A brand that sells at a market stall, a pop-up or its own shop usually runs that counter on a second system. The in-person sale lives in the till’s database, the online order lives in the store, and the customer who buys in both places is two strangers. Reconciling the two is somebody’s Monday.
PlatformDTC POS removes the second system. It is a register in your dashboard, a countertop smart card reader paired to it, and a cash drawer — and every sale rung up on it is written as an order in the same Orders list as your online store, against the same catalog and the same customers.
Taking payment
Card payments run on a smart reader at the counter. You send the amount to the reader from the register, the customer taps, inserts or swipes, and the sale completes when the payment does. If the card is declined, the customer tries again on the same payment rather than a new one, so a decline followed by a success is one payment on the sale, not two to reconcile.
Cash is a first-class tender, not a note on an order. Enter what the customer handed over, the register shows the change, and the sale is recorded against the open drawer. A sale can be split across tenders — some on a card, the rest in cash — and completes once the payments cover the total.
Card payments settle to the same PlatformDTC Payments account as your online checkout, at your plan’s card rate: in-person card payments cost what online card payments cost. Cash is recorded rather than processed, so no card rate applies to it.
Building the sale
The register searches the products you already sell, and a catalog product’s price is read from your catalog on the server every time the sale is priced, never taken from the screen. Anything that is not in the catalog goes on as a custom item with its own name and price.
- Cart discounts, as a percentage or a fixed amount, with the reason recorded on the sale.
- Tax per location. Each location carries its own rate, applied to every sale rung up there.
- Customers at the counter. Attach a customer you already have, or create one from an email or phone number. They land in your normal customer list, beside anything they have bought online.
The drawer is counted, not assumed
Each location has one drawer session open at a time. You open it by counting the float, and during the day every cash sale, every cash refund and every pay-in or pay-out — change brought in from the bank, cash taken out for a delivery — is written against it.
Closing it means counting what is actually in the drawer. The close shows expected cash, counted cash and the difference, alongside the session’s sales by tender, refunds, pay-ins and pay-outs. A drawer that is short says so the moment it is counted, not at month end.
After the sale
The customer gets a receipt by email or on paper. It is your receipt — your store’s name, the location, the lines, the tenders and the card details a card-present receipt is required to carry — not one issued in a payment processor’s name.
Refunds go back to the card the customer paid with, or out of the drawer in cash, and you choose whether the items return to stock. The order’s payment status is updated through the same path an online refund takes, so the Orders list tells the truth whichever channel the money came from.
In the Orders list, an in-person sale is tagged Point of Sale, so the channels stay distinguishable without living in different places. It is marked paid and fulfilled — the customer walked out with it.
Built so a dropped connection does not lose a sale
A card reader can lose its connection halfway through a payment, and when it does, nothing necessarily reports it. So the register does not trust a single signal. The sale’s state is checked against the payment itself while you wait, a failed connection is re-checked before the payment is declared failed, and a reconciliation job runs every minute in the background: it finishes sales whose payments already cover the total, and makes sure no card authorisation is left hanging.
Getting started
- Set up a location in the Point of Sale section of your dashboard — its name, address and tax rate. Card payments need an active PlatformDTC Payments account, and the location has to be in that account’s country.
- Pair a reader. Generate a pairing code in the reader’s settings and enter it against the location. A location can have as many readers as it needs, and you can run as many locations as you have counters.
- Open the drawer and sell.
Card readers are supplied through our sales team — ask for one here. The full walkthrough is on the PlatformDTC POS page.
What it does not do yet
The honest list, as of launch. These are the edges of version one.
- No offline mode. Every sale, card or cash, needs an internet connection.
- No tipping, gift cards or loyalty at the register.
- No staff PINs or per-staff permissions. The register runs under the dashboard sign-in of the person using it.
- No exchanges as a single step — refund, then ring up a new sale.
- No barcode scanning; products are found by search.
- No tap-to-pay on a phone. Card payments need a paired countertop reader.