One of the most frustrating parts of building solutions in brick and mortar is the integration to legacy systems that slow down value creation. That’s often because the data needed to produce said value resides on the POS.
POS companies have historically been disaster softwares, built more by hobbyists than professional engineers, and even those in the latter camp were not the kind that would be considered for employment at today’s technology leaders. There’s redundant code, poorly documented code, corrupted code, and it’s only getting worse.
The first generation of legacy POS companies would (mostly) do everything possible to avoid integrating with third party providers. This is somewhat understandable, as the third party solutions would require an inordinate amount of time to get up and running… ironically because the POS company’s code was total crap. Or, in the case of Micros and NCR, they eschewed third parties because they wanted to build everything (extremely poorly) themselves. And a quick shout out to Dinerware POS, a company that actually had great documentation and embraced third party integrations. RIP since the Global Payments acquisition, naturally.
Now, many of the legacy POS companies have gotten even worse, and this may be intentional. Prior to the Heartland, Global, and Shift4 rollups, there was at least a corporate office at the legacy POS companies that would ignore your call. Today you can’t even call anyone to get information about how to integrate to the legacy systems that have been subsumed. Instead, it’s full-steam ahead on newco cloud POS.
So if you do want to integrate to a legacy POS, at least one of the many that’s been acquired, you’re going through a dealer. The dealer understandably lacks the intimate technical knowledge of the system, and often they’re given quotas to sell new, cloud POS systems, not the legacy systems that have stopped being supported, regardless of what corporate heads say publicly. In other words, it’s going to take some time.
Because of these factors, the cost to integrate to a legacy systems has risen dramatically. The biggest gap is no longer measured in pure technical hours, but in the lapse of communication: what does this field do? This field? What about that field? You might ask a question but not get an answer anyone is sure about for weeks.
It’s legacy POS at its finest.
We’ve created a table that estimates total time and engineering hours for integrations. We’ve also separated read only from writing, the latter of which is much more difficult. We’ve assumed a $100/hour time cost to put a dollar amount on things.
This gets pretty daunting when you acknowledge that there exists a very, very long tail of legacy POS systems. And this time doesn’t even include the weeks it would take to both find a reseller of the correct POS system and build the relationship to get them comfortable with sharing the requisite integration information. If you add that in, the timelines could double, and you could also easily double the management hours.
Suffice it to say, coming in without relationships, we think third parties need to budget an integration price of $25,000 per POS system for read-only use cases, and $50,000 for writing. It also means that it will take at least 3 months from the start of the process to successful integration and product deployment.
Legacy POS integration has become defacto tribal knowledge: there’s nobody working on the code, any documentation that did exist has been lost in the shuffle of acquisitions, and nobody cares to put anymore time into fixing old systems.
This is not exactly what you want to be hearing if you’re a merchant on an old POS system, but you’re not going to read this anyhow because by and large, you don’t self-educate. (Side note: as a bit our own heuristic we find that merchants on cloud systems are more receptive to innovation and are more likely to use third party solutions.) Is it any wonder that as COVID spread, and third party integrations became paramount for survival, that merchants still flocked to cloud POS systems in record numbers?
Hopefully this paints a new reality. The only way merchants will be able to access new value will be to upgrade their POS systems to more modern versions. Or you can cling on to that brick POS while your revenue gets replaced by that ghost kitchen down the street.
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