Inside Kitestring’s Vendor-Neutral Point-of-Sale Lab for Omnichannel Retail
As merchants pursue unified checkout across channels, a retail technology company founded by former Walmart technologists has built a hands-on lab where buyers can trial offerings from multiple point-of-sale vendors under one roof.
Vendor-Neutral Testing: How Retailers Compare Point-of-Sale Options
Kitestring Technical Services presents its innovation laboratory as a neutral environment for evaluation and live demonstrations, giving retailers a controlled space for quality-assurance-style reviews of equipment from seven software providers and 14 hardware makers.
In that setting, retailers typically focus on testing that reduces the risk of disruptions at checkout and across connected channels. Teams look for reliable transaction handling to avoid revenue loss from system failures, protections for sensitive customer data, adherence to relevant industry requirements, and a smoother experience that keeps lines moving and customers satisfied.
Those evaluations span the core components that tend to break in the real world: payment processing, inventory management, the user interface cashiers and associates rely on, receipt printing, loyalty and promotions logic, and integrations with external systems that feed orders, pricing, and customer profiles.
To cover those areas, buyers commonly run functional testing, integration testing, performance testing, security testing, usability testing, compliance testing, and regression testing to confirm that updates do not reintroduce defects across stores and devices.
That work can be difficult to standardize because point-of-sale deployments often involve complex hardware-software integration, multiple payment methods and devices, real-time transaction processing requirements, the need for consistent omnichannel behavior, and evolving security and compliance obligations.
Selecting a point-of-sale system often means a multi-year, multimillion-dollar commitment with intertwined hardware and software considerations, including performance and reliability risks, said Lindsay Schwab, Kitestring’s head of partnerships and growth. That scale pushes teams to move deliberately.
Common test cases in those deliberations include a successful sale from scan to authorization, failed payment scenarios such as declines or timeouts, correct discount and promotion application, inventory updates after a sale, receipt generation across supported printers, and secure user login and logout flows for associates.
We bring retailers into our Bentonville, Arkansas lab so they can place the systems they’re considering next to each other and make like-for-like comparisons.
Launch and Company Evolution
The lab made its public debut in January during the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York City.
Kitestring is a private, family-owned firm of roughly 140 employees, led by chief executive officer Jared Smith, who acquired the company from his father, Larry Smith. Schwab said the leadership’s experience grew out of two decades of point-of-sale work for Walmart.
Schwab noted that Walmart and Sam’s Club now account for about 20% of Kitestring’s revenue. The client roster includes major grocers, department stores, and several large convenience-store chains, with most customers posting annual sales above $300 million.
Omnichannel Integration and Real-World Demos
Many retailers want an integrated retail point-of-sale platform that manages digital orders, in-store checkout, kiosks, mobile transactions, and marketplace flows from DoorDash and Uber Eats, said Justin Clark, a retail technology specialist at Kitestring.
In today’s market, buyers expect a modern architecture that unifies online and in-store journeys.
Clark added that the market has grown more agnostic, allowing retailers to combine components from different providers so long as they share an operating system such as Android, Linux, or Windows.
Automation is also becoming more practical as retailers seek repeatable coverage across frequent updates. Teams increasingly use test automation frameworks to simulate transactions and device interactions, run automated regression suites, and plug those checks into continuous integration pipelines so issues surface earlier in the release process, with less manual effort and broader coverage.
Security and compliance checks, meanwhile, often include validating encryption of payment data, ensuring secure user authentication, and testing against payment-card security requirements and applicable data privacy regulations as configurations change across devices, stores, and channels.
Altaine, a digital commerce company, used the lab to walk a prospective client through end-to-end order flow on real terminals, said co-founder and chief operating officer Jo Gelb during a joint call with Kitestring.
Anyone can run an emulator and flip through screens, but pairing it with physical devices is far more convincing, she said, noting that Altaine’s ordering platform supports a major fuel brand, Pizza Hut, and Subway.
Gelb added that when Altaine engages a prospect, the team often relies on the facility for demonstrations because Kitestring’s hands-on work in the lab makes its engineers nearly as fluent in Altaine’s technology as Altaine’s own staff.
Diebold Nixdorf, a North Canton, Ohio supplier of point-of-sale and automated teller machine solutions, has also deployed its retail hardware and software stack inside the lab.
Beyond physical labs, retailers and vendors are also experimenting with cloud-based point-of-sale testing environments, more continuous testing practices tied to faster release cycles, and emerging approaches such as artificial-intelligence-driven test automation aimed at expanding coverage for omnichannel experiences without slowing delivery.
Retailers can gauge how their point-of-sale and broader omnichannel solutions behave in store-like scenarios and envision seamless experiences with personalized interactions, said Ed McCabe, Diebold Nixdorf’s head of retail sales for North America.