Epos Technology - advice on retail software systems

Many modern EPOS retail solution software packages integrate with third party address software. The purpose of this is to aid enter of customer details into your system - you only need to type the postcode and house number, this means that addresses lines are correctly entered into consistent fields.

Very few Epos retail software houses write their own address lookup software. The reason for this is that all the software works with the same regularly updated postcode database, which is ultimately maintained by Royal Mail. This does not come free - all software houses that write postcode addresses lookup software have to pay for the right to use the address database - and this costs a lot of money, and involves complex contracts.

Therefore most epos software integrates with one of the third party postcode lookup software suites such as Quick Address or AFD. These companies provide a product that the EPOS software programmers can use from within their own software to lookup address data. So, although you enter the customer details into your EPOS software, behind the scenes it is using a third party piece of software to lookup the address information in the postcode database.

Some software houses will change you extra for the address lookup function. It has a lot of business value, and expect a hefty charge per seat for each user that uses postcode lookup - therefore limit the number of uses to those that actually need it - the front end tilling users and those taking mailorders. Some EPOS software include postcode lookup in the cost - so check first, and if it is included, make sure your users are using it!

The main advantage is consistency. The address is always spelt correctly, and, perhaps more importantly, the address lines, such as road, town, county etc are always entered into the correct field in the EPOS system database. The advantage of this comes when you wish to use a third party company to provide marketing mailing services - having proper and consistent address data saves a vast expense in cleaning up thousands of addresses.

The postcode database is regularly updated - so expect a yearly charge for the postcode lookup service, and expect regular database updates (often done over the internet) to keep you postcode database filled with the most up to date information. With that one annual charge, each seat is allowed to make as many postcode lookups as they like.

Some postcode lookup software, noteably QAS, will stop working once the database gets out of date - this is largely to force you into paying regularly for the required updates.

It should be noted that postcode lookups on ecommerce sites is usually a different service with a different pricing model (usually a few pence per lookup) and is normally dealt with completely separately to postcode looking in EPOS.

There are lots of reasons to collect customer data, be it orders, repairs, or simply filling in the TV license return, and having it stored consistently is well worth the price. If you need to store customer address data, do not consider an EPOS retail system without the vital postcode lookup service.