Our row says the till cannot trade offline

The last row of our comparison table is keeps trading with the internet down, and the cell in our own column is a cross. Six of the seven rivals in that row are ticks. Friday’s re-read of one rival added theirs: their case studies describe terminals that switch to offline processing when the connection drops and store ten thousand transactions each until it returns. The post that compares us to them now credits that under the heading of where they are ahead, because it is where they are ahead.

What the cross means exactly

The till cannot complete a sale with no network. A payment has to be recorded against an order on the server, and with the connection gone there is no server to record it on. That is the gap, and the site has said so in its questions section since the beginning, in the one answer that matters to a service: the till cannot take a full sale offline yet, and the payment still needs the network.

What the cross does not mean is that a dropout wipes the service. The sale being rung up is kept on the till itself, so a reload, a crash or a pulled plug brings the bill back as it was. The kitchen screen keeps every bump on the device before it sends it, and when the network returns the board comes back exactly as the chef left it. That exists because the wifi went during a rush at our own hall and a chef re-bumped fourteen tickets by hand. Guests ordering by phone are on their own network, not the venue’s, so a dead venue wifi does not stop orders arriving, though the kitchen needs its connection back to see them.

Why the row is in the table at all

The table’s second rule is that the rows we lose are in it. Card processing and offline trading are the two things nearly every rival has and we do not, and they sit beside everything else rather than being left off. A table with no losses is an advert. We would rather an operator read the cross here than discover it on a Saturday.

The question for any supplier, then, is not whether they trade offline but what happens to the sale when the network comes back. Ask them to pull the cable mid-transaction and show you where the money went, how a refund on an offline sale is matched to it later, and what the kitchen saw while the till was on its own. A tick on a row is the start of that conversation, not the end of it.