Salesforce launches POS system, Retail Cloud

Salesforce pushed deeper into retail with new offerings including a library of Agentforce skills specific to the vertical and Retail Cloud, which includes a headless point-of-sale system.

The company plans to roll them out from February to April, with the lion's share available next month. Salesforce, along with competitors including SAP, previewed its retail tools at the National Retail Federation's NRF '25: Retail's Big Show.

Point-of-sale systems are the boxes that retail associates use to process cash and credit card payments. Salesforce's POS is built from PredictSpring, a cloud-native POS it acquired last Sept. 12.

While Salesforce won't manufacture POS hardware, systems can be provisioned with hardware from a number of partners with touchscreens such as iPads to process payments anywhere within a store or on a website.

In general, most retailers' POS systems aren't on the cloud, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm. Salesforce offers retailers a way to get transaction data into its cloud -- and therefore make it more accessible, usable and linked to a customer's other profile data.

That data is ripe for automation such as product recommendations and presenting offers that can't be done when the POS is in its own intranet silo.

"POS is one of those last dinosaurs, only behind maybe contact centers in moving to the cloud. A lot of antiquated stuff is still going on out there in the POS space," Wettemann said. "There are opportunities for retailers to take advantage of the benefits of cloud."

A number of retailers still rely on "arcane" POS systems, said Nitin Mangtani, Salesforce senior vice president and general manager of retail, who joined Salesforce from PredictSpring.

"In fact, they're so arcane, they hide them behind the curtain [at luxury stores]," Mangtani said. "They don't even bring it out because it doesn't meet their luxury standards, right? They have to literally hide it in the corner somewhere."

Salesforce isn't the only vendor modernizing POS to mix and match in-store capabilities with retailer mobile apps and websites; competitors such as Aptos and Manhattan Associates' POS systems, like Salesforce's, can handle similar tasks. One example of advanced POS is managing "mixed carts," or transactions that include inventory from multiple sites such as the store and delivery from a warehouse.

Such POSes, like Salesforce's, typically enable customer self-service to order goods, pay for them, and arrange for in-store or curbside pickup if a store offers it.

Salesforce also plans to release a library of prebuilt generative AI agent skills for the retail environment. The library includes e-commerce skills that plug into Salesforce's order management system, as well as marketing skills that complement loyalty cloud services from Salesforce or competitors.

Loyalty programs reward customers with coupons, points or other benefits for repeat purchases. Salesforce's generative AI marketing skills for loyalty management can take plain-language prompts and examine shopper, POS and market segment data to create personalized emails designed to generate more purchases.

"Salesforce is all about customer data, CRM, Agentforce -- and we really wanted to home in on that experience in the stores," Mangtani said. "Technology should be enabled in the palm of the associate's hand so they can look up a customer's profile."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.