Points of sale, e-commerce and retail IT solutions
Arke Technologies designs, integrates and supports points of sale, online stores and retail IT solutions for multi-store retailers and online sellers across South Africa. From Johannesburg, we connect tills, e-commerce, ERP and accounting systems, secure payments and customer data under POPIA, and run store IT under one service-level agreement.
Points of sale: what a retail POS system does
Points of sale are where a retail business meets its customers and its data: every scan changes stock, revenue, VAT and often a loyalty record. A POS system combines hardware (terminal, scanner, printer, cash drawer and card machine) with software that records sales, applies prices and promotions, manages stock and reports to head office.
In IT terms, a retail store is a set of points of sale, a back office and a network linked to head office, whether a mall shop or an internet shop business with no counter at all. Retail management means running stock, pricing and customers across all of them, so an integrated POS system shares one stock pool and price list with the online store, ERP and accounting. That integration, more than the till, decides whether retail IT solutions work.
Point of sale software for pharmacy
POS software for a pharmacy must handle dispensing, prescriptions, scheduled medicines and stock with expiry dates. For South African pharmacies, see IT for healthcare and pharmacy.
Payments: e-commerce payment gateway integration
E-commerce payment integration connects checkout to a gateway, and settlements back to accounting. We integrate PayFast, Yoco, Paystack, Peach Payments and Stripe. Shopify payment gateway integration is different: a store can use only the third-party providers Shopify lists for its country of registration, so a Stripe Shopify integration or PayU Shopify integration depends on that list, and we confirm it, with Shopify's charges, before you apply. E-commerce payment gateway integration on a custom site uses hosted payment pages or tokenisation, so card numbers never touch your servers. See payment gateway integration.
Retail security management
Retail security management protects card payments, customer data and trading hours. The managed security services value proposition is automated monitoring, a tested response plan and evidence for the board, without building an in-house security team.
Tills on their own network: POS, back office, cameras and guest Wi-Fi segmented behind firewalls. The purpose of network monitoring is to catch an outage or unusual traffic before trading suffers.- Vulnerability assessment: its purpose is to find and rank known weaknesses in stores, websites and cloud accounts before attackers do; see cybersecurity assessment.
- Penetration testing: we scope and perform tests on online stores and store networks. A positive pen test, one that finds an exploitable weakness, gives you evidence to act on; we help remediate it and retest.
- Cloud security posture: cloud security posture management compares AWS, Azure or Google Cloud settings with a secure baseline, and posture monitoring catches drift.
- Customer data under POPIA: electronic direct marketing to people who are not yet customers needs their consent; see POPIA compliance.
Retail IT services and support across stores
Retail IT support follows trading hours. Our retail IT services cover the service desk for stores and head office, remote support on our own platform with every session approved and logged, POS terminal and device management, store Wi-Fi, and business fibre with LTE backup through Fibre Boyz. Monitoring checks each managed computer every 15 minutes and logs faults as tickets automatically. Our office hours are Monday to Friday 08:00–17:00 and Saturday 09:00–13:00 (SAST); cover for late trading, Sundays and public holidays is agreed in your SLA.
Peaks are predictable: Black Friday, the festive season, and the back-to-school rush in January, when families buy uniforms and stationery and school-leavers apply for university or register to upgrade their matric results. We freeze changes around your trading calendar. Servers, networking and computers come through Server Hub. Customer service teams need e-commerce helpdesk software joined to the store and CRM, and an AI assistant, where it helps, runs in modes you control: off, draft with staff approval, or automatic. See chatbots and conversational AI.
Governance, data and compliance
The purpose of IT governance is to make technology spend, risk and data serve the strategy, provably. Retailers answer to boards rather than government procurement rules, and it is possible to have governance without government oversight: King IV Principle 12 makes technology and information governance a board responsibility, and the JSE Listings Requirements expect listed companies to report how they apply King IV.
- An SLA set to trading: incidents prioritised P1 (critical outage) to P4 (low-impact request), with response and resolution targets agreed to the impact of downtime, escalation paths, and a monthly service review and report.
- Documentation you own: an enterprise architecture repository recording each system, what each integration exchanges and who owns it.
- Data you can trust: a retail data warehouse whose metadata repository defines each measure (a sale, a return, like-for-like growth), so Power BI reports agree; retail audit software for store visits and stock counts can feed it.
- Compliance: POPIA for customer and loyalty data; King IV Principle 12; card data kept on the payment provider's certified systems to limit PCI DSS scope; controls aligned with ISO/IEC 27001 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (alignment, not certification).
- Procurement: Level 1 B-BBEE contributor, giving 135% procurement recognition (sworn affidavit available on request); company documents, CSD supplier number and SARS tax compliance status on request; buy through a proposal and SLA, or a purchase order.
- Continuity: you own your data, credentials and documentation, and at handover or exit we transfer all of it.