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Glossary

Point of sale (POS)

The point of sale is the store where the product meets the shopper: a supermarket, a pharmacy, a kiosk, a shop. In trade marketing and retail it is the unit on which everything is planned, measured and compared.

In Spanish it is abbreviated PDV, and in English it appears as POS — point of sale — which in some contexts refers instead to the checkout terminal. The distinction matters when reading documentation: the point of sale is the place, the POS terminal is the equipment.

Treating it as the unit of analysis is what makes patterns visible: a stockout that repeats in the same store is a replenishment problem, and the same stockout spread across fifty stores is a supply problem. The national average does not distinguish between the two.

Where GoDoWorks handles this:GDW Retail