Offline-first POS
The POS that keeps selling through load-shedding
Every sale is captured on your device first and synced to the cloud later. No internet, no Eskom, no problem.
Cloud-only tills assume the internet never blinks
Most modern POS systems are web apps: every scan, every basket, every payment confirmation is a round-trip to a server far away. That architecture is fine in places where connectivity is boring. South Africa is not one of those places.
Load-shedding takes the router down even when your till has an inverter. Mobile networks congest the moment a suburb goes dark. Fibre gets trenched, LTE towers drain their batteries mid-outage, and month-end queues don't wait for reconnection. When a cloud-only POS loses its connection, the till freezes — and the fallback is a cash-only sign, a paper notebook, and an evening of re-capturing sales from memory.
The cost isn't just the sales you lose while the queue walks out. It's the stock counts that drift, the discounts that never get recorded, and the numbers you can no longer trust at month end.
Local first. Cloud second. Always in sync.
How offline sync works: while online, each sale syncs to the Back Office as it happens. When the power cuts, the connection drops but the till keeps selling — sales queue in durable storage on the device and receipts still print. On reconnection the queue drains in order, and every sale reconciles deterministically. All sales synced, nothing to re-capture.
1
Online — sales sync as they happen
The sale completes on the till in under 100ms, and each transaction flows straight up to the Back Office.
2
Power cut — the till keeps selling
Nothing about the selling flow changes. Completed sales land in the on-device queue, and receipts still print.
3
Reconnected — the queue drains in order
The moment a connection returns, queued sales replay to the Back Office in the order they happened.
4
All sales synced. Nothing to re-capture.
Stock levels, reports and audit trails catch up automatically — no end-of-day re-typing from a notebook.
- Durable on-device storage
- Queued sales live in durable storage on the till itself — not in memory, not in a third-party queue.
- In-order replay
- Reconnection drains the queue in the order sales happened, so the record reads the way the day ran.
- Deterministic reconciliation
- The same inputs always reconcile to the same result — no duplicate sales, no guessing which number is right.
- Failures held for review
- Anything that cannot apply cleanly is held for review with full detail — never silently dropped.
Full offline mode is available on the Professional and Enterprise plans. See plans
One till — or the whole store
Abosto Desktop on a till
Install the desktop app on a single POS device and that till carries the full offline engine itself — it sells with zero connectivity and syncs to the cloud whenever a connection appears.
Abosto Desktop as a hub
Install once as a hub and every till in the store — PCs and tablets — runs off it over your local network. The whole floor keeps trading through an outage together, and the hub syncs to the cloud as one.
And when you don't need offline at all? Skip the install entirely — Abosto runs fully in the cloud, from any browser.
What works offline — and what needs a connection
Keeps working offline
- Ringing up sales and returns
- Barcode scanning and price lookup
- Discounts and customer accounts at the till
- Receipt and kitchen/order-ticket printing (ESC/POS, USB or network)
- Your own receipt text and branding
- Cash drawer and cash payments
- Stock movements from sales, recorded locally
Waits for reconnection
- First-time activation and store setup
- Pulling new products and price changes from the Back Office
- Cross-store reporting and dashboards
- Card payments (your card machine’s own network applies)
Being upfront about this beats finding out mid-outage: the selling never stops, and everything that needs the cloud simply catches up the moment you're back online.
Each store stands alone. Head office sees everything.
For multi-store retailers, offline-first means every location keeps its own resilient local state. A blackout in one suburb doesn't touch the store in the next one, and no store ever depends on another store's connection to trade.
As connections come and go, each till syncs independently: sales flow up to the Back Office, and catalog, pricing and stock changes flow back down to every terminal. Head office sees consolidated, near-real-time reporting without ever phoning a store to ask for numbers — and an immutable movement trail records where every unit of stock went, outage or not.
Offline POS questions, answered
Stop losing sales to the schedule
Start free in minutes, or tell us about your stores and we'll quote a setup that trades through anything.