Having spent several years in the IT industry, working as a Lead Architect for Several Fortune 500 Companies and having worked closely with Several Functional and Business domains in those industries, I understand and realize that making the actual day to day business operations visible to the management and enabling the management to be able to respond immediately to those day to day changes are the one of the most toughest challenges every industry faces today. On top of that, to make the matter worse, every department in the organization need flexibility in their operations and does not like to be tied down by the incompetitiveness or delays caused by other departments/systems.

A real ePOS system should help you to bridge these two different needs and yet provide a single system for the management.

Degree to which an ePOS system addresses the above needs will help you to acheive a better control on the way you want manage your business.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example

A user orders for 2 peices of a particular brand of Apparel using an ecommerce system. At the same time, a customer buys in 10 peices of the same apparel in the store. Apparently we seem to have only 10 peices of that product in our store and none in the warehouse.

Normally you may want to accept both the orders, both online and offline. But since your warehouse does not have any, you may not want to accept online order. Your system should be able to determine this immediately and let the online user know.

Supposedly, what if you still want to process the online order even if it is not in the warehouse. You may want, your system to determine this based on the fact that, if ordered, the order fulfillment should be done in X number of days. You may want your system to generate a Purchase Order automatically or let the accountant know to raise a Purchase Order for that product with the supplier of product. You may want to raise the purchase order with the supplier through a webservice provided by the supplier or you may want to give them a user view to log into our system as a supplier and look at their Purchase Orders, Invoices and status of Payment for those invoices.

System should be able to not only meet the above needs but should also be flexible enough to adopt different models based on the business needs- Such that every department should be able to decide on how they want to do their operations and how they want to share data with other departments and/or external parties.

Irrespective of the way the department handles operations, management should be able to view the entire operations. On top of that, management should be able to adopt or change the way, the things are being done today and their ePOS software should act as a tool to enable them to support their business models, whatever it may be.

This was one of the major principles on which the RiteCart product (http://www.ritecart.co.uk/ and http://www.ritecart.com/) is based upon. It is built on a very reliable framework and all the modules are built on the same framework. Core framework has been built using Java and XML technologies.
Product is marketed by Palindrome Software Labs Ltd. www.palindromesoftware.com in UK and elsewhere.

Flexibility in the operations and integrity of data across different operations are the key features to be checked for, before you decide to go for any commercial ePOS system.