Point-Of-Service Solutions

Forrester let this scorecard sit for six years, and the market it returned to had quietly become strategic again. The Forrester Wave: Point-Of-Service Solutions, Q4 2024, published in November 2024, was the first evaluation of this market since 2018, and its central finding is that the store checkout stopped being a cost center and became the last mile of the unified commerce promise.

The scorecard that came back: The Forrester Wave: Point-Of-Service Solutions, Q4 2024

Analyst Lauren Cevallos announced the results on November 14, 2024, with the blunt context: POS goals have stayed consistent across the six-year gap, drive omnichannel sales, deliver brand consistency, boost store associate productivity. What changed is the internet's effect on offline retail and the demand for seamless omnichannel services.

The Wave scored nine providers against thirty one criteria, and the report's own customer references explain why the market moved. "We knew we could inform some of the way the vendor built the POS." "The vendor shared a compelling vision and has delivered on that vision." Strategy and partner relationships, not feature checklists, decided the deals.

The six-year gap is the story the report only partly tells. In 2018 the POS was a transaction terminal with a screen, and the market treated it as commodity. By 2024 the checkout had become the hinge of unified commerce: endless aisle, buy online pick up in store, ship from store, returns anywhere, all of which run through the same terminal that once just took payments. The vendors that rebuilt for the hinge are the ones the scorecard rewards, and the retailers that kept the 2018-era terminal are the ones now replacing it.

Three Leaders, three architectures for the same counter

Manhattan announced a Leader placement with the highest possible scores in twelve of twenty four Current Offering criteria, including custom checkout flow, digital payments, clienteling and assisted selling, practitioner UX, and endless aisle. It was the only Leader to take maximum scores in store inventory management, store fulfillment, product catalog, and reporting and analytics, the four criteria that connect the checkout to the whole unified commerce estate. Manhattan is also a Leader in the Order Management Systems Wave, Q1 2025, which is not a coincidence: its POS win runs on the same inventory and fulfillment backbone.

GK Software took a Leader placement with the highest Strategy score, earning maximum scores for innovation, roadmap, partner ecosystem, in-store checkout, hardware compatibility, and globalization and localization. GK is the global-rollout answer: retailers running hundreds of store formats across dozens of countries on one software stack.

Jumpmind took the third Leader placement with the highest possible scores in thirteen criteria, including practitioner UX, offline resiliency, architecture and delivery model, and all three omnichannel fulfillment tool criteria: ship from store, buy in store and return in store, buy online and return in store. Its citation name-checks a "customer and associate-centric vision" and a modular, technology-agnostic architecture, the bet that the POS should be a composable layer, not a suite.

Three Leaders, three theories. The unified commerce backbone, the global rollout stack, the composable layer. The market's six-year silence ended with three different answers to the same question, and the scorecard rewarded all three.

The strong performer and the checkout spectrum

Cegid announced a Strong Performer placement, scoring highly in globalization and localization with customers across seventy countries, security and privacy, AI-driven user experience, partner ecosystem, and adoption.

The report's differentiator list is the buyer's checklist. Support for traditional and emerging checkout experiences, fixed, mobile, self, and automated, with few vendors holding extensive deployments across all four. Integrations that deliver value beyond the checkout: clienteling, fulfillment, inventory, with purpose-built interfaces. And no-code and low-code tools that let nontechnical staff modify checkout flows, promotions, and digital receipts without opening an IT ticket.

The related research completes the picture. The Point-Of-Service Solutions Landscape, Q3 2024 mapped the wider market before the Wave, and Cevallos's companion piece, retailers are reassessing their POS technology strategies and accepting trade-offs, names the buyer's real position: every POS decision in this market is a trade-off between what the store needs today and what the unified commerce roadmap needs tomorrow. The scorecard grades the vendors. The trade-off belongs to the buyer.

The honest limits of a reawakened scorecard

The six-year gap means this edition lacks a direct predecessor to measure against, and its tier placements are the market's first public ranking in its current form. Three Leaders and one Strong Performer are confirmed; the other five placements have not surfaced.

There is also the architectural bet the scorecard cannot settle. Manhattan's unified backbone, Jumpmind's composability, GK's global standardization, are three genuinely different strategies, and the tier column puts them on the same rung. Which one fits a given retailer depends on the retailer's OMS, its store estate, and its tolerance for replacing the checkout again, none of which the scorecard can see. The tier names them equal. The architectures do not, and neither will your integration bill.

Three questions before you replace the counter

Which backbone does your POS have to ride on? Manhattan's win runs on its OMS. If your OMS is elsewhere, the highest-scoring POS may be the wrong purchase, and the scorecard will not tell you.

How composable do you actually need it? Jumpmind's architecture is the modular bet. If your stores run one format in one country, you may be paying for composability you will never use, and the middle of the field may hold your fit. Buy the architecture your estate needs, not the one the tier table rewards.

What happens offline? Offline resiliency is a maximum-score criterion for one Leader and a disaster for everyone who skips it. Demo the POS with the network cable pulled, because the store's worst day is the checkout's real test.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

This pairs closely with Merchant Payment Providers, where four of the nine vendors scored in this Wave recently changed ownership or leadership, and Forrester's own warning is blunt: card acquiring is a razor thin margin business, and new owners chase profit.

This market sits next to AI-Enabled Retail Smart Checkout Solutions, covered separately on this site. Gartner's Market Guide says the self-checkout kiosk has evolved into a real-time enterprise data asset, and the loss-prevention case alone may pay for the whole deployment.