In store terminal
✅ Available now. Tradar's in store terminal brings walk in sales into the same platform as the storefront and order desk.
Storefront orders are only one part of a supermarket's day. Customers also walk into FreshMart, pick up a loaf of bread, and pay the cashier at the counter. Those sales need to update the online catalogue as soon as the item leaves the shelf.
The in store terminal closes that gap. It is the till at the FreshMart counter, and it is part of the same Tradar platform as the storefront and the order desk. Every walk in sale flows into the same back end as every online order, against the same catalogue, drawing down the same stock counts.
The problem the terminal solves
Without a terminal, a supermarket on Tradar is really running two stores. The online store knows about every Tradar order. The physical store knows about every walk in sale. Neither one knows about the other. Three things go wrong because of that.
Stock drifts. Tradar shows ten cartons of milk available. Six get sold in store during the day. The online storefront still thinks ten are on the shelf and accepts orders for nine. The seventh customer is going to be told later that their order cannot be fulfilled.
Reporting splits. Yesterday's revenue lives in two places. The supermarket has to add Tradar's report to their till takings by hand to know what they actually made. The numbers never quite reconcile.
The catalogue ages. A new product gets added to the till but never to Tradar, or vice versa. Prices change at one and not the other. Over time the two views of the same shop drift further apart.
The terminal makes all three problems go away by treating the in store till and the Tradar back end as one thing.
What the terminal is
A till app for the FreshMart counter. The Tradar terminal can be paired with a barcode scanner, a receipt printer, a card reader, and a cash drawer. It signs in against the same FreshMart account that runs the order desk and the storefront.
Several terminals can run side by side at a single store. A supermarket with three checkout lanes runs three terminals, all sharing the same catalogue, the same stock, and the same staff list. Sales from all three feed into the same daily report.
A day at the counter
Here is what running the till looks like from open to close.
Opening the shift
A cashier arrives, taps their staff PIN into the terminal, and confirms the float in the cash drawer. The terminal logs the shift open, records the cashier, and pulls down any catalogue or price changes that have happened since the last time it was online.
Selling to a walk in customer
A customer puts a basket on the counter. The cashier scans each item. Each scan looks the item up in Tradar's catalogue, the same catalogue the online storefront reads from, and the price appears on the screen.
When the basket is complete, the cashier asks how the customer wants to pay. The terminal supports cash, card (through whichever processor FreshMart uses), and bank transfer. The customer pays. The terminal prints a receipt and, if the customer wants, can also send a digital copy to their phone number or email.
The moment the sale is finalised, two things happen. Stock is decremented in Tradar's catalogue, so the online storefront sees the new count straight away. The sale appears in FreshMart's dashboard next to every other sale that has happened today, online and in store, in one combined view.
Returns and voids
A customer brings back yesterday's bread because it was stale. The cashier looks up the sale (by receipt number, by the card used, or by the customer's phone number if they gave one), selects the item, refunds it, and prints a return receipt. Stock goes back up. The supervisor approves the refund if the policy requires it.
A void is the same idea, but for a sale that is still in progress and has not been paid for yet. The cashier voids the line or the whole basket; no stock movement happens because no sale ever happened.
Closing the shift
At the end of the cashier's shift they tap End shift. The terminal asks them to count the cash drawer and enter the number. It compares the count to what it expects (opening float plus cash sales minus cash refunds) and flags any difference. The cashier signs out and the next cashier signs in.
At the end of the trading day, the manager closes the day. Sales from every terminal in the store are tallied into a single day report. Cash, card, and transfer totals are broken out separately so the manager can reconcile each against the actual bank receipts.
How sync works
The terminal and the Tradar back end are in constant conversation. As long as the terminal has a working connection, every sale is sent to the server the moment it is paid for. Other terminals at the same store get the stock update almost immediately, and the online storefront gets it within seconds.
The terminal also subscribes to changes coming the other way. A price update made in the supermarket app reaches every terminal in the store on the next sync tick, without anyone having to push it manually. The same is true for new products, archived products, opening hours, and promotions.
Offline sales
This is the part that most distinguishes a real till from a web app. The terminal must keep selling when the internet drops, because in many places it will drop several times a day, and a queue of customers at the counter is not a problem the cashier can solve by waiting.
The terminal handles this by keeping a working copy of everything it needs locally. The catalogue, the prices, the stock counts as of the last sync, and the staff list are all on the device. When the connection goes down, the cashier carries on scanning, taking payment, and printing receipts exactly as before. The only thing the terminal cannot do offline is talk to the card processor, so card payments will fail until the connection returns; cash and any pre arranged offline tender still work.
Every sale made while offline is queued locally on the device. The receipt is real, the customer leaves with their bread, but the back end has not been told yet.
When the connection comes back, the terminal flushes the queue. Each queued sale is sent to the server in the order it happened. Stock is decremented, the dashboard updates, and the receipts now have a presence in the central report. From the supermarket's point of view, the day looks complete.
What happens when offline and online both sell the last item
This is the hard case, and it deserves a clear answer.
Tradar treats the server as the source of truth for stock. The terminal works from a local snapshot. When the terminal goes offline holding "five cartons of milk in stock", and during the outage the online storefront sells four of those cartons, the terminal does not know. The cashier at FreshMart can still ring up a sale for the last carton, because as far as the terminal knows there are five on the shelf.
When the terminal reconnects and flushes its queue, the server now sees that more cartons were sold than existed. The server applies every sale anyway, because every sale really happened (the milk left the shelf, the money was taken), and lets the stock count go negative. A negative count is a signal to the supermarket: "you oversold; the storefront promised something it could not deliver, or the floor has fewer cartons than the system thought".
The manager gets a notification. The dashboard surfaces every product that went negative during the offline window so they can be reviewed. In practice the answer is usually one of three things: cancel the affected online order and apologise, source a substitute, or correct the count if it was wrong to begin with.
The alternative (refusing the offline sale, or rolling it back on sync) would mean either turning away walk in customers when the internet is flaky, or pretending sales that happened did not happen. Neither is acceptable for a real till, so Tradar accepts the temporary negative count and surfaces it clearly.
How long can the terminal stay offline
In principle, indefinitely, with two caveats. Cards stop working without a connection to the processor. And the longer the device is offline, the more out of date its catalogue and price snapshot become, which means a higher chance of selling something at a stale price or missing a new product. In practice, hours are fine, a full day is workable, and beyond that the supermarket should expect more drift.
Staff and permissions
Every action at the terminal is attributed to a person. Three roles cover most needs.
Cashier. Can sign in, run sales, accept payment, print receipts, and close their own shift. Cannot give refunds above a small limit, cannot change prices, cannot open the cash drawer outside a sale.
Supervisor. Everything a cashier can do, plus approve larger refunds, void completed sales, override the price on a line within a configured range, and open the cash drawer for change.
Manager. Everything a supervisor can do, plus close the day, see end of day reports, add or remove staff, and configure the terminal itself.
Staff sign in with a short PIN rather than a full password, because at a busy counter a four digit code typed in two seconds is the difference between a smooth queue and a stalled one. The terminal also signs the cashier out automatically after a short period of inactivity, so an unattended till cannot be used.
Permissions are configured from the same supermarket app FreshMart already uses for everything else. There is no separate admin system for the terminal. Adding a new cashier is one entry in the staff list, with a role and a PIN.
Linking walk in customers to Tradar accounts
A walk in customer is, by default, anonymous. The sale is recorded against the store and the cashier, but not against any particular person.
If the customer wants to associate the sale with their Tradar account, the cashier can ask for the phone number at checkout. If the number matches an existing Tradar customer, the sale shows up in their order history next to their online orders. If it does not match, the customer can choose to create an account or to remain anonymous.
This is the foundation a loyalty programme would sit on later. A customer who has done ten orders, six in store and four online, looks the same to Tradar either way.
What the supermarket gets
In one paragraph: a single source of truth for everything you sell. The same catalogue. The same prices. The same stock count. The same dashboard. The same customer records. Whether the sale happened on the website or at the counter, FreshMart sees it in one place and the platform handles it the same way.
In a list:
A real till that keeps working when the internet does not.
Stock that stays accurate without anyone keying numbers from one system to another.
One report at the end of the day, not two.
An audit trail that says exactly which cashier rang up which sale on which terminal at what time.
A path to a loyalty programme without having to bolt on a third party tool.