Point of sale (POS) systems have been an absolute nightmare to integrate into since their arrival on the market nearly 30 years ago. The reasons for this truism are two-fold:
- The POS manufacturers (often abbreviated ISVs for independent software vendors) have had horrible, horrible business strategies if they held any at all. Most POS companies were started by former merchants, and we’re pretty consistent with laying out impartial data demonstrating how merchants struggle to make good decisions. Usually this resulted in walled gardens within the POS, where the ISV would develop any and all bolt-on products to force on their customers.
- Since the ISVs were former merchants, they almost certainly weren’t engineers or data scientists (as these types rarely decide to work in retail). That’s why you’ll see the same field show up 10 times in a POS data table. It’s also why integrating at a technical level has been incredibly difficult. Even if you could convince the ISV that integration was good for their business (and many ISVs made you prove this by paying them $50,000), it was still needlessly complicated to integrate into their systems. Poor architecture and data management practices meant a well-intentioned integration could break one of the core systems a merchant used.
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