EPOS and E-Commerce Getting it Right

Here at Yellow Cherry we love putting together beautiful E-Commerce website for our retail clients, they are always interesting to build and usually great for a bit of problem solving to keep our minds active!

What we find most problematic (so therefore the most time consuming) for both ourselves and our clients is the time it can take to effectively sync up their online shop with their epos system so that stock control and accounting is easy and hassle free. From our own experience, one of the issues with this is that often the person dealing with the sale and service of the epos system does not know the technical aspects of the hook up or in some cases of their own E-Commerce solutions that they offer inline with their system. What this means is that they can be selling you features that actually don’t exist, or when they say they fully integrate are actually offering an open API for custom development – which is fine but more expensive and can be hugely problematic if the documentation is not up to spec and questions take a prolonged time to be answered. What this does is leave people feeling frustrated and put off something that should be simple to attain.

We have decided to take a look at some of the top epos offerings available in the UK and how suitable they are for syncing up with the popular CMS platforms such as WordPress/Woocommerce.

Vend

Vend is an online system and works on iPads, Macs and PC’s as it is a cloud platform you can use it across multiple devices, it will work offline and will resync when it reconnects to the internet. It is described as being intuitive and easy to use, allows for customised receipts, has options for “on-account” payments and “split payments” as well as processing refunds with options of credit, gift cards or original payment card.

We spoke to William via the Vend chat facility on their website, we were looking for a pos for a client who owns a clothing and accessories shop and also sold items online from Woocommerce, did Vend hook-up?

The response was yes they did, so we asked how it hooked up. When the typed response came through We have an open API, Our thoughts moved instantly to custom development and the expense that comes with this…but then William sent me two links which take you to information on how the hook-up works a plugin! While they openly say it’s in BETA and only available on the Pro and Enterprise plans, a quick watch on the video available makes everything look like a straightforward hook-up, so no custom development required.

They work with multiple payment providers like Worldpay, Paypal, Square and Cardconnect.

As mentioned in order to use Woocommerce you have to be on the pro or enterprise plan, the pro plan starts from £69 a month if you pay annually or £89 if you are paying monthly.

Lightspeed

Lightspeed is an epos system that sections itself for retailers and restaurateurs, they cater specifically for small and medium sized businesses and state on their website that commerce belongs to everyone. They offer access from any device, customer analytics, special orders and split payments as some of their features.

The chat facility disappeared before we could talk to someone online, and when I went back to use it a second time (loading the website in another browser) the team were currently out. We contacted them via a contact form for more information but haven’t heard from then since.

Pricing on the website seems a little confusing, with plans for either POS or Ecommerce but not and example of a mixture of both, at this point it looks like their E-commerce offering is only available through themselves with no integrations to other platforms, what this E-commerce is offering we haven’t been able to find out!

Stock.ly

The first thing we noticed about Stock.ly was it’s nifty domain name (we love a good domain name here at Yellow Cherry headquarters). Stok.ly say that they provide UK Retailers with a seamless, user friendly approach to stock control, multichannel E-commerce and EPOS, delivered via the cloud and paid for monthly with no contracts and no up front fees. Stock.ly works on Windows, iPad and Android devices but they also offer full terminals. They have customer analytics, a stock control app, barcode receipts for promotions as some of their features.

We contacted the via their contact form to find out if their multichannel E-commerce included integration with Woocommerce and they responded to say that they had a plug and play solution specifically for it. This is included on the small business package and up and prices start at £59.99 a month. They then offered to give us a call on Monday to discuss the hook up in more details.

Square

Square is a little different from the other systems we have mentioned here for the reason that they are also a payment solutions provider. They can be used to take both offline and online payments. So with Square your payments and EPOS would be all in one place. Square works on Windows, iPad and Android devices. Features for EPOS include Payments, digital receipts, open tickets, inventory and reports.

While they have their own E-commerce offering they also let you know the Woocommerce is one of their partners for both taking payments and syncing online and offline sales.

Their pricing also works differently from the other solutions we have discussed, the account with Square is free and you are charged per transaction: 1.75% for card transaction fees and 2.5% for card not present transaction fees (such as invoices, over the phone payments).

These are just a few of the current EPOS offerings out there, here at Yellow Cherry we have worked with a variety of EPOS systems and we wanted to share a few pointers with you to help take the nightmare out of EPOS/E-Commerce hook up.

1. Know what you need the systems to do before you start your research – have a set of specific questions ready to ask a variety of suppliers.
2. Get help, if you are unsure of what exactly you need, aren’t sure of technical terms or just don’t know where to start – speak to someone who does. Talk to other shop owners and find out their experiences, talk to a digital agency who can advise on the techy stuff
3. Ask for a demo of the system before you commit – always check that when a system says it’s “Easy”, “Straightforward”, “Seamless” that it actually is.

Do you have a EPOS horror story? Are you looking to get started on an integration or have an existing EPOS system that you want to sync up with your online offering? Get in touch and see how we can help.