Mobile POS App for Field Sales and Pop Up Retail

Where a mobile POS has to work

A mobile POS sells in places a countertop terminal never sees: a vendor booth at a trade show, a brand pop up in a mall atrium, a route sales rep restocking a corner store, a winery pouring at a festival, or a showroom associate closing an order on the floor. Each setting changes the requirements. Tepia starts by listing every place your team sells and what is different about each one, because a booth and a delivery route need different screens even when they share a back end.

The constraints repeat across those settings. The network is unreliable, the device is a phone or handheld rather than a terminal, the seller is standing up and often serving a line, and the stock on hand is whatever fit in the van. A mobile POS also has to answer questions a store POS assumes away: which event or route this sale belongs to, which tax jurisdiction applies, and which inventory location should be reduced.

B2B field sales adds its own layer. Reps sell to accounts with negotiated terms, order minimums and credit limits, and many sales are orders for later delivery rather than a bag handed over a table. Tepia builds both modes into one app when your team does both: collect payment now for cash and carry, or capture an order for the warehouse to ship.

Selling scenarios and what each one needs

Tepia maps each selling scenario to the workflow and the systems behind it before designing a single screen:

Tepia designs the item grid around the busiest moment in each scenario. At a festival that means the top eight items as large tiles; at a trade show it means search and a barcode scanner over a catalog of thousands of SKUs. One app can switch layouts by event type, so your team learns a single tool. Managers set up each event in an admin portal ahead of time, choosing the layout, the stock list and the tax address before the booth opens.

Payments, hardware and compliance

Card acceptance is the part most teams worry about first, and it is where Tepia keeps scope tight. The options we build on:

• Tap to Pay on iPhone and on Android through Stripe Terminal or Square, so a supported phone accepts contactless cards and wallets with no extra reader.
• Bluetooth card readers for chip cards and high volume booths, paired per device and managed from an admin portal.
• Rugged handhelds with built in scanners for route sales, managed through MDM so a lost device can be locked; see rugged device enterprise apps.
• Portable receipt printers where accounts expect paper, with text and email receipts as the default.

Card data is tokenized by the processor and never stored on the device or your servers, which keeps PCI DSS scope small. Tepia also sets a ceiling on offline transactions, because a card accepted offline is authorized only once the device reconnects. For tax, Tepia connects a service such as Avalara or the tax engine in your commerce platform, so each sale uses the rate for the event address.

How Tepia approaches mobile POS development

Tepia runs its six phase process with a US based project manager who schedules testing around your real event and route calendar.

1. Discovery: shadowing a booth, a route or a pop up, interviews with reps and finance, and a review of your ERP, CRM and commerce platform. Deliverables include an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories such as a rep taking a deposit on a trade show order.
2. Design: a style guide and wireframes for the item grid, the cart, the account lookup and the end of day close, tested standing up with one hand.
3. Development and Testing: an Alpha at a small event and a Beta across a full show or route week, with test plans for offline sync, reader pairing, tax accuracy and user acceptance by reps.
4. Training: hands on practice with real devices, covering reader pairing, refunds, offline mode and closing out an event.
5. Launch: device provisioning, migration of product catalogs and accounts, and Tepia support reps reachable during the first events.
6. Support: issue resolution, bug tracking and feature requests such as a new event type or reader model.

Typically Discovery runs 1 to 3 months, development and QA 2 to 6 months and rollout about a month, often timed so the Beta lands on a real show. See our process.

Off the shelf mobile POS or a custom app

If you run a handful of pop ups a year and sell a short product list, an off the shelf mobile POS from Square, Shopify or Clover is usually enough. Tepia will recommend that when it fits.

Custom mobile POS work makes sense when:

• Reps sell to accounts with specific catalogs, terms and credit limits that a retail POS cannot model.
• You need one app that handles both cash and carry sales and orders for later delivery.
• Event inventory, consignment or van stock has to reconcile with an ERP like NetSuite.
• Your sales process includes badge scanning, product configuration or delivery signatures the packaged app lacks.

Related reading: custom POS system development and our field sales rep mobile app page. When you are ready, contact Tepia.

Frequently asked questions