Whether you realize it or not, everyone has interacted with a Point of Sale (POS) system. When you get ready to buy that cup of coffee and head up the register, you’re about to put your credit card into a Point of Sale system. And today, you get to tip on things you’ve never had to tip on before thanks to that nifty little iPad. What many don’t realize is that a POS can integrate with your website and record sales, bring the orders back into the site, save customer’s emails for future marketing, and help you keep track of your inventory.
Many businesses use a Point of Sale system when they have a physical store. Or if they visit a lot of trade shows on the weekends. Whether the business keeps up with inventory or not depends on their needs but everyone needs a way to manage orders that aren’t happening online. Square has become a popular POS for small businesses because of their transportable card reader. And what started out as a great way to take money has become a problem for those who need to manage inventory.
A POS system is a great way to manage your sales, multiple brick and mortar stores, product inventory and reporting. However, we believe that an easy way to take customers credit cards shouldn’t make you sacrifice keeping track of your inventory. So, why not integrate the two and keep a better tab on your business?
Having your Point of Sale system communicate with your website gives a business the benefit of keeping track of your products in one place, getting a record of all of your sales in one place, and making sure your inventory stays in sync. Whether a business wants to manage their products and inventory inside their website or within their Point of Sale tool shouldn’t be limited based on technology. Our Nashville web design team wants to give you the power to decide what works best for your business.
How Does It Work?
One major advantage of integrating your POS with your e-commerce store is you are selling your existing products with a one-time setup. If you are using a POS you already have a brick and mortar store. Integrating your existing Point of Sale with your e-commerce website allows you to sell your products with a hands-off effort and a one-time setup charge. While many companies charge a recurring, monthly fee, we believe in a one-time setup fee. This helps our customers find a return on their investment quickly.
From the technical side, we need to get the data from your system and put it into Magento. Or in some cases we’ll get the information out of the website and sync it over to your POS. Fortunately for everyone, Magento has an API that allows us to add products and categories. With this information, we need to get the data from the POS. Most systems offer an automatic export that will take the products, categories and inventory and dump the details into a file. Other systems have an API that allows us to go out and grab the data. Either way, you can rest assured our Nashville web design team will have what’s needed to connect your website with your POS.
What Systems Do We Work With?
If you’re still reading you’ve seen the benefits and are probably wondering if this will work for you. The truth is we can work with almost any system as long as they have an export or API capability. You don’t have to decide that for yourself because we offer a free consultation and can investigate this for you. We’ll determine if your POS is a good fit and can let you know of any hangups without any cost to you.
We’ve worked with a lot of POS systems so far and some work in different ways.
At this point in time, we have integrated the NCR Counterpoint system by exporting the information nightly and placing it onto a server. From there we will upload it and put it into Magento. When a sale is made we can export it immediately, or batch export sales every 5 minutes, every hour or daily.
POSIM POS or Evopos is another system that we have worked with frequently. This system has a built-in connector and is a pretty easy setup but has a little extra cost from the EVO team.
LightSpeed POS or LightSpeed Cloud has been a popular choice amongst customers as well. LightSpeed is a very robust system that has great reporting and product management. Their API was recently reconstructed and we have worked with both version 1 and 2.
Also, we have done integration with Square. We can pull products and inventory from Square and add directly into Magento. Square is a little unique because we have also built a payment module that processors your customer’s orders directly in your Square app, which sends the order data in as if you swiped the customer’s card on your own.
We’ve also worked with custom systems that were built by our clients. Point of Sale systems or Customer Relationship Management tools are sometimes built to keep things simple, reduce monthly fees, and make sure the tools meet the needs of the business owner. Working with these tools is fine and works the same way as any other integration.
WordPress websites that use WooCommerce allow us to grab products as well. Since WooCommerce isn’t a POS but an online e-commerce system we will reserve it for another post. The point is we can help you out with almost any POS.
In conclusion, we can work with almost any Point of Sale system to better your business by helping you keep track of your inventory, collect your sales in one place, improve your reporting, and reduce administrative time by managing your products and categories in one location. Giving a business clear insight on your products and sales gives another level of control and comfort. Reach out today for a free consultation to see how we can help your business.