POS Hardware Guide: What You Actually Need to Buy
Every POS buyer ends up asking what hardware to buy and how much of it is genuinely necessary. Here is each piece, what it costs to get wrong, and where to spend versus save.
The short answer
Most shops need three things: a PC or laptop, a thermal receipt printer, and a barcode scanner. A cash drawer is worth adding almost everywhere. A label printer and a weighing scale are only needed if your stock arrives without barcodes or you sell loose items by weight.
None of this needs to be a purpose-built POS terminal. That is the single most expensive misconception in POS buying, and it is worth understanding before anything else here.
Receipt printers
Thermal printers, not impact (dot-matrix) printers, are the standard for POS — no ribbon to replace, near-silent, and fast enough that the printer is never the bottleneck at the counter. They come in two paper widths: 58mm, which is narrower and cheaper but cramped for anything beyond a short item list, and 80mm, which is the more common choice once a receipt regularly carries more than a handful of lines.
Connection matters more than most buyers expect. USB is the simplest and most reliable for a single till. Network (Ethernet) printers let several tills or a back-office PC print to one printer, which matters once you have more than one counter. Bluetooth printers suit a mobile or tablet-based till but are the least reliable of the three under load — worth testing before committing a whole counter to one.
Barcode scanners
A laser scanner reads a standard printed barcode reliably and is the cheaper option; it will not read a barcode off a phone screen. A 2D imager scanner reads both printed barcodes and QR codes, including from a phone screen, which matters if you ever accept a digital coupon, a loyalty QR code, or a mobile payment confirmation at the counter.
Corded scanners are cheaper and never run out of charge mid-shift. Wireless (Bluetooth) scanners free the cashier to scan an item that will not fit on the counter, at the cost of a battery to manage. For a single fixed till, corded is usually the practical choice; for a shop where staff need to scan shelf stock or a bulky item, wireless earns its extra cost.
Cash drawers
A cash drawer that opens automatically from the receipt printer's port is standard and inexpensive, and it removes the temptation to leave the drawer open between sales — a real, if unglamorous, source of shrinkage. USB-triggered drawers work the same way where the printer does not support the older printer-port trigger. Either is fine; what matters is that the drawer opens on completed sale, not on demand, so there is a record tied to every open.
Label printers and weighing scales
A label printer matters only if stock arrives without a usable barcode — loose produce, in-house bakery items, repackaged bulk goods — and you need to print your own. If everything you stock already has a manufacturer barcode, skip it.
An electronic weighing scale matters only if you sell items priced by weight. A standalone scale that a cashier reads and keys in works but is slower and invites keying errors; a scale integrated with the POS, where the weight posts directly to the bill, is worth the extra cost once loose-weight items are a meaningful share of daily sales — which is most karyana stores and many bakeries and butchers.
Do you need a purpose-built POS terminal?
Almost never. Dedicated POS terminals — the all-in-one touchscreen units marketed specifically as POS hardware — are tidy, durable, and cost several times what an equivalent standard PC or laptop plus a monitor does. A standard PC running proper POS software does the same job for a fraction of the price, and when it eventually fails, replacing it is a same-day errand rather than a wait for a specific part.
The exception is genuinely tight counter space or a shop that wants a single sealed unit for durability reasons — a busy fast-food counter with limited depth, for instance. Ask a supplier who insists on their own branded terminal hardware why standard hardware will not work; sometimes there is a real reason, and sometimes the terminal carries a margin the software licence does not show.
Where to go from here
If you are still deciding between a cloud, local or hybrid setup, our guide on what a POS system actually does covers that decision in depth. If you want to see how your specific counters, branches and hardware needs add up, the free POS cost and scope calculator gives you a scope tier and the real factors that drive the cost before you talk to anyone.