Retail Setup with No Menus - An alternative POS screen layout

Its really enjoyable watching ideas happen with SambaPOS and then seeing them become reality. Just shows how truly flexible it is. I mean I will be honest the idea came to me from the conversation last night. You took the idea and ran with it and look whats happening. SambaPOS is turning into a very powerful retail setup.

Great job @RickH I look forward to seeing what else you do with this idea.

PS. When you remove the buttons on bottom of ticket it will really add a lot more room for a retail setup to view ticket.

2 Likes

yea itll be brilliant, theres lots to think about to make sure the buttons dont work when they shouldnt, different constraints and things to use as they are actually products, so adding the cancel order action into the rules like you suggested was the key to getting some of the automation right :smile:

ill post more screenshots once ive got more of the automation changed over and working, in some ways i need to completely redesign some of the automation from my bar setup, its fun starting new projects

thanks for your help again :slight_smile:

1 Like

Yea thats what i was thinking, itll look quite good when finished

one issue ive encountered is that any auto commands that have Admin Pin enabled dont ask for the PIN, @Emre can this be looked into so that the Admin Pin feature works when using automation commands assigned to products?

It’s because your not using the command button. You will need to automate something for it.

i have some products set up as “Spacer” and set to hidden but they dont “hide” on the menu. this setting did work, could you check your version in case its to do with the setup im doing, although i would have thought as the buttons are products that the hidden setting should work?

ive also tried the hidden setting on the misc item button but thats not working either any ideas? or has this setting stopped working?

EDIT - turns out its do to with having the category set as fast menu, none of the formatting work in this case, de-select fast menu and the formatting kicks in

Did you try logout and log back in? Fast menu overrides that yes.

yea it was because I had the fast menu option ticked, i unticked it and the formatting works, i didnt realise that

1 Like

That’s looking good.

slowly getting there, lots to figure out but it should be a good retail set up

This is not a setup that I would use personally, but I do think it is incredible that it can be done, and it really shows the power and flexibility of SambaPOS.

Yea its good for a retail side when you dont need/want categories on the screen ill keep posting updates the more i develop it to see how it goes

Samba is brilliant!! Always a way to do something :slight_smile:

lol, I still can’t understand what is going on here
 I think I need to carefully start reading it from beginning. (just reviewed screen shots)

1 Like

Basically creating dummy products and assigning automation commands to them to try and create a retail setup

All real products will have barcodes so no need for a menu and categories to show on screen. So instead im trying to use the area that usually has the products to have all my auto commands instead, kind of like i traditional retail pos system, im seeing if i can adapt samba enough to do this

It wouldbe useful if i could combine ticket and order functions on the main screen but order line auto commands dont work there so im having to use dummy order tags for the order line auto commands

I know samba is for restaurant setup and what im tryin to do isnt a priority for you but i thought id see what i could adapt to create a retail type setup, it may not work properly but ill have a good go at it :grinning:

2 Likes

Well I had this crazy idea for a full blown retail setup that actually used menu in unconventional way by setting products and order tags as actual POS function buttons. With some clever automation it actually works lol. @RickH took the idea and ran with it.

@emre what would be useful is if we can map automation commands to the pos product area of the screen when there is no menu and categories setup. This would mean we wouldnt have to create dummy products to activate the automation commands and would make the setup so much easier

I know samba is a restaurant setup, but there is also so much potential for retail too and if this change was simple to implement it would make the setup so much easier.

That said i know this isnt a priority, but an interesting idea for you :smile:

1 Like

Lets say he allowed mapping there from Automation Command Mapping, how would you arrange the buttons? I think if he was going to do anything in this regard it might be simply allowing an Automation Command override that Overrides Product making it just an Automation Command button. This could be a simple check box next to Automation Command in the Menu settings.

But that would not really make much useful sense considering its a product


I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high for something being done here until more interest is shown in this being useful to community. At least for now even if its complex somewhat, we have a method or maybe you could call it a hack that gets it working.

simple check box is a good idea, but yea it would probably need more of a specific setting in terms of layout etc, not getting my hopes up i know this probably isnt that interesting to most people, although it would open samba up to another market :smile:

what you could help me with is, is there a way to stop the “product” being added to the ticket when pressed and just run the auto command instead. The reason is as they are “products” when pressed (even when ive added the cancel order action) it still creates a new ticket. For example if the open drawer button is pressed, the product is added and removed from the ticket but it creates a new ticket so we cannot exit the pos screen until an actual order is added and ticket settle or we use the abort transaction button. I know this isnt the design and probably cant be done, but just in case there is some sort of constraint in a rule somewhere that i can set to not add an order if it equals the product name of the dummy products i have made?

It shouldnt be creating a ticket unless something is submitted. Simply pressing close would clear it if there are no products on ticket screen. So just automate Close Ticket in there somewhere.

Remember tickets are not written to database (AKA created) until ticket is closed and submitted.

There might be some sneaky things we can try.

1 Like

of course, genius thank you it works :slight_smile: