Back to catalog
WooCommerce POS
GPL-3.0WooCommerce POS is a free, self-hosted till for WooCommerce stores: offline caching, barcode scanning and thermal receipts, no per-location SaaS fee.
Open-source alternative to — compare it against:
Overview
WooCommerce POS is a WordPress plugin that turns a WooCommerce store into a point-of-sale register for a physical counter. Its distinctive trait is where it stops: this repository is only the server side — a REST API and JWT auth layer — while the till interface ships from a separate client app loaded over CDN.
Why WooCommerce POS instead of Shopify POS
Shopify POS runs as a managed service: Shopify keeps the register, sync engine and uptime guarantee on its own infrastructure, so checkout never depends on your host staying up. WooCommerce POS flips that — the register talks to a REST API on whatever server hosts your store, and the client caches products locally so search and order entry stay fast offline. That cache is also where problems surface: stores with very large product counts have reported the register freezing or barcode lookups returning nothing, because the IndexedDB and FlexSearch layers underneath have ceilings a cloud-native register does not hit.
Square POS sidesteps the comparison differently, since it needs no website at all — hardware and software ship together and Square owns the sync path end to end. WooCommerce POS only makes sense once a WooCommerce store already exists, because the register borrows that store's products, taxes and, in the Pro tier, payment gateways rather than bringing its own. The payoff for self-hosting is that checkout never depends on a third party's outage window, and a plain thermal printer keeps working over USB, Bluetooth or network without a subscription tying hardware to a service plan.
What it does well
- Offline-first client caches products locally, so a spotty backroom connection does not stop a sale from ringing up.
- Thermal receipt printing over network, Bluetooth or USB to 58mm/80mm printers, with a template designer for receipts, invoices, quotes and kitchen tickets.
- Runs on browser, desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux) and mobile (iOS, Android in beta), so one setup covers a counter and a back office.
- Barcode scanning straight into the cart, plus ad-hoc line items for products not yet in WooCommerce.
- A dedicated
wcpos/v1REST namespace keeps register traffic off the normal WooCommerce API path, so a busy storefront and a busy till do not compete. - Customer Tax ID field (VAT, ABN, GST), full multilingual support, and HPOS order storage so the register stays fast as history grows.
