One of the charms of the Point Of Sale business is that it is dominated by small companies. Of course, companies like IBM and Epson produce POS hardware, but both companies have set up very specialized departments that work separated from the rest of the company. Don’t try to find drivers for Epson receipt printers on www.epson.com; you’ll have to look at the site of the Epson SD group. In the POS software market, the presence of the big guys is even less prominent. Microsoft does have POS software, but they hardly sell it outside the USA.
The POS market is dominated by small local companies, and it makes sense. After all, the target group also consists of small local companies, who really prefer to speak to partners of their own size. Even big POS clients as the famous fast-food chains, are effectively run as a series of small companies, or even franchises. Burger King in Spain is almost independent from the international HQ, and they leave the choice for POS systems up to each outlet. The Point Of Sale world is a world of small companies. Each country or even each region has its own local players. There is no POS supplier coming even close to world domination, being a main player in a single country is difficult enough.
This fact makes marketing POS goods a headache. How can you possibly reach so many and so different clients? Most manufacturers solve this problem in a rather strange way: they look where the clients of their clients are, and go there. So the best place to find a new dealer for your restaurant software is a restaurant tradeshow. If you show of your products there, you might sell some systems to restaurants, but more important, you might find some dealers who are visiting the show looking for new clients. The trick is to combine this: your potential dealer does not go home with a new software solution, but he received some potential clients for this new system as well. This gives the new dealer a flying start, and raises the chances for a successful partnership.