Why Do Some Cloud POS Companies Still Lack APIs?

It’s understandable how legacy POS companies avoided building APIs. Remember, the leadership at most of these companies couldn’t be bothered to invest a measly $20,000 in efforts with 1000% ROI.

However, their actions are pretty predictable when you really think about it:

1. The ownership/leadership simply wasn’t very intelligent about business matters
2. The ownership/leadership simply wasn’t very intelligent about technical matters
3. The ownership/leadership simply viewed integrations as a cost center because they took an amazingly myopic view at partnerships

The result was that many legacy POS companies did not have integrations or API capabilities until they were bought by larger companies who invested/are investing in bringing this needed functionally to the market.

That explains the legacy market, but what about the cloud POS players? As mobile-first stewards, is it possible that some of them don’t have APIs for integration?

A growing number of existing merchants and prospective partners, both of whom seem ready to benefit from the integrations an API would offer, are approaching us about one cloud POS company in particular. This article seeks to clear up that confusion, selfishly so we don’t have to spend more time dolling out answers.

Touchbistro has raised over $100M at this point and would seemingly lack a formalized integration program. From the outside this would rightfully signal a few possibilities.

First, it could mean that Touchbistro is focused downmarket. Smaller merchants, like those that use Clover, don’t do self-discovery on an app store and are happy with much lighter functionality. In this instance it may not make sense for Touchbistro to build an API if they think they can serve all the merchant’s needs on their platform.

This brings us to the second point, which is that Touchbistro may not build an API because it believes it can monopolize the entire ecosystem – or at least it must pitch this to their investors. The countless examples from the likes of Aloha, Micros, Lavu and now Lightspeed are thrown aside to make the investor’s numbers work; logic be damned.

However, Touchbistro has shared that their average merchant already does closer to $800K in annual revenues – nearly 3x as much as your average Clover merchant. Touchbistro has also permitted some integrations – like the one with 7shifts – that are connecting over some API.

So what’s really going on?

Touchbistro has an API, it’s just more quiet about it than most POS companies.

“We have an API, but we don’t publicly promote as much as some of the other POS companies,” says Alex Barrotti, TouchBistro’s founder and CEO. “The reason for our reticence has to do with mapping our fields: we don’t want a competitor making it easier to onboard TouchBistro merchants.”

For clarity, a number of POS companies have “transposers” – pieces of software that map the database and configuration files of a POS and transpose those fields to seamlessly onboard with their POS software. Since moving POS and migrating all that data can be a barrier to switching systems, these transposers have greatly helped POS companies in he past. TouchBistro doesn’t want to fall victim to these tactics.

“We’re open with our API if you approach us to talk about it. For existing customers, please let them know that it’s up to the third party software provider to get an API key from us for integration. We haven’t made a habit of giving customers access to the API because they can already export all their data from TouchBistro… so a customer that asks for an API is suspicious.”

TouchBistro evaluates all third party API requests closely. Commercial terms must be established and even then API keys are intensely monitored. “If an approved provider is doing something fishy we kill the key until we can get to the bottom of it,” jokes Alex.

Alex shared that TouchBistro already has around 6 months of integrations ahead of them, so the queue is quite long. For those third parties looking to establish an integration relationship with TouchBistro, John Florinis is the right contact.

You can reach him by emailing: integratedpartners@touchbistro.com.