How to speed up checkout in a small shop

Watch one busy hour at your till and time a few sales. You will see the same pattern: finding each product, entering it, working out the total, taking payment, and giving change. Greeting and bagging happen too, but they are not usually the slow part.

A typical basket of four items might take 60 to 90 seconds on a notebook or a clunky screen. Most of that is finding things and doing arithmetic. Those are exactly the parts you can speed up, and every customer you serve faster is a customer less likely to give up and leave.

In most small shops, about 20 products account for a large share of sales: bread, drinks, snacks, phone credit-type items, cigarettes where legal, eggs, milk. Make these favourites, so they appear on the first screen without searching. Use the same names, in the same order, every week. Cashiers learn the layout by heart.

To choose the 20, look at last month's best sellers or just ask your cashier which items they ring up most.

For items that are not favourites, a short list of categories (Drinks, Snacks, Cleaning, Groceries, Personal care) lets the cashier narrow 400 products to 40 in one tap. Keep categories few and obvious. If a cashier has to think about where something lives, you have too many. See naming and organising products.

Packaged goods usually carry a barcode. Scanning takes about a second per item and cannot pick the wrong size. It only works for products already in your list with the code attached, so it pays to scan each new product once when you add it. A phone camera is enough to start. See using your phone as a barcode scanner.

Typing a few letters of a name is fast when names are clean and consistent. It is slow when there are ten products starting with "Coca". Good naming makes search quick; bad naming makes it frustrating. Put the brand first, the size last, and avoid abbreviations only you understand.

• Keep change ready. Start the day with enough small notes and coins. Running to find change stalls the line. See how to cash up at the end of the day.
• Ask for payment type early. "Cash or card?" before the total helps the customer get ready.
• Finish one sale before starting the next. Mixing two customers causes errors that take longer to fix than they save.
• Second pair of hands at peak. A second person bagging while the cashier rings can halve the time per customer.
• Do not stop to answer long questions at the till. Move the chat to the side.

Say a shop makes 300 sales on a busy day and the average sale is 60 seconds long. That is 300 minutes at the till: 5 hours. Now apply three changes: favourites for the top sellers save 6 seconds per sale on half the items, scanning saves 4 seconds on packaged goods, and ready change saves 2 seconds on every cash sale. Even if the true saving is only 10 seconds a sale, that is 3,000 seconds, or 50 minutes, back across the day.

These figures are an illustration, so time your own tills for a day to get real ones. Six more customers served in a rush is real sales you would otherwise lose to the queue.

• Too many favourites. If everything is a favourite, nothing is. Keep it to the products your till sees every hour.
• Messy names. Three entries for the same cola sends cashiers hunting. Clean up duplicates and keep one product per item. Naming and organising products has the method.
• No small change. Running out of coins mid-rush will cost you more time than any other single problem.
• Learning during peak hours. Train new cashiers in quiet times. How to train a new cashier suggests a plan.
• Chasing speed at the cost of accuracy. A wrong item rung up means a refund later, which takes longer than the seconds saved. Fast and right beats fast and wrong.

Shopkeepa's point of sale is built around these tactics. You can pin favourites, browse by category, search by name, or scan a barcode with your phone, tablet or computer camera, or a Bluetooth or USB scanner. Add items to the sale, choose the payment type (cash, card, bank transfer, a local wallet or other), and finish. The sale reduces your stock automatically, so there is no second step.

Shopkeepa records the payment type; it does not take the card or wallet payment for you. The receipt can be shown on screen, shared as a link or printed. See the point of sale page for more. Shopkeepa is in development, and early access shops will help shape it.