Shops in basements, vans that deliver to villages, stalls at weekend markets: every one of them loses the network at the worst moment. Odoo’s Point of Sale runs in the browser and, once the connection drops, you can keep tapping for a while but opening a session, loading products or synchronising orders needs the server. Here are the three ways people solve it.
Option 1: a second connection
A 4G router with a different carrier, or the cashier’s phone as a hotspot. Cheap and often enough for a fixed shop. It does nothing for a basement with no signal from any carrier, or for a van that moves between coverage holes.
Option 2: a local Odoo server in the shop
Some retailers run a small Odoo instance on site and replicate to the central server. It keeps the browser POS alive, but now you maintain two servers, two databases and a synchronisation that must never conflict on stock and payments. It is a project, not a setting.
Option 3: a native Point of Sale on the device
XProERP’s Point of Sale is part of its Odoo Community mobile app. You open the session while online; from then on products, prices, customers and the session live on the phone or tablet. You sell, take payments, print Bluetooth ESC/POS receipts and refund with no network at all. Orders queue on the device and are pushed to your Odoo server in order, without duplicates, as soon as the connection returns. Reports, stock and accounting stay in Odoo where they belong.
What to check before you choose
- How long are your outages: seconds, minutes or whole shifts?
- Do you need receipts printed offline, and on which printer?
- Do several cashiers share one device? Shared devices with one login count as one user in XProERP.
- Does the POS need to work on Odoo Community 16, 17, 18, 19 or 20? All are supported.
If outages are the rule rather than the exception, a native offline POS is the only option that does not depend on the network coming back in time. It is included in the XProERP plan at $1 per user per month, with a free 7-day trial on your own database.