Earlier this year we released our Vend POS integration. For those of you that may not have heard of Vend, they offer a brilliant Point of Sale solution. They have 10,000+ stores worldwide using their solutions at the time of writing this article, and are growing fast.

Our first release of Vend POS Integration was ok. It synced stock and sales between Vend and shopping cart solutions including Magento, WooCommerce and other popular cart solutions.

We quickly started signing up customers. And in the process, started getting suggestions and feedback on how we could improve our solution.

So at the start of this month we released an update that included some cool new features including:

• The ability for users to select the Vend Outlet that they wanted to source inventory from to sync to their online store. This also included an ‘All Outlets’ option that took the sum of a product across all outlets – very useful for Vend users with multiple locations.
• Use of a Vend price book to set online pricing independent of your in-store pricing.
• Register Selection to record online sales against.
• Selection of User to record online sales against.
• Selection of Payment type to record online sales against.

The last few options are helpful for recording online sales independent of your ‘in-store’ sales.

These changes were welcomed by our existing and new users, but you asked for me. So our development team is now working on the following enhancements to make our Vend POS linksync solution even more flexible and powerful.

Features we’re planning to release in our next release include:

• Move all Vend settings and options to the online store admin interface – right now you have to log into the linksync dashboard to make changes.
• Importing of images from Vend to your online store (the most popular request).
• Use product tags from Vend to map product to categories in your online store.
• Use product tags to select which products to make available in your online store.
• Automatically create products and their variants in your online store (right now it’s a manual process to create the product and variants).
• Map payment types in your online store to Vend payment types. Eg. PayPal payments map to PayPal in Vend, and Credit Card payments map to Credit Cards….
• Have the option to export sales to Vend, or just update Vend inventory levels when sales are made in your online store.
• Make product changes in your online stores, such as pricing, descriptions and available quantity, and have those changes synced to Vend.
• Bulk export all products from your online store to Vend. This has been a popular request too, for new users to Vend with established online stores.

Once these changes are introduced, our Vend offering should pretty much cover most user requirements and business cases, but we’ll still be looking to our expanding customer base for more suggestions and feedback so that we can keep improving our integrations.

Progress Update

The update to our Vend POS integration is taking longer than expected, as we chose to re-write our existing API to enable us to be more flexible with introducing new features, now and into the future. At this stage Vend / WooCommerce integration available, and we aim to have the the Vend / Magento and Vend / PrestaShop solutions available early 2015.