Definition: A point of sale (POS) is a physical or virtual place where sales transactions are made, typically a cash register or online shopping cart. In other words, this is the place where the customer pays for an item and purchases it from the seller.
What Does Point of Sale Mean?
What is the definition of point of sale? The concept of what a point-of-sale is has evolved with technology and software. The Internet marketplace has extended this concept beyond physical places and into the virtual world. A point-of-sale is the actual place where a sales transaction is completed. This might be the cash register at a Best Buy retail location or it might be the virtual shopping cart on Amazon.com or Ebay.com.
This term can also be zoomed in and zoomed out, this means that the concept applies for places like shopping malls or big office buildings with many companies closing deals each day. It can also be applied to the actual physical cashier’s booth located at a physical store where an employee issues the invoice and takes the payment when a sale is completed.
This concept also commonly refers to the point-of-sale system that includes all of the software and hardware to ring up, process, and record transactions.
Let’s look at an example.
Example
O-Mart is a supermarket that sells different kind of groceries and small appliances to a small neighborhood located in the city of Washington. O-Mart has a 3,000 square foot store with three cashiers. Each cashier is equipped with a POS accounting system that includes a computer, bar code scanner, cash vault, and electronic POS. Which of these items or places can be identified as a POS?
According to our definition, a point-of-sale is the place where a sales transaction is completed. In this case, this concept will include the physical store as a whole, since the transactions are completed in there and each of the cashier’s booths fully equipped with the POS system, as long as they are operational.
Summary Definition
Define Point of Sale: POS means the place where the sale of goods takes place.
