Can One System Run Your Shop and Your Website?

POS and ecommerce: what each one does

A point-of-sale system runs the counter. It takes payment, prints receipts, records which unit was sold and who sold it, and closes the day. For a phone shop it also handles returns, trade-ins and repairs. Its main user is your staff, in the shop, and it has to be fast.

An ecommerce platform runs the website. It shows products to customers, takes their orders and payments online, handles delivery or collection, and sends them emails. Its main user is the customer, who is not in the shop and may be on a phone, and it has to be clear and trusted.

They overlap in three places: the product list, the stock count and the order. A POS with ecommerce built in shares all three. Two separate systems keep a copy of each and have to be kept in step.

What should be shared: stock, customers, orders

Of the three, stock matters most. A phone sold in the shop should stop being available online straight away, and the other way round. If the two disagree, you will either sell a phone twice or leave a phone on the shelf that a customer thinks is gone.

Customers and orders are worth sharing for a different reason: you want one picture of who bought what and what you owe them. A repair booked on the website, a phone bought in the shop and a trade-in sent in by post should all sit in the same customer record and the same order list, so that your staff are answering questions from one place.

The ability to share is not the only question. Ask which direction the sharing runs and how quickly, because some connections between separate systems only update a few times a day.

The cost of running two systems

Two systems cost more than two bills. Every product has to be added in both places, every price change made twice, and every stock level reconciled. When the connection between them fails, someone has to notice, and that someone is usually the owner, at the end of the day.

There are also costs that do not show up on a bill: double entry, mistakes when staff type the same thing twice, a customer who is told the wrong thing because one system was behind, and a stock count nobody trusts. A phone shop with one-off units, where each phone can only be sold once, suffers from this more than a shop selling identical items.

Two systems can still make sense, for example if you already have a website you are happy with or sell on marketplaces. If so, choose one place as the master list for stock and make every stock change there, and check regularly that the other one agrees.

• Products entered twice, and prices changed in two places.
• Stock levels that drift apart and have to be reconciled by hand.
• Two sets of customers, orders and reports.
• A connection or plug-in to maintain, pay for and fix when it breaks.
• Staff who need training on two different systems.

Buy, sell and repair on one site

A phone shop website has three jobs, not one. Buy sells devices and accessories. Sell takes trade-ins from customers who want a quote and a way to send the device in. Repair shows a price list and takes bookings or mail-in repairs. Most shop websites do the first and ignore the others.

Gadgets POS runs all three from one system. The Buy section reads the same product and stock records as the till, including stock held in open carts. The Sell section takes quotes and payout choices and lands its orders alongside your shop trade-ins. The Repair section takes appointments with reminders, and mail-in repairs. See POS with an online shop, phone buyback website and online repair booking.

The limits are real. The web shop is set up with our team rather than self-service, it runs on your own domain, and checkout payments use gateways such as Stripe, Square, PayPal and myPOS that you connect yourself. It does not sell on marketplaces such as eBay or Amazon.

Questions to ask

• Does the website use the same stock as the till, or a copy?
• How quickly does a sale in the shop show on the site, and the other way round?
• Are web orders, trade-ins and repair bookings in the same order list as shop sales?
• Who builds and maintains the site, and can I keep my own domain?
• What happens to online stock for products where stock is not strictly managed?
• Which payment methods does the site take, and what do they cost?
• Can I take trade-in quotes and repair bookings online, not just sales?
• What happens to my website if I leave?