How to Choose POS Software for a Retail Store in India

Choose POS software by listing what your counter does every day, scoring vendors against that list on a live demo with your own products, and confirming price, support and data ownership before you sign. This guide gives the questions, a scoring sheet and the red flags for retail stores in India.

1. Write down what your store actually does

Before looking at any product, spend an hour at the counter and note:

• How many bills per day, and how many lines per bill at peak?
• What share of products carry a manufacturer barcode?
• Do you sell variants (size, colour, pack size) or serial-numbered items?
• How do customers pay, and how often is one bill split across methods?
• How many products are in the catalogue today, and how fast is it growing?
• Who needs to see reports, and from where?
• How many counters and outlets now, and in 12 months?

These answers are your requirements. A vendor's feature list is only useful measured against them.

2. Must-haves for Indian retail

• Barcode billing plus product search. Scan what has a label, search what does not. (details)
• Automatic stock reduction and low-stock alerts. The reason to buy a POS rather than a billing app. (details)
• Tax setting per product. GST applied at billing without cashier arithmetic. Confirm invoice fields. (GST guide)
• Multiple payment methods per sale. Cash, UPI and cards on one bill. (details)
• Customer profiles with purchase history. For returns, service and regulars. (details)
• A dashboard with today's sales, orders, revenue and top products. (details)
• A clean product catalogue with categories, SKUs and barcodes. (details)

3. What changes by store type

Vanikra has a page per store type: grocery, electronics, fashion, pharmacy.

4. Run the demo properly

Ask the vendor to do the following with your products, and watch the screen rather than the presenter:

1. Create a product with a variant and a barcode.
2. Scan it into a bill twice; check the quantity.
3. Attach a customer.
4. Take payment half cash, half UPI.
5. Show the stock count, the customer's history and the dashboard immediately afterwards.
6. Change the product's price and bill it again.

If any step needs a workaround, note it. Workarounds at the demo become daily habits at the counter.

5. Commercial questions

• What is included in the price, and what is a module? Inventory, customers and reports are sometimes add-ons.
• Monthly or annual? What happens if I stop? Ask how you get your product list and sales history out.
• Which hardware is confirmed to work? Scanner, printer, device.
• How is support provided, and in what hours? A counter problem at 7 pm on a Saturday is the real test.
• Where is the data, and who owns it? Read the terms.

Vanikra's answers to the pricing questions are on the pricing page; the Business plan includes the core features at ₹599 per month.

6. Red flags

• The vendor will not demo with your products.
• "Best", "#1" or "trusted by lakhs" without anything you can verify.
• Inventory is "coming soon".
• Pricing is not written down anywhere.
• No way to export your data.

7. Scorecard

Score each vendor 0–2 per row (0 = no, 1 = with a workaround, 2 = yes, cleanly). Weight the rows by your requirements from step 1.

Highest weighted score wins, provided nothing in the red-flag list applies. To score Vanikra, start with the POS software overview and book a demo with your product list.