[evandavid]

This is a kind of obvious problem to approach, but as people here have mentioned, it would be extremely difficult (milo are trying, as have others). An idea I had once upon a time was that you could essentially solve it by building a kick ass point-of-sale and inventory management software system that customers are able to use for free, provided that they're happy to have their goods indexed on a location aware product search engine. Needless to say, that is still an extremely difficult challenge. I've got a feeling these guys might attempt it at some point: www.vendhq.com

[tbgvi]

Agreed, it is a difficult challenge. I know because I'm working on it right now with my company, Cashier Live. We've thought about doing something like this in addition to working with options out there like Milo or Google's local product search, but it leads to the same problem they have now. Comprehensive search. If I (or VendHQ) did something like that, we'd only have independent stores and not the large chains.

That being said, I think Milo knows their weakness is in independent retail and it looks like they're taking steps to solve that.

[mistermann]

Exactly what I was thinking. One feature you'd have to include though is a way to back out transactions at end of day. A lot of small, independent family run retailers (especially coffee shops, corner stores) have software mods to their cash registers for reversing sales at end of day so they can remove them to avoid paying taxes.

If I was doing this, I would be very leery of accepting an advanced, internet connected POS device into my store rather than my trusty old, hackable offline cash register. It would take a huge increase of sales to overcome the money saved by not paying taxes on a portion of sales.

[vdm]

Or decouple the POS and inventory/catalog systems and have a restricted interface between them. Only the inventory system needs to be indexed for search.