What Is POS Experience? 8 Strategies To Enhance Customer Satisfaction

Shopify supports brands operating more than 1,000 physical stores, yet more than 10% of point-of-sale (POS) users are still brick-and-mortar only. In other words, for many retailers, POS is the business.

“The key is minimizing friction,” says Ray Reddy, head of POS at Shopify, in an interview with PracticalEcommerce. “Sellers need lightweight inventory tools, stock counts, and real-time syncing between online and offline. Something as simple as buying a mattress in-store and having it shipped requires more than a basic payment app.”

That framing gets to the heart of POS experience. A good one absorbs complexity so neither customers nor staff have to think about it. 

Ahead, we’ll look at what POS experience means in practice, and eight concrete ways retailers can improve it. Plus, get real-life examples from brands who’ve been there, done that. 

What is POS experience?

POS experience refers to the lived experience of the checkout process, for both the customer and the staff member running the sale.

It’s not the POS system itself—it’s how that system behaves in real conditions: 

• During a rush
• With a line forming
• When an item is out of stock
• When a return needs context
• When a customer expects the same flexibility they get online

This is why the POS experience is best understood as a design and workflow problem, because two retailers can use similar tools and deliver completely different experiences depending on how well their POS supports the realities of in-store selling.

The high stakes of the checkout counter

Behavioral science has long shown that people don’t evaluate experiences evenly from start to finish. Instead, they judge them based on two moments: the peak and the ending. 

This idea—known as the peak-end rule—comes from decades of research by psychologists, including Daniel Kahneman. It explains why the final moments of an interaction disproportionately shape how it’s remembered.

In retail, that “ending” is almost always the point of sale.

That’s what POS experience really refers to: the lived experience of checkout, where payment, inventory, fulfillment rules, and customer expectations collide in a very public, very time-sensitive moment. So, how an interaction ends matters disproportionately to a shopper’s “overall” evaluation. 

If the final moments of a store visit feel clunky, that negative end point weighs much heavier in memory. But if those final moments run smoothly, you’re more likely to leave a positive impression that could keep customers coming back. 

The checkout experience affects emotion in the moment, too. Recent retail research finds that the emotional discomfort felt while waiting and during the billing process is a measurable part of overall customer experience.

The point of sale, therefore, is a pressure point. When it works, it reinforces trust and satisfaction, but when it doesn’t, it can undo a lot of good work that came before.

8 ways to improve your POS experience

The strategies below focus on practical changes that make checkout feel easier for customers and less stressful for staff.

1. Move staff out from behind the counter

The global handheld POS market was valued at $30.12 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $80.65 billion by 2034.

But most checkout experiences are still built around the cash wrap: a fixed counter where transactions happen and lines form. Humans aren’t naturally patient; waiting has repeatedly been described as a “timeless form of torture,” and the cost of it—emotionally and commercially—has been well documented. For most consumers, standing in line actually triggers a negative emotional response. In fact, nearly 65% of shoppers say waiting makes them feel impatient, bored, annoyed, frustrated, or even disrespected. 

The same Waitwhile survey also found that consumers have encountered lines in retail more frequently than in any other industry for three years running. 

This is where mobility changes the experience. By moving the checkout off the cash wrap and onto the floor—and using a mobile POS like Shopify Tap to Pay—you can practice line-busting: breaking up queues before they form by letting associates complete transactions anywhere in the store. 

The sale still happens, but without the visible line and without forcing customers to pause their momentum.

💡Your action step: Identify your top congestion points (fitting rooms, high-ticket displays, seasonal tables) and pilot mobile checkout in those zones during peak hours. You don’t need to eliminate the cash wrap, just stop making it the only place a sale can happen for improving customer satisfaction.

2. Accept various payment methods

According to the Worldpay Global Payments Report 2025, wallet-based POS transaction value has increased more than 10 times over the past decade—from 3% in 2014 to 32% in 2024—and Worldpay expects that share to climb to 45% by 2030.

Zooming in, in 2025 alone, Apple Pay helped prevent more than $1 billion in fraud globally in 2025, while also driving more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales. In the US, card-linked digital wallets are expected to outpace non-card-linked wallets, reflecting how consumers increasingly want speed and familiarity at the point of sale.

So, if your system doesn’t reliably support Apple Pay, Google Pay, and tap to pay, you’re adding friction at the exact moment customers expect checkout to be effortless.

But payment flexibility matters only if it’s reliable. POS systems that support offline mode make sure sales can still go through when connectivity drops, because, from a customer’s perspective, a failed payment is still a failed checkout, regardless of the reason.

Shopify POS lets you enable offline payments so sales don’t stop during internet outages. 

This feature has been invaluable for brands like Neom Wellbeing, which operates across the UK, Europe, and the US, combining ecommerce with physical Wellbeing Hubs. Some of these locations are in buildings where mobile and Wi-Fi connectivity can be unreliable, but with Shopify’s offline payments, Neom’s retail teams can complete transactions even when connectivity drops.

💡Your action step: Use Shopify POS to audit your in-store payment setup. Confirm that Shopify Payments is enabled for Apple Pay, Google Pay, and tap to pay, and that offline payments are turned on for your locations. Then test a real transaction during a low-connectivity scenario so staff know exactly what happens if the network drops during peak hours.

3. Merge online and offline profiles 

A customer who’s bought from you before shouldn’t feel like a stranger the moment they step into a store. When customer profiles are unified, a sales associate can see that a customer usually buys a specific size, prefers a certain category, or recently ordered online. 

New EY research shows just how much unified customer profiles change in-store performance. Retailers using Shopify POS are able to convert eight in 10 first-time in-store shoppers into known customers. That means their contact details, preferences, and purchase history are captured and stored in a single, unified profile from the first transaction.

That recognition carries real commercial weight, because known customers spend up to three times more per order than anonymous shoppers, account for up to 61% of repeat purchases, and drive 76% of in-store sales growth.

Reddy says that “the retail industry’s approach to customer identification is backward,” because when in-store data capture breaks down, the instinct is to add layers: email pop-ups, loyalty programs, parallel databases. The fix, however, is by creating a single source of truth.

For the makeup brand Sculpted By Aimee, asking staff to capture customer details at checkout nearly doubled transaction time. As a result, associates stopped asking altogether just to keep lines moving. 

Shopify POS addresses this by redesigning how customer data is captured by creating a network effect across three stages:

1. Collect. More than 200 million shoppers globally have Shop Pay accounts. When these customers pay in-store, Shopify POS can automatically recognize them, securely attach their contact details to the transaction, and send a digital receipt—no extra action required from your shop associates.
2. Organize. Shopify uses a unified data model that brings online and in-store customer activity into a single profile. Retailers can also enrich profiles with custom metafields, like preferred sizes or whether a customer shops for a dog or a cat.
3. Activate. Once you have clean, unified profiles, teams can create precise customer segments based on purchase behavior, location, or channel. 

After rolling out Shopify POS and enabling customer receipt selection, Sculpted by Aimee saw a major lift in data capture. “At our UK flagship store in London, we’ve seen a 74% increase, and a 60% increase at our flagship store in Ireland,” says Kevin Clarke, the brand’s head of ecommerce. 

💡Your action step: Map the true total cost of ownership (TCO) of your customer data stack— license fees, plus middleware, integrations, maintenance, and internal time spent reconciling systems. If you’re paying to stitch together POS, ecommerce, CRM, and marketing tools just to maintain a single customer view, reevaluate your stack. Retailers using Shopify POS report a 22% lower total cost of ownership.

4. Accept online returns in-store

Buy online, return in-store (BORIS) is one of the most preferred return methods for shoppers, and retailers that offer BORIS tend to see higher store traffic and conversion. 

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), returns accounted for an estimated $849.9 billion in retail value in 2025. When online orders aren’t visible at the point of sale, staff are forced to reconstruct the transaction while the customer waits, and the checkout counter becomes a problem-solving desk instead of a service moment.

Retailers that enable contextual returns avoid this entirely. 

Take Canadian brand Rudsak, for example. The company operates a strong ecommerce business alongside more than 25 retail locations across the US and Canada. Previously, the brand ran its stores on Microsoft Dynamics 365, but struggled to connect in-store and online order data. Rudsak’s teams had to manually stitch datasets together using custom scripts, APIs, and plug-ins just to support basic omnichannel flows.

After migrating to Shopify POS, Rudsak unified online and in-store data in one system. That made BORIS and buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) straightforward to execute with immediate operational gains: in-store transaction time cut by 50%, and average checkout time reduced to less than one minute.

💡Your action step: Calculate how much time and labor your team spends handling online returns in-store today. Track one week of returns and note how often staff have to switch systems, ask customers for receipts, or contact support. If a return takes longer than a standard purchase, or requires escalation, you’re paying a hidden (and avoidable) tax at the counter.

5. Offer multiple fulfillment options 

Stockouts are inevitable, but lost sales don’t have to be. The moment a customer hears “We don’t have that in your size,” the POS experience can either collapse or save the sale. This is where fulfillment flexibility matters more than merchandising.

The endless aisle is the simplest test. If an item isn’t available in-store, staff should be able to place the order directly from the POS and ship it to the customer’s home—without asking them to pull out their phone or start over online.

The same logic applies to BOPIS. Customers choose pickup because they expect speed. If collecting an order takes longer than a standard checkout—waiting for staff to locate the item, confirm the order, or manually close the transaction—that negatively impacts the POS experience. 

Allbirds uses Shopify POS to offer ship-to-customer fulfillment when products aren’t available in-store. Instead of losing the sale, associates can place the order on the spot and have it shipped directly to the customer.

This endless aisle approach helps Allbirds maintain strong in-store conversion rates without carrying full inventory at every location—reducing complexity across its more than 35 stores while still meeting customer expectations.

💡Your action step: If ship-to-customer orders require manual handoffs or slow fulfillment today, evaluate whether outsourcing makes sense. This is where working with a third-party logistics (3PL) partner—such as the Shopify Fulfillment Network—can remove friction from the moment of sale by offloading picking, packing, and shipping to a specialized provider. 

 6. Declutter the counter

Foot traffic to US retail stores rose 0.4% year over year in 2024, a small but meaningful signal that physical retail isn’t fading.

The checkout counter sets expectations before a word is spoken. A modern POS experience benefits from intentional minimalism. Slim tablets, clean iPad stands, and compact card readers make the counter feel calmer and easier to approach.

📚Recommended reading: 10 Cash Wrap Counter Ideas to Optimize Your Checkout Counter

This is where hardware choice matters significantly. Shopify hardware—including POS Terminal and POS Terminal Reader—is designed to reduce counter sprawl by combining display, payment, and receipt functionality into fewer devices. Fewer components mean fewer cables, less setup friction, and more flexibility when staff need to reposition hardware for returns, line-busting, or assisted checkout.

💡Your action step: Audit your current checkout setup and list every device, cable, and accessory on the counter. Ask whether each item actively helps complete a sale. If not, remove it or consolidate hardware.

7. Train up your staff

POS system training often focuses on mechanics: how to ring up a sale, how to process a return, where to tap next. That’s all important, yes, but what often gets missed is hospitality training at checkout: how to stay present with the customer while using the POS as a support tool.

That gap matters, because checkout is cognitively demanding. Staff are juggling payments, inventory questions, fulfillment options, and customer expectations in a very short window. And the pressure adds up. 

Nearly 79% of retail workers report experiencing burnout, which means even small moments of friction at checkout can tip an interaction from calm to hassled.

So what’s the solution? Take Pepper Palace. It’s the world’s largest spice-themed retail chain, with 100 locations in high-traffic tourist destinations across the US. In 2019, Pepper Palace moved both its ecommerce and POS systems to Shopify, completing the end-to-end implementation in just two months. 

“The software itself, along with the hardware, is really easy to use,” says Corey Hnat, Pepper Palace’s marketing and digital sales manager.“Instead of troubleshooting card readers, checkout is much smoother. We’ve shaved 10 to 20 seconds off each transaction.”

💡Your action step: Shift POS training from “button training” to scenario-based training. Read more in Shopify’s POS training guide for modern retailers.

8. Set up post-purchase communications

A simple digital receipt, order update, or follow-up message reinforces trust and keeps the brand top of mind. More importantly, it creates a direct line for future engagement: new arrivals, replenishment reminders, or loyalty offers that actually feel relevant.

But if your staff have to manually ask, type, and double-check details during a busy checkout, this step will often get skipped. 

Shopify POS automatically captures customers’ details through digital receipts or during payment without slowing checkout. And because Shopify Forms connects natively to Shopify’s customer database, the data can be immediately used for segmentation, follow-ups, and personalized messaging.

💡Your action step: Audit how customer contact details are captured in-store. If it depends on staff typing during checkout, enable digital receipts in Shopify POS, and use Shopify Forms to collect email or SMS via QR codes at the counter or on receipts. 

Metrics to measure your POS experience

These metrics focus on operational performance at the point of sale:

• Checkout speed. How long it actually takes to get from scan to receipt when the store is busy.
• Customer capture rate. How often checkout turns a transaction into a known customer.
• Inventory accuracy. How often POS data matches what’s physically on the shelf.
• Staff adoption and error rates. How frequently staff have to override, correct, or work around the POS.
• Omnichannel return rate. How often online orders show up at the counter as in-store returns.

If you’re using Shopify POS, these metrics don’t need to live in separate systems. Shopify Analytics lets you monitor checkout speed, customer attachment rates, in-store returns, and inventory accuracy from the same dashboard—so you can spot friction early and fix it before it shows up on the floor.