How to Use WordPress as a Point of Sale System

Let’s try to break down point-of-sale systems in an effort to show you how easy and advantageous it is to use WordPress to manage your store.

Point of Sale: Tools for Consumer Benefit

Point-of-sale is a big deal, to say the least, these days. It really always has been but now that we are taking money more electronically, therefore the capacity for systems has overall expanded. Point-of-sale is a bit more complicated for the vendor, so that it  can be more intuitive for the user.

There are many proprietary point-of-sale systems that promise everything under the sun. Or, developers who would like to create you a five-figure custom point-of-sale system and written in exotic things like Python or Javascript subsets completely written from scratch for your company – but this is extraneous and expensive in many, rather most circumstances. There exists a point of sale system that’s completely free, and hooks into the most customizable website management system in the world, WooCommerce for WordPress.

Point-of-sale relies on the ability to log sales and take payments, the rest is kind of extra. Think of a cash register of the old school – people just had a cash register and a ledger. Now, we use the website as the ledger and connected to the “cash register” through scripting. This can be done through pretty much any web scripting language, as long as the payment processor that you using has an API to develop with it or you are willing to create one yourself, which could be very profitable if you could then sell it to the payment processor.

Maximize that benefit the easiest way.

So to demystify point of sales online, with a basic store and WordPress and Woocommerce. Let’s think about it like this. You have a computer with a website on it, the website has your inventory inside of it fully, including stock. As a customer comes in to buy things, you can mark it on the screen and then mark their order as fulfilled as they have just paid you in cash. Now we can use the same system to accept payments online with the exact same website. The only difference is that we know that the fulfillment of the order happens through validation between your secure website in the payment processor, telling you when you have actually been paid. Once you have been paid, you can then see that you have been paid, and then mark the order to be shipped out, or set a date for delivery, or set a date for pick up. Not to mention, there are many extended tools that will help you automate this process even further.

WooCommerce for POS

WooCommerce also has plugins for every sort of novelty, sales, gift cards, reward points systems. Every payment gateway can usually be extended into WooCommerce, or worked in through API. It’s really the answer if you need a simple to use point of sale system on top of a functional website and or blog.