To help corporations and retailers cut costs and boost efficiency, one section of COMPUTEX 2019 has been set aside to display point of sale (POS) solutions.

Dozens of POS suppliers are displaying their products at the Smart Retail & Business Solutions area on the fourth floor of the Nangang Exhibition Center, Hall 2, attracting many international visitors who are asking questions and checking prices.
A growing trend in POS is to combine computers, facial recognition, and IoT in venues such as shops, supermarkets, restaurants and
hotels so that customers can select goods and make payments by interacting with the POS equipment.
At the POS section of COMPUTEX, the biggest booth is that of Shanghai Sunmi Technology Co. Ltd., which manufactures IoT devices but is perhaps best known for its facial-recognition technology.
“We combine facial recognition with Alipay, so that when Alipay members go out without carrying a card and want to buy something or pay for a service, they only have to show their face,” Sunmi Brand and Design Director Hu Xiaowei, said.
To make sure visitors know when and where they can use facial recognition with Alipay, their booth has an LCD monitor wall, as large as a cinema screen, displaying a supermarket, library and other scenes at regular intervals.
In addition to Sunmi, South Korea’s POSBANK Co. Ltd. is promoting its POS equipment at COMPUTEX 2019.
An air of quiet elegance surrounds POSBANK’s booth, which features a white and light-blue structure and sleek POS equipment in mostly white and dark frames.
“POSBANK is the No. 1 POS manufacturer in South Korea. We mainly produce hardware, and customers can add or change the content,” said Christina Chou, POSBANK’s global sales manager.
POSBANK sells several kinds of POS terminals, including the sturdy BOXPOS, as well as POS printers and POS touchscreens that can be placed on counters or hung on walls.
Many foreign visitors stopped at POSBANK’s booth, asking questions and taking photos.
POS is designed to not only improve the efficiency of retail and hospitality businesses but also to cut manpower costs.
One Taiwanese company, Netronix Inc., sells electronic product labels so that stores and supermarkets do not have to put up new labels when goods come in or remove labels when goods sell out.
Their electronic labels are hard to sell in Taiwan but easier to sell in Europe, because manpower is more expensive in Europe than in Taiwan.
The labels come in five sizes, and their contents can be changed by computer, even wirelessly.
“Electronic labels are more expensive than paper labels because they are made with e-paper … but it holds great future,” said Sean Huang, senior specialist at Netronix’s sales department.
“At department stores and supermarkets, fresh products like fruits and vegetables only have a week’s shelf live. After that you have to cut price and then stop selling them. So, staff members are busy putting up labels and removing them. This is not only a waste of manpower, a waste of time, but also causes environmental pollution,” he said.
“This is especially important for Japan, which faces a serious problem of an aging population,” he added.
While POS is generally associated with cashiers, checkouts and self-ordering or self-service kiosks, it can also be smartly applied to a bakery.
The POS system made by one Taiwan company makes it easier for a customer to make purchases at a bakery.
The customer picks up the bread or cakes he or she wants to buy, puts the tray under a POS terminal to identify the purchase and show the total price, and then pays the bill.
“When a cashier charges a customer, the cashier taps the names of the purchased goods on the screen of the cashier machine and sometimes makes mistakes. When the POS checks the bread and cakes on a tray and gives the tally, the accuracy is 97 percent correct,” the manufacturer said.
The POS section at COMPUTEX shows systems primarily from Taiwan and China, and that is what lures foreign visitors to COMPUTEX.
“COMPUTEX offers a wide range of products from Taiwan and China at competitive prices. I like it very much and have been attending COMPUTEX for several years,” said Ayush Sanghvi, a buyer from Mumbai, India.