Hi guys it is posible to program a POS / Inventory (create, delete, edit items for sale), reports (daily sales, annual, monthly and weekly earnings, etc) with Corona or its better to find another language/SDK to make it? I’ve been searching the Internet for three days but I do not have anything to start with.
Thanks in advance
Are you (or just one person) going to be the only one running the app? Or will the inventory show up on some website or other mobile devices? Are customers going to buy items that will reduce inventory and will someone be adding items back? Will people be conducting sales from the app?
Certainly, Corona can act as a front-end to a server-based implementation, but I’m not sure you know the scope of this project. Point of Sale terminals are typically going to need to interact with a credit card reader. Many of those communicate through the headphone port, which Corona doesn’t support in the simulator. You might be able to use Corona Native builds to access native code that can read card scanners.
An inventory system requires very strong database knowledge. Setting up tables and relations between them will be a large part of the projects. If you plan to have this share on a server, you’re going to need to develop server based API’s using a language like PHP or similar hosting. That’s going to require a different set of programming skills. Corona, of course, can talk to many server-based APIs with the network.request() API call.
And of course, there is a lot to just build the device side of an inventory/POS app. This is by no means a small project.
Rob
It’s a small store, practically a corridor of women’s clothes, it is my wife project. Yes, money would be handled, yes, items are added weekly to inventory and discounted when a purchase is made. Something like make an items search field, and by touch events of the added items make something like a shopping cart where I can delete and add more items, charge the customer, empty shopping cart, delete purchased items from the inventory, etc. I considered adding users if there is a need to add an employee. Still has not thought about going online. I would rather write to a directory on a tablet the items that are added and delete the ones that are bought and in some way calculate some type of daily, monthly and annual report of the profits … I thought of doing it as a game where the only serious thing is the money management, maybe open a drawer and print some purchase receipts but everything would happen inside the tablet or windows 10 pc where you can manually copy the data to a micro sd / usb drive to have a backup in case the tablet or pc is damaged. I did not think it was so complicated, wao! Thanks for your explanation. It is something that when I read your comment I know is out of my knowledge. It is not a super POS as for some mega chain stores, it is more a family business and for a moment I thought I could do it using only the Corona sdk api.
This may also be a case of don’t re-invent the wheel. You’re going to need a merchant account to handle the credit card sales. Square Up and Quicken/Quickbooks already have software and apps in place to do this that won’t take hardly any development time (setting up reports). You may still need an inventory/product display setup, but from the POS/reporting side, the commercial options should be explored.
Rob
For eCom like you are describing I would be looking at shopify and magento type solutions (both have free tiers with limitations). This is definitely something best handled by a proper web app.
if you are talking about database transactions Select, Insert, Update, Delete then corona is very powerful in this field
i have created so many database apps with corona
you need a database hosted somewhere, and a webservice between corona and the database then you can do wonders
but as Rob says … the business might require several things like payment etc… which need to be taken care of
Are you (or just one person) going to be the only one running the app? Or will the inventory show up on some website or other mobile devices? Are customers going to buy items that will reduce inventory and will someone be adding items back? Will people be conducting sales from the app?
Certainly, Corona can act as a front-end to a server-based implementation, but I’m not sure you know the scope of this project. Point of Sale terminals are typically going to need to interact with a credit card reader. Many of those communicate through the headphone port, which Corona doesn’t support in the simulator. You might be able to use Corona Native builds to access native code that can read card scanners.
An inventory system requires very strong database knowledge. Setting up tables and relations between them will be a large part of the projects. If you plan to have this share on a server, you’re going to need to develop server based API’s using a language like PHP or similar hosting. That’s going to require a different set of programming skills. Corona, of course, can talk to many server-based APIs with the network.request() API call.
And of course, there is a lot to just build the device side of an inventory/POS app. This is by no means a small project.
Rob
It’s a small store, practically a corridor of women’s clothes, it is my wife project. Yes, money would be handled, yes, items are added weekly to inventory and discounted when a purchase is made. Something like make an items search field, and by touch events of the added items make something like a shopping cart where I can delete and add more items, charge the customer, empty shopping cart, delete purchased items from the inventory, etc. I considered adding users if there is a need to add an employee. Still has not thought about going online. I would rather write to a directory on a tablet the items that are added and delete the ones that are bought and in some way calculate some type of daily, monthly and annual report of the profits … I thought of doing it as a game where the only serious thing is the money management, maybe open a drawer and print some purchase receipts but everything would happen inside the tablet or windows 10 pc where you can manually copy the data to a micro sd / usb drive to have a backup in case the tablet or pc is damaged. I did not think it was so complicated, wao! Thanks for your explanation. It is something that when I read your comment I know is out of my knowledge. It is not a super POS as for some mega chain stores, it is more a family business and for a moment I thought I could do it using only the Corona sdk api.
This may also be a case of don’t re-invent the wheel. You’re going to need a merchant account to handle the credit card sales. Square Up and Quicken/Quickbooks already have software and apps in place to do this that won’t take hardly any development time (setting up reports). You may still need an inventory/product display setup, but from the POS/reporting side, the commercial options should be explored.
Rob
For eCom like you are describing I would be looking at shopify and magento type solutions (both have free tiers with limitations). This is definitely something best handled by a proper web app.
if you are talking about database transactions Select, Insert, Update, Delete then corona is very powerful in this field
i have created so many database apps with corona
you need a database hosted somewhere, and a webservice between corona and the database then you can do wonders
but as Rob says … the business might require several things like payment etc… which need to be taken care of