How to Automate Cigars POS

Cigars POS has to count the same cigar three ways

Tobacco retail has its own point of sale software, and Cigars POS is built for nothing else: smoke shops, cigar shops, lounges and vape stores. The company's own pages sometimes shorten it to Cigar POS, and shops use both.

The stock is what makes it different. One cigar is sold as a box of twenty-five, as a five-pack bundle, and as a single stick out of the open box on the counter, and all three come off the same line of inventory. Around that sit accessories, a wall of lighters and cutters, and a third of the humidor that turns slowly on purpose.

The register is also where the ID gets checked, where a member is looked up, and where somebody who has come in every Thursday for six years expects to be known by name. All of it is one screen, open from the moment the shop unlocks.

The buying gets done in the twenty minutes between customers

Ringing a sale is quick. Everything that decides next month's margin happens on somebody else's website.

A limited release is announced and allocated in the same week, and the boxes go to whoever logged into the distributor's portal first. An invoice lands as a PDF with forty lines on it. A rebate program wants a scan data file by the end of the month. Three of the singles that sell every day are down to their last two, because they came out of an open box and nobody counted. A box that seemed clever in March is still in the humidor, at full price, in August.

So it gets done in gaps: a portal checked while the lounge is quiet, an order built on a Sunday night, a rebate deadline remembered on the day.

Cigars POS

Drops caught the same morning New allocations and limited releases read off each distributor's site before opening, matched against the lines your regulars actually buy.

Cash sitting in the humidor Premium boxes ranked by how long they have sat and what they cost, while there is still a season left to sell them in.

Regulars worth a note Members holding points who have not been in for weeks, each one turned into a short message with their usual stick already named in it.

The A to D grade knows which box is not moving

A general retail system would carry the carton, the pack and the single as three products. Cigars POS consolidates them into one entry, and each item can hold tags for wrapper, blend, country of origin and flavour profile, so a lookup or a report is built on how a cigar tastes.

The buying side is stronger than most shops use. Purchase orders are raised from the POS with vendor management, low stock reports and reorder points behind them, and a paper invoice can be photographed or uploaded as a PDF instead of typed in. Every item is graded from A to D on its own sales history, and that rank shows at checkout, on the low stock report and in the inventory overview, so a D can come off a purchase order before it is sent. Age verification sits inside the transaction, with ID scanning, manager overrides and a record of who checked. Loyalty tiers, customer groups, custom barcode labels for singles and bundles, and scan data reports for manufacturer rebates are in the same system.

All of it reads what came through your own register. It has no view of the distributor's allocation page, the manufacturer's release calendar, or what the box you are sitting on is listed at by the shops your customers check on their phones.

A drop can be on a list before the group chat hears

A release is public information for about four hours, and then it is gone.

Each distributor's B2B site read at seven in the morning, with only the brands you stock pulled out, so the allocation request goes in before the lounge opens. Backordered lines from an order placed six weeks ago, checked on the portal rather than assumed. The manufacturer's release calendar, so a pre-order list is started while there is still something to pre-order.

The same reading works on the money. What a box you are holding sells for elsewhere this week, so a markdown is a decision rather than a surprise. Whether the rebate portal has posted this period's credit. Premium boxes ranked by how long they have sat against what they cost.

Then the shop's own people. Cigars POS already knows who holds points and has not been in since June; what it does not do is write forty short notes, each naming the stick that person always buys. Keep the sensitive end supervised: declines and overrides on the ID scanner belong on a weekly summary the owner reads, not with anything that acts on its own.

Six logins in a fixed order is machine work

Distributor sites announce nothing to anybody. Somebody opens them in a fixed order every trading day, and the order never changes.

WebRun is an agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Cigars POS, a distributor's B2B site, a manufacturer's page or a rebate portal, reads what is on the screen and puts the answer where your buyer will see it.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it part way. Anything that reaches a customer is drafted and held for a person to send, and anything touching an age-verification record is a report for the owner rather than an edit.

The workflows underneath name the sites they open and the order they open them in.