POS Integration with eCommerce Platforms

eCommerce sphere is constantly evolving, and as a POS software vendor, you need to keep up with the expectations of your clients and accept the changes.

To be able to meet your clients’ demands and provide them with advanced functionalities, you need to integrate your POS software with various eCommerce platforms.

A POS software is a central source of information and covers significant processes associated with an online retailer’s business. Such processes include sales, customer management, payment processing, and inventory management.

To seamlessly perform these functions, your POS software needs integration with eCommerce platforms. This article is a short guide that shows how it is possible to develop such integration.

Primary Functions of a POS Software

A POS (point-of-sale) software is among the most useful SaaS solutions when it comes to managing an eCommerce business. With this software, retailers can effortlessly manage and streamline their day-to-day operations while creating personalized experiences for their online shoppers.

POS software offers a lot of features to online retailers. Some of them include selling the products across multiple sales channels and customizing shopping experiences for e-store customers.

Apart from this, here’s a list of functions that POS software offers to retailers:

1. Online retailers can synchronize their store data in real-time. With POS software, retailers have access to all the data related to customers, products, inventory. Having real-time access to such data, retailers can eliminate underselling and overselling situations that usually arise due to wrong updates on the stock status.
2. Retailers can offer a variety of payment methods to their customers. These methods are not limited to cash, PayPal, cards, and cryptocurrencies. Such a facility allows more customers to checkout, thereby improving sales and customer loyalty.
3. The checkout process has been very convenient since the inception of POS software. It allows retailers to provide a hassle-free payment process to their customers.
4. POS software makes it easy for retailers to manage multiple outlets of their stores. They can now scale their eCommerce business by dividing parts of their inventory into multiple outlets.
5. POS software automates the order fulfillment process for retailers. The order fulfillment process starts from initiating a sales process — placing an order to processing it — to finally making a delivery.
6. POS software extends the possibilities and opportunities for customer management. They can make use of certain features like gift cards, discounts, loyalty programs, and more using the software.

The Importance of eCommerce Integration for POS Solutions

Integration with shopping platforms is a must-have for POS solutions that want to be presented on the eCommerce market. If your software needs access to the data related to customers, categories, products, and orders on your clients’ e-stores without any restrictions, you cannot miss this step.

For instance, if you integrate with an eCommerce platform, say Magento, you can access all the information from the online stores built on Magento. Such data is essential for your software to be able to provide all the functions mentioned above to e-retailers. With POS eCommerce integration, your software can do the following tasks effortlessly:

• Import orders from the client stores built on an eCommerce platform
• Sync inventory across all the sales channels used by retailers
• Add and update product data on multiple e-stores
• Import customer lists from the eCommerce platform
• Generate organized reports from the data collected

Further, your target audience will buy your software or not will solely depend on the quality of integration you establish between your POS solution and various shopping platforms. However, specific difficulties associated with the integration process might impact their quality over the long term.

Difficulties associated with eCommerce integration development

To start with, the development of eCommerce integrations might be very complex. Every eCommerce platform has a different API, and the developers need to investigate that API thoroughly to develop custom integrations. Hence, when you establish integrations one by one, you spend more time, money, and resources on it.

Secondly, it is difficult to find experienced developers to establish integrations. Even if you find them, you have to spend a lot of money on hiring, onboarding, and training them for your development tasks. As if it’s not enough, there are additional costs of setup and infrastructure that will add up in your expenses.

The resources you need to develop these integrations are expensive, too, and need special care. Moreover, after establishing these integrations, you will have to take care of their updates and maintenance.

eCommerce platforms update their APIs after a given point of time to maintain the security of their platforms. To make your software compatible with the latest versions of these platforms, you will need to update your integrations constantly. It means more time, money, and resources invested in updates.

Therefore, to get rid of all these back-and-forth processes, expensive resources, and draining investments, you need a solution that can take care of integrations at a reasonable cost. While they handle your integration development processes, you can look after the more crucial functions of your business.

How to develop POS integration with eCommerce platforms easily

API2Cart is the solution used for establishing seamless integrations with eCommerce platforms and your POS software.

API2Cart is a unified API that allows you to integrate your POS software with more than 40 eCommerce platforms and marketplaces at once. There are no separate integrations required with API2Cart. You just have to connect your POS software with API2Cart, and it will integrate the software with all the eCommerce platforms you want to connect with.

API2Cart supports more than 100 API methods to help you retrieve and manage the data from online stores of multiple eCommerce platforms. With these methods, you can easily edit, delete, update, and modify the data on your clients’ online stores.

API2Cart offers a free 30-day trial period. During this time, it is possible to test all API2Cart functionality with no limits.