer.

“Looking at all the different use cases associated with earning points, making sure your system is working with the loyalty provider, allowing customers to spend or combine those points or get a deal … all of those different scenarios become pretty deeply embedded in the workflows that a point of sale needs to support,” said Raha.

Retailers are often also running multiple loyalty programs on the same site.

“It’s a unique quirk of our industry that convenience retailers will have one loyalty program for the store, and if they have branded fuel the major oil company will have their own loyalty program at the pump,” said Hervey. “You’re doing a lot of prompting at the payment terminal, which can make for a cumbersome process. It also opens retailers up to threats if those prompts aren’t encrypted and secured.”

Hervey said Verifone is investigating technology to tokenize identities for loyalty programs to make the process feel more seamless. The technology would link multiple loyalty programs to the same facial recognition token.

“Say that when you show up, you could just look at a camera and it pulls up all of your loyalty programs. You don’t have to worry about entering multiple phone numbers, swiping multiple cards, etc. So I think things like that, features that make the experience smoother when it comes to presenting payment or loyalty accounts, are also things that will work to make the consumer experience better,” said Hervey.

… support you for the long haul.

One of the top concerns for independent and smaller operators, according to Hervey, is the price-to-value ratio of equipment and software.

“Small and mid-size operators don’t have gigantic IT budgets, a large IT staff [or sometimes even one at all], or procurement at scale, so they have to really think about price to value,” said Hervey. It’s one of the reasons he said the company builds and manufactures its own hardware that is built for “significant longevity. You can find systems of ours that are 20-plus years old, that we don’t even support anymore, that are still out there running stores. So retailers need to consider the price-to-value ratio and what a provider is bringing to the table there.”