As a retailer selling in multiple channels, it can be challenging to manage your operations and maintain data accuracy across your tech stack.
Yet this is fundamental to providing a seamless customer experience that matches the biggest merchants — for example, allowing customers to buy online and pick up in store (BOPIS), buy online and return in store (BORIS), or for you to fulfill online orders with your retail inventory.
To do this, you need Magento integrated with the other platforms in your stack, including your store point of sale (POS) system. And you need to distribute truth across that stack. But for retailers using Magento, the thought of possibly disrupting or destabilizing the customizations and tuning you’ve performed on your Magento site can induce palpable anxiety.
In this post, we’re going to tell you how you can integrate your Magento store with your POS system — without adding undue complexity, risks, or costs. We’ll dive into:
First, let’s take a quick look at the advantages of integrating your online and offline operations.
Combining online selling with one or more physical stores can cause a headache. You either have one team working within multiple systems, or multiple teams working in various disparate systems — almost like running your online and offline operations like two separate businesses.
And when it comes to inventory and order management, you’re hamstrung by the limitations of each system, unable to make all your inventory available in real-time, and prevented from reliably offering the services customers now expect from modern retail, such as BOPIS, BORIS, and find-in-store.
The benefits of bringing together your eCommerce and in-store systems include:
One of Magento’s core benefits is its endless opportunity for customization. It’s a heavy-hitting eCommerce solution, suitable for retailers who manage huge volume, complex products, and sell in multiple locations and languages. But this makes any integration a daunting project, because even the smallest code error can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost sales.
With this in mind, it’s important to know that some solutions offer more stability and scalability than others.
In this next section, we’ll take a look at a few integration options.
When it comes to integrating Magento with your in-store POS system, you have three options:
Let’s dive into these options in more detail.
Many Magento users are tempted to build a custom POS integration. This is because developers have already been involved in their eCommerce solution, so it makes sense for them to offer this service. But you may find yourself hamstrung with a solution that’s difficult to support, and you’ll be on the hook every time any issue comes up. If the developer(s) responsible for building a custom solution aren’t available to fix the problem, this becomes severely disruptive.
And as a Magento user, you’ll be familiar with your developer’s hourly fees. Building a custom POS integration can take anywhere from 200-500 hours ($8,000-$100,000, depending on scope and whether you offshore). And these costs are compounded if you need ad-hoc emergency support or bug fixes — especially if you need to source a developer who didn’t build it originally.
If you want to minimize risk, improve stability, and get access to reliable support that doesn’t cost a fortune, we think you’re better off using a specialist integrator (like Accumula), which we’ll explain more in the next section.
Our Magento POS integration (for Heartland and Lightspeed) has been developed in collaboration with multi-channel retailers who are doing millions of dollars every year through our solution. It’s stable, secure, and most importantly — well-supported.
Accumula is a headless inventory and order management system, which sits in the middle of your Magento platform and your POS. Our solution distributes truth between your various back-end systems, meaning you can manage inventory, publish products, and process orders in whichever system you prefer — while Accumula automatically reconciles your data.
This is in contrast to typical inventory management solutions (IMSs) that act as a single source of truth, forcing inventory-related tasks to be performed in that one piece of software. And IMS often gives you great visibility, but doesn’t provide that same visibility to your other teams, like the people on the frontlines in Brick and Mortar stores.
Accumula also supports multiple Magento websites containing different inventory, meaning you can publish products and maintain data integrity for various different eCommerce operations at once (for example, wholesale, clearance, and international selling).
Accumula is one of the few Magento integrators to offer deep integrations into point of sale and to be experts in the point of sale platforms they support. In fact, most Magento integrations are only focused on eCommerce, and are blind to other critical parts of a retail business.
With Accumula, you can make sure that all your operations — in-store, online, and warehouse — are integrated to give customers more product availability, flexibility in purchase and fulfillment, and a consistently great experience when they buy from you.
When Popcultcha were running a huge sale recently, a shopper inadvertently entered a hidden special character in their address, causing the Magento API to crash — so the Accumula team was able to identify the offending order and move past it to restart their operations.
Another client, Purl Soho, sells high-quality supplies for sewing, knitting, crocheting & embroidery. With a sizable eCommerce business, but no dedicated warehouse, they’re able to manage and fulfill both online and in-store orders from a single inventory. And BOPIS orders from their dedicated customers are easier to manage.
When Purl Soho started experiencing server timeouts in Magento for some orders, Accumula was able to help identify possible causes, rule out the integration and staff workflows, and keep them running as their developer resolved the issue on the server.
These two brands use Accumula to integrate their physical locations with their eCommerce operations, giving customers the experience they have come to expect from major retailers while simplifying the work of their staff.
Magento POS Extensions don’t give you the full functionality of a POS. They simply offer an extension of your online store — an interface for your tablet or laptop, which allows you to sell products in your store using Magento as the back-end.
Essentially, these tools run directly on your Magento server, and that means more load on your server, thereby straining resources. That extra load can impact the online shopping experience, which may require a server upgrade.
Just as important, POS extensions usually don’t provide inventory management capabilities (Purchase Orders, Transfer Orders, adjustments, reporting, permissions) and have little to no product support. While not all POS extensions are equal, due to the server impacts and limitations, they are also not a substitute for a proper point of sale like Lightspeed.
The biggest retailers have set the standards for omnichannel customer experience, and mid-market merchants need to integrate their tech stack across online and offline platforms to meet these new expectations.
If you’re running a Magento store, any type of integration is fraught with potential pitfalls, excessive costs, and risk to your business. With this in mind, you’ll be looking for a stable solution that comes with reliable support as part of the package.
Accumula’s Magento (Magento 2) POS integration for Heartland Retail and Lightspeed Retail provides peace of mind while opening up exciting new ways to drive sales and improve customer service. Our solution is proven as stable and scalable for retailers handling millions of dollars of eCommerce transactions while managing inventory across multiple stores.
If you want to synchronize inventory and orders across your POS and your Magento store, book a free demo with Accumula today. We’ll guide you through the whole process.