When there's a cashier behind the counter, the screen layout barely matters — a person points, reaches, and rings things up. On an unattended self-serve till, the screen is the only staff you have. It greets the customer, shows them what you sell, and takes the money. If the thing they came for is buried three rows down in an alphabetical list, you've put a cashier out front who refuses to say where anything is.
So the question "how should I arrange products on my checkout screen?" isn't a cosmetic one for a farm stand, a self-serve fridge, or a market stall. It's the difference between a customer who finds the tomatoes in two seconds and one who gives up at an empty-looking shelf because the screen made the barn feel closed.
Here's exactly how TallyTill decides what shows first, which two settings actually move the needle, and a plain playbook for a stand that changes every few weeks.
The screen shows your whole catalog — not a short "favorites" list
Most point-of-sale apps make you build a separate "favorites" or "quick keys" screen by hand, and anything you forget to add simply isn't there until someone searches for it. TallyTill works the other way around: the checkout grid shows your entire catalog. Nothing is hidden. Your job isn't to decide what appears — it's to decide what appears first and biggest.
Two kinds of tile do that:
- Hero tiles — big, for the items you mark featured. These are your in-season stars and your impulse buys.
- Standard tiles — smaller, for everything else, so the long tail is still one tap away without crowding out the stars.
A shopper never has to know a search box exists to buy your best sellers. They just tap a picture. (That matters most for the items with no barcode to scan — the camera can read a barcode or identify a photo, but a bunch of beets gets rung up by tapping its tile.)
How the till decides the order
Every tile is placed by the same rule, and it's worth knowing because it's the whole game:
Read it top to bottom and you can predict where any product lands. The useful consequence: you only ever touch the first two rows. Star the handful of things you want up front, and nudge the order of a few with a sort number. Everything else sorts itself alphabetically and stays findable.
The default is alphabetical — and that's the trap
Out of the box, with nothing starred and no sort numbers set, the grid is purely alphabetical by name. That's tidy, and it's exactly wrong for selling. "Apples" and "Asparagus" win the top of the screen in April for no reason other than the letter A, while the honey you actually want to move sits below the fold.
Alphabetical is a filing system, not a shop window. The fix takes about a minute per product and lives in one place.
The two settings you actually touch
Both live in the merchant Portal, under Catalog, on the product you're editing:
| Setting | What it is | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Featured (the ⭐ checkbox) | Promotes the product to a big hero tile at the top of the screen | Your 3–8 in-season stars and your impulse buys |
| Sort order (a number, default 0) | Higher shows earlier, within the featured block or the standard block | Fine-tuning the order of your starred items, or lifting a standard item without making it a hero |
A product's Sort order only reorders it inside its own group — a high sort number on a non-featured item makes it the first of the standard tiles, but it still sits below every featured one. Star first, then fine-tune with numbers.
There's also an optional layout setting that makes featured tiles physically larger (a two-by-two block instead of a single cell) for stands that want a few items to truly dominate the screen — handy for an event gate selling mostly tickets and drinks, less necessary for a produce stand with a broad catalog.
What about pints, quarts, and half-dozens?
If you sell one product in several sizes, you don't want four near-identical tiles — "Honey 8oz," "Honey 12oz," "Honey 1lb" — eating four slots and confusing the shopper about which button is which. TallyTill collapses a product's sizes into one tile that opens a size picker when tapped. The grid stays clean; the choice happens after the tap. (The full mechanics are in One product, several sizes, and weighed items like loose produce are their own story in selling by weight.)
A playbook for a stand that changes every few weeks
The whole point of a short, curated front row is that it's cheap to change. A workable rhythm:
- Feature what's peaking, right now. Strawberries in June, tomatoes in August, pumpkins in October. Un-star last month's star — a featured item that's sold out or out of season just teaches customers the screen is stale.
- Put one impulse buy up front. The jam next to the bread, the cut flowers by the eggs. On an unattended till there's no one to suggest it, so the screen has to — a hero tile is your "would you like…?"
- Use sort order sparingly. You rarely need more than a handful of numbers. Give your top seller the highest, and let the rest sort alphabetically. Numbers everywhere is just a second filing system to maintain.
- Don't fear the long tail. The screen shows up to the first fifty tiles by default (adjustable), with your featured and high-sort items always safe at the top — never the ones trimmed. Anything past that is one search or category tap away, so stock as deep as you like without clogging the front.
Edits reach the till on their own
You make all of this in the Portal, from a laptop or your phone — not by walking out to the stand and poking the tablet. Catalog changes sync down to every till automatically, so re-featuring next week's crop from the kitchen table is a normal Monday, not a field trip. Run several stands and they all pull from the same catalog, so the order you set is the order every location shows.
The screen is doing a person's job — give it good instructions
An unattended checkout succeeds or fails on whether a customer who's never seen your stand can find what they want and pay in a few taps, with nobody there to help. Alphabetical order leaves that to chance. Five minutes of starring this week's best and burying last week's gives the screen the one thing a good shopkeeper has that a filing cabinet doesn't: a point of view about what you'd like to sell today.
If you're setting up a stand from scratch, building your first season's catalog and running checkout without barcodes are the natural next reads.
Create your free TallyTill account and lay out your first screen — star a few stars, and watch the shelf start selling for you. Curious what a stand costs to run? The plans are here.