Integrating new ecommerce website with existing EPOS system

Many modern retailer already have an EPOS software solution installed, and are quite happy with it. However, many retailers are looking for a more advanced integrated Ecommerce solution, without the upheaval of installing a new EPOS system. Can a new Ecommerce software solution be made to work with an existing EPOS software solution? This is a very common situation for retailers, and thankfully the answer is that it is becoming increasingly possible to link different systems without a prohibitive cost.

A lot of established retailer have a primitive Ecommerce site that was setup on a small budget just to "get something up there" in land of the Internet. Sometimes, after a few years, these rudimentary un integrated ecommerce sites start to take an increasing number of sales. Once you get beyond the point of half a dozen web orders per day, a retailer needs an Ecommerce solution that is integrated with their EPOS stock and order processing software. Re-keying stock product records and sales orders twice between two un integrated systems is something that you can cope with, but is grossly inefficient. Much better to have integrated EPOS and Ecommerce!

The money and time investment in a fully integrated Ecommerce and EPOS system is quite large. You may well be perfectly happy with your EPOS solution, but require a new Ecommerce system that can bolt on.

This problem can be solved from both ends. Firstly, from the EPOS end, you need two things. The ability to export product information and stock levels from your EPOS system in a format that can be accepted by the website and the ability to import customers and sales orders from the web into the EPOS software sales order processing module. It is very rare that an EPOS system fails to offer this basic functionality.

Of course, on the web site, you need the same to things in reverse. The web ecommerce software needs the ability to accept data from the EPOS system about product and stock data, and the ability to pump out sales orders to the EPOS system. There are two bits of software here, the EPOS and the Ecommerce, and both need the correct features.

Whilst this transfer can be done by manual or automatic transferring of text or XML files, there is an increasing tendency for the ecommerce software providers to give a suite of web services which the EPOS programmers can use to integrate the new systems.

A web service is a programming interface to a software package that other programmers can call securely over the internet. Programmers love them because they are easy to write and easy to use, and virtually eliminate the mistakes and problems that can occur with older methods. For example, the EPOS system can "call" the web service on the Ecommerce site and ask it to create a product record. It can do this automatically, and without anybody having to do anything.

Most Ecommerce software provides a web service interface. All that you need to do is talk to your EPOS software house, and ask them to write the code to integrate with the web services on the ecommerce website. If you are lucky and use a common ecommerce software package, they may already have done this, if not expect to pay for 2 or 3 days work to get the integration working properly.

Increasing I am finding that the reverse is starting to happen. Many EPOS software packages are offering their own suite of web services. So instead of the EPOS programmers calling the web services on the Ecommerce site, the reverse happens: The Ecommerce programmers call the web services in the EPOS system. Whilst this works well with online EPOS systems, like Cybertill, where the data is already held on Internet facing servers, it is more tricky with locally hosted solutions - however there are solutions: Talk to your EPOS provider.

Which ever way around the problem is solved, expect a bit of extra product file maintenance. The web needs data fields in the product file that most EPOS systems have never heard of. Things like page title tags, page meta data, html descriptions etc. You may still need to visit the website backoffice to fill in this data.

One word of warning: Do not consider any solution that involves the website linking to your EPOS system via the shop's broadband connection. This solutions cause more trouble than they are worth. In the worst case, you might find your Ecommerce system actually stops working if you have a problem with the internet in the shop, or a power cut - this is not how Ecommerce solutions are supposed to work!