Magestore POS has long been a prominent name among 10,000+ retailers of different sizes and types because of its robust functionality, extensive partnerships, dedicated support, and nonstop improvements.

The strength of Magestore POS lies in its ability to create and process orders in less than 1 minute, thus facilitating fast checkout. Additionally, Magestore POS can work with many POS terminals supporting Web Application technology to accept and process different payment methods. The POS allows your customers to make payments using cash, debit cards, credit cards, split payment, layaway, buy now pay later, reward points, store credits, gift cards, and more.

Magestore POS also supplies self-checkout service and a customer-facing display mode for quick checkout. Square payment integration becomes easier as the POS can work seamlessly with 3rd-party services to provide buyers with a top-notch shopping experience.

Besides features for handling payments, Magestore POS has powerful tools to help you manage inventory across channels and locations, sync different types of data like customers, orders, and products in real time, and support omnichannel fulfillment options and omnichannel loyalty programs. All of these functions contribute to making your business operations run effectively at optimized costs.

To get an overview of what Magestore POS has, take a look at its key features below.

Key features

• Accept a wide range of payment methods like cash, debit cards, credit cards, reward points, store credits, gift cards, split payment, layaway, buy now pay later, etc.
• Create orders in seconds to facilitate fast checkout
• Provide customer-facing display mode and self-checkout services
• Monitor employee working time and performance
• Support omnichannel fulfillment options like store pick-up
• Assist loyalty programs like reward points, store credits, and gift cards
• Support cross-channel and cross-location inventory management
• Sync customers, orders, and products across channels
• Generate diverse types of detailed reports in real time for business insights
• A web-based app that can work on any device and in offline mode
• Support refunds, returns, exchanges
• Work with different types of POS hardware
• Easy to scale and customize to your changing needs
• Integrate with 3rd-party services providers, including payments like Square, ERP (NetSuite, SAP), marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Etsy), shipment (ShipStation, FedEx), marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Etsy), accounting (Xero, QuickBooks)

Having numerous payment methods in a POS system produces many significant advantages. With many payment options available, buyers can choose the method that they find most secure, convenient, and affordable, encouraging them to proceed with their purchases. This not only helps you provide greater convenience and flexibility for your customers but also avoids losing sales, thus increasing your revenues.

Most buyers tend to make a purchase where they can pay the way they want. By giving customers many payment choices, sellers can satisfy them, and win their trust and preferences, thereby boosting their repeat purchases. These considerable benefits make it worthwhile for you to consider offering multiple payment methods to stay competitive in any given industry.

Using Square payment with Magestore POS facilitates many types of payments, including the ones listed below.

• Credit cards
• Cash
• Partial payments
• Split payments
• Contactless payments
• Store credits
• Layaway
• Online payments
• Buy now, pay later

Many consumers tend to give up their purchases due to the long checkout process and the unavailability of their preferred payment methods. As a result, it’s vital to have a POS system that supports a variety of payment options and integrates smoothly with a reliable payment processor like Square. With these two systems in place, you can accept and handle payments quickly, easily, and securely in diverse ways, thus offering your customers an uninterrupted checkout experience.

Besides the above benefits, integrating Square payment with Magestore POS also helps you reduce costs and improve operational efficiency considerably.

Regarding costs, Magestore POS and Square payment integration help you save a bundle as the POS doesn’t charge any transaction fees. Besides the upfront costs, merchants who use Magestore POS and Square to process payments have to pay Square’s transaction fees only. This is highly economical in the long run, especially for businesses with steadily increasing numbers of sales or having expansion plans in the future.

As one of Square’s partners, Magestore POS can work seamlessly with Square to provide customers with a fast, safe, and secure checkout experience. In addition to accelerating order processing, the smooth Square payment integration also enables you to effectively use the POS system to run and manage your business.

Whether you’re selling online or in-store, customers are always at the heart of your business. Consequently, providing them with a convenient, easy, and fast shopping experience is one of the key factors in sales increase. At the checkout stage, offering your customers the convenience and flexibility they expect is undoubtedly beneficial.

Integrating Square payment with Magestore POS is a useful way to speed up order processing. The integration enables you to accept payments fast, easily, and securely using numerous methods while saving you a considerable amount of fees. It’s time to improve the checkout process and reap the fruit now!

There are many extensions in the Magento marketplace to help retailers control their supply chain operations. However, executing inventory or fulfillment operations in the Magento backend can be quite complicated and takes a lot of time.

With Magestore’s new retail management solution, Magento merchants can manage their stores from a separate progressive web app that syncs data to Magento in real time.

Our solution is built on Magento, so there’s no need to hire another team to manage a separate system, saving you maintenance costs.

Once you’ve set up your roles and staff, your team only needs a URL to access the PWA. You can set up your own store management system from existing desktop and tablet devices.

Instead of logging into one Magento backend, now each store has the power and flexibility to manage operations on its own. Our easy-to-use and fast PWA will surely speed up processes and help your team focus on business instead of IT.

To ensure inventory is accurate at all times, our retail management software enables your staff to track all products and inventory movement. With bin locations, you’ll always know where exactly your products are in your warehouse. You can count and adjust inventory, as well as send and receive inventory between stores.

Know exactly when to order products from suppliers and with whom to work. Calculate reorder quantity based on your sales history. Create purchase orders based on supply needs forecast and cut down on paperwork.

Magestore’s solution is customizable, so you’ll always be able to add more features to build a comprehensive system that fits your business.

Unlike other retail management systems in the market, there’s no limit on how many users or devices you can add.

At Magestore, all new features and solutions came from the business needs of actual retailers; and optimizing store operations has always been a concern for many Magento merchants we work with.

Overview 3 Magestore core products>>

Once we spotted the problem, the Magestore team started interviewing companies with more than 10 stores on how they maintained their daily operations. Talking with our customers validated the demand for an efficient and stable system that is separated from the Magento backend, while maintaining one centralized database.

Given the success and stability of our Magento POS, we decided to keep using progressive web app technology for our new solution. This gives our customers the flexibility to set up their system on a variety of devices, and reduces the wait time that usually comes with building and maintaining a native app. This way our customers get the most out of their retail software in the shortest time.

To design a solution that addresses the business and IT challenges of Magento merchants, we first created mockups and basic prototypes to review with our customers. We made sure that our core concept and prototypes were well received by our clients—not just the business owners but also their teams.

Magestore follows the Agile mindset and values speed, flexibility, and frequent feedback. We work with our customers to prioritize the features based on business value, and present to them what we worked on every week. With this method, the Magestore team can continuously evaluate requirements, progress, and results, so we can respond to change quickly and build a product that meets market demands.

To ensure our customers can use our new product right away, we designed our solution based on the valuable retail and IT knowledge of key projects. After implementing the solution for early adopters, we set up a team of retail and Magento experts to standardize the architecture and workflows, while keeping room open for unique niches. This way, we can deliver adaptable solutions based on each company’s scale and complexity.

We hope that with our new product, Magento merchants can optimize their retail operations without the need for a full-blown ERP system, or slowing down their Magento backend. Learn more about our solution and how to reduce manual work today!

In 2015, Google first introduced PWA technology. Since then, it has attracted much interest and become a dominant topic among developers. PWA or Progressive Web App is well known for its relatively simple development, fast, smooth, reliable user interface, and efficient user engagement.

Our story starts with our motivation to continuously enhance to bring a better POS system to all Magento retailers. We understand that fast and stable performance is critical to daily retail operations. Moreover, a good POS system should have a friendly interface, accurate and live data sync, and high data security.

In August 2018, with more than 4,300 business rules, we finally completed the first version (beta program) of PWA POS ready for Magento 2. Fast, reliable, and easy-to-use are the most suitable words to describe Magestore PWA POS. Since then, we’d embarked on a journey to improve our product and make sure that our beta users were happy with our POS.

In September that year, we launched our PWA Magento 2 POS to replace the old web POS in our omnichannel packages for Magento 2.

Synchronize data in real time

We understand that POS is a gateway to most of your daily operations and data is critical to your business. Thus we prioritize the real-time sync feature and bring it into our POS. You’ll enjoy the accurate and consistent data across your system as this POS can:

• Update sales orders to Magento backend immediately;
• Ensure the same customer information on your Magento POS and an online store;
• Guarantee product attributes, prices, and stock information is identical between POS and website.

Sell on any device with no app or software installation

The latest version of our POS for Magento 2 is the best of both worlds—browser and app. Once you’ve installed the POS on your Magento site, all you need is an URL and a web browser. There’s no need to install software from the app store, our new POS can work on a desktop, laptop, or any tablet as long as it has a web browser. You can even add a shortcut to your desktop/home screen, making it easier to access and sell.

Save time with fast and stable checkout

Our new POS will deliver the lightning checkout speed you and your customers have been waiting for. With the scope of 100,000 SKUs and 100,000 customers, the latest Magento 2 POS can:

• Look up customers in under one second;
• Scan product barcode in under one second;
• Complete transaction in under ten seconds;
• Process up to 12,000 orders per hour (equivalent to 200 active POS systems).

In addition, you can create multiple orders at the same time or hold orders for later checkout.

Delight and impress your customers

The POS lets you operate flexible order fulfillment to serve better your customers and save business costs:

• Buy in store, home delivery;
• Click and collect;
• Dropshipping.

Mix payment methods to complete order

Your customers want to pay in different ways, and our POS is designed to help you with just that. With our POS you can:

• Process offline payment such as cash and credit card;
• Accept online payment gateways such as Paypal (credit card and email), Authorize.net, Stripe;
• Allow customers to pay with store credits or via contactless payment.

In case your customers want to combine different methods to pay for one order, a split payment is also available. You can use multiple online AND offline methods to complete the order. In addition, your customers can pay in different installments with the partial payment. With our latest update, you can process future installments with both online and offline methods.

Sell without the internet

Similar to previous versions of our POS, you can use offline mode and complete orders without the internet. Our system automatically saves all data of new orders and gets old data from your IndexedDB browser. Once the connection is restored, orders will be automatically synced into your Magento backend.

With our latest update, now you can even refresh your browser and still checkout. In addition, you can export orders created in offline mode into a pdf file for backup.

Refund

Our POS makes refunds easy for both you and your customers. You can easily look up order history, refund the whole order or in part, process payment for your customer and return the items to stock.

Generate live reports

It’s high time to say goodbye to guessing or wrong business decisions. You will get a clear picture of your current business performance any time with the granular inventory reports and key sales metrics. The point of sale helps you:

• Control daily performance of each store from revenue, profit, and margin with X and Z-report in your POS;
• Keep track of inventory movement and performance;
• Track employee success to better recognize and reward their work.

Checkout

• Visualize product lists with thumbnail images;
• Search products by barcode, SKU, name, or description;
• Scan barcode to add the product to cart, using tablet camera;
• Support simple, configurable, bundle, grouped, and virtual products;
• Create custom sale items (such as for new arrivals) in two clicks;
• Re-order;
• Warning icon and message to avoid adding out-of-stock products.

Promotions

• Support Magento shopping cart rule;
• Support Magento catalog rule;
• Support catalog tier price;
• Apply coupon code that is created in Magento shopping cart rules;
• Apply custom discount per item or shopping cart.

Peripheral devices

Our POS can integrate with various hardware to build a complete retail system. You can see the list below:

• Barcode reader;
• Cash drawer;
• Card swiper;
• Receipt printer;
• Label printer.

Customer

• Use the default customer info for guest checkout;
• Search customers by name, email, or phone;
• Choose existing or add new customer when creating an order;
• Edit customer info right on POS screen;
• Let customers subscribe to newsletters.

Performance tracking

You’ll know how your POS system is going with this new feature. Guess how? For every action which takes more than 2 seconds, our POS will notify you in the POS Performance session. With that you can:

• Define the low-performing POS machine in your system;
• Find what actions need the most time to proceed;
• View performance summary of a single POS and the whole system.

We hope that our latest update to PWA technology will help you checkout and manage better. Drop us a line if you have any questions. And now it’s time to view this latest PWA Magento 2 POS in practice.

Trulieve is one of the largest cannabis retailers in the world, based in the U.S., which is operating in 11 states and plans to expand nationally. The company manufactures their own products, including therapeutic and herbal medicine products, natural herbal cosmetics, and products for animals.

Trulieve had 62 stores. Each store had up to 10 registers and an additional 2–4 tablets for the delivery team.

Trulieve looked for a system that could sync inventory online and offline. They wanted to migrate their current system into Magento and own the source code. Therefore, they needed a customizable and Magento-compatible solution.

As a big retailer, Trulieve paid much attention to the following things when they came to Magestore:

• The confidentiality of customer information
• A point of sale that can scale and be customized to their business requirements
• A POS that can handle a number of large orders, from 60,000–70,000/day without any interruptions
• Simultaneously migrate from the old ERP system to SAP along with setting up the POS system at the stores

Trulieve would use Magento as a platform for eCommerce websites, SAP as their ERP system, and Magestore POS system at their physical stores. Magestore POS would connect directly with Magento and sync data from Magento to the ERP system.

At the beginning of the project in August 2020, Trulieve didn’t set an exact date to launch the solution. After nearly 2 months of working together, Trulieve requested more features to fit their business and set the launch date around mid-November.

However, November is the peak sales season of many retailers and Magestore was also working with other clients to launch their system. But in the end, Magestore and Trulieve made it happen.

Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential

The stakeholders in this project included 3 parties from Trulieve—their internal IT department, an ERP system provider, an external deployment team—and 2 Magestore teams—Delivery and Product.

During project kickoff, Magestore received the following requests from Trulieve:

• Dual screen: A large screen display for customers to view products and increase their experience
• Customer management: Manage prescription information and purchase history of customers
• Reward point and Redemption: Apply reward points to customers
• Call center: Receive customer requests via phone and coordinate orders
• Batch assignment: Manage and update the status of shipments by batches

The requests were updated regularly, even daily while the project timeline was too urgent. Moreover, Trulieve had some problems with their ERP deployment at that time, some related requests could be changed or on hold (as the Magestore POS system would sync data to the ERP).

After many changes, we held a meeting between all parties to finalize the minimum viable product (MVP) version and lock the go-live features.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

When working with multiple partners, the biggest challenge was to reach a mutual understanding of the following factors:

• Request
• Solution
• Communication method, communication channel, meeting time
• Method of transferring source code
• Code review
• Development flow

Initially, Magestore’s Delivery team received the project in August 2020. At that time, the team didn’t have the resources for the project and the project’s deadline wasn’t set.

In September, the team reached max capacity with many active projects. We decided to bring in more resources to help Trulieve by cooperating with more partners. 

In October, Trulieve shared their go-live plan on November 11th and added new, complex requests. 

When the Delivery team designed the solution for Trulieve’s requests, we estimated that it would take at least 2 months to complete.

With the go-live date quickly approaching, Magestore teams and partners proposed a few measures to ensure the right pace:

• Over-time working
• Daily internal acceptance (for all relevant teams to review and agree on the given solutions)
• Daily meeting with customers

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software

As Trulieve would implement the POS solution in all their 62 stores, they cared much about the simplicity of devices and the seamless integration between hardware and software. Therefore, they had selected two simple payment providers. And to make all hardware devices and software work well together, Magestore used a semi-integrated model.

When integrating devices, the team also faced some below challenges:

• Limited documentation of payment methods
• The payment parties didn’t share the test cases at the beginning of the project
• No available devices to test
• One payment solution deployment of Trulieve was still in progress. 
• No data preparation before go-live (data mapping)

How did Magestore overcome the difficulties?

• We built test cases based on our experiences and all available documents we had which covered essential scenarios to make sure the integration could work. Then when the payment parties sent us their test cases, we completed testing after 1 day.
• We decided to integrate two payment providers but would go live one first and put the other in pending.

All parties had close and usual meetings to update the project progress and timeline. And we turned these challenges into valuable lessons in the end.

Working software is the primary measure of progress

Since Trulieve would mainly use the POS for their daily retail operations, they were greatly concerned about whether the current infrastructure could cope with thousands of transactions daily. What would Trulieve do if their infrastructure failed to handle a large order volume?

This was such a critical and challenging question. After evaluating the situation, Magestore created a temporary cross-functional team to solve the problem of load capacity. This new team included 1 System Admin, 1 Product Specialist, 1 Project Manager, and 1 Developer.

The team’s next steps were:

• Get Trulieve’s specific technical requirements
• Brainstorm together to find a solution
• Define a plan
• Implement the plan
• Review and report to Trulieve

In the first step, the team recorded the system’s workload after go-live. When going live, Trulieve would run 1,980 POS at the same time in 62 stores. Their system had about 600 products. 

Because Trulieve used the infrastructure service of a trusted provider, the team decided to only focus on testing the POS performance and see how much it could handle.

Next, the team made a plan to test performance. Replicating the customer’s environment was the most important step to ensure the accuracy of the performance test. After that, the team created mock data on the POS, found API testing tools, and designed test scenarios. Then they ran the tests and created reports and suggestions for Trulieve.

You can see the test results here.

When miscommunication caused a failure

Trulieve failed when they went live for the first time—on November 11th, 2020. The Trulieve team had to review the git flow and deployment flows.

The initial plan was that Magestore would work on the Magestore Develop branch, then merge into the Staging branch.

First, the Magestore team built and tested the solution on the Feature branch to make sure everything was fine, then we merged it into the Magestore Develop branch. After that Trulieve would combine the solution from the Magestore Development brand to the Staging branch.

However, Trulieve split the Feature branch and merged it into the Staging branch.

You can see that there were two different Feature branches here. One was on the Magestore Develop branch and the other was on the Staging branch where Magestore couldn’t have the permission to work. This led to a huge problem.

Magestore still worked on the Feature branch and merged the results to the Develop branch. Some partners modified something on the Staging branch which included another Feature branch split previously. When Trulieve merged the results from the Magestore Develop branch to the Staging, some features which were deleted before now reappeared. That brought about bugs and cost us more time.

In the end, all the parties had to agree on the deployment flow.

The Magestore Develop branch was only for the Magestore team to test. After testing was complete, Trulieve would merge the Feature branch into Staging. And deploying became smoother, significantly reducing the development time.

Trulieve successfully launched their POS solution on November 22nd, 2020. It was a huge milestone for all participants.

The system ran smoothly and met their daily requirements. Now Trulieve can:

• Save hours on synchronizing data between the POS system, Magento, and ERP
• Manage inventory across channels easily 
• Process payment quickly

The Warranty Service of POS Commerce will last for one year since the first sales order is confirmed. During your active warranty period, you will have access to the latest product version. After your warranty period has expired, please renew your warranty to get the newest version.

For example, your warranty period is from 1st December 2021 to 1st December 2022, and throughout this time, the latest POS Commerce version is v4.18.0, then you can download it from our package downloading page easily.

What does the new Warranty Policy contain?

Magestore guarantees all below products and services when this Warranty Service is active:

• The latest version of POS Commerce
• Professional Support level:
  • Business working hours: 09:00 – 17:00 (GMT+7), on Vietnamese working days. (Vietnamese holidays excluded)
  • First-time response: Maximum of 24 hours during business working hours
  • Support channel: Instant message on Slack
  • One dedicated support agent will keep track of customer support information
  • One dedicated project manager will plan and report the progress weekly
• You can access and keep the below assets:
  • GitLab: To store source code
  • Jira service desk: To submit and store service request history
  • Slack channel: To instantly communicate with the Magestore Support team
  • Package downloading page: To download the latest version of POS Commerce

The changes will take effect from December 2021. We recommend that you check when your warranty will expire, then soon have appropriate actions. This ensures you can experience our best services and timely support.

Should you have any questions regarding the Warranty Policy changes, please contact your project manager or account manager for help.

Support small retail businesses during the pandemic

This year has been another challenging year for all businesses, especially for small retailers. Under the negative impact of dangerous coronavirus variants and long lockdowns, many of them are financially fragile. That makes us – people at Magestore – want to do our small job to support the community.

We officially released a “lite” and free version of our powerful POS solution called Open Source POS. If our premium product Commerce POS is a feature-rich solution dedicated to medium and large businesses with more complicated retail operations, then this simple POS version is light and has essential ordering capabilities that allow a new small business to run a store from scratch.

Small retailers can enjoy a small-scale omnichannel experience such as showing customer data, products, orders,… consistently across online and offline channels. The system simply includes:

• Magento Open Source (as an online eCommerce website) (Available for Magento version 2.4.x or above)
• Magestore Magento-native Open Source POS (as a point of sale system at physical stores)

With zero spending on one of the most important aspects of a retail business – a retail POS and eCommerce system – our Magestore Open Source POS can help you save a lot of money, time, and effort in building game-changing retail software.

If your business is using notebooks or Google Sheet files to write down orders, this POS system can be a perfect tool, to begin with.

Read also: 51 Best Open Source Software for Small Businesses in 2022

Offer a new “trial” experience for medium and large businesses

Making a big decision like buying a long-lasting POS solution for your enterprise can be a daunting task. Hand-on experience is a perfect way to use the product to test its performance, interface, and data accuracy.

Simple features are enough for a test drive, along with a personalized demo showcase from a consultant. If you’re interested in our advanced POS solution with more powerful features but not sure it’s fit your business or not, feel free to install and use the Open Source POS first. After that, if you need any upgrade, your can talk to our consultants to know more about Magestore Premium Commerce POS.

Here are some popular types of businesses using our open source POS product right now:

• One store, one website
• Simple business management model
• Solo entrepreneurs
• Local businesses
• Small scale businesses

Because of its simple structure, it’s only suitable for small businesses. You can compare the features of Open Source POS vs. Commerce POS from Magestore to see the differences.

1. Where to download

• Our official landing page for Open Source POS
• Official Magento Marketplace (Product certified by Adobe and Magento)
• Square Marketplace (Coming soon)
• Product Hunt product post

2. Online guide

You can access our public User Guide and Technical Documentation to get the instructions on how to install and use the product.

3. Support Center

If you can’t find the answers to your questions, submit a ticket on our Customer Support Portal or send us an email via pos-open-source@magestore-service.atlassian.net to get responses from our Support Reps.

We’d love to support and hear feedback from you.

Please note that:

• Delay response: Maximum 48 hours (in the Vietnam working time)
• Update support status regularly per week (in the Vietnam working time)

4. Request Magestore’s services

No one understands the product by the person who creates it. If you need any service such as POS installation or POS customization to fit your business needs, please contact us to get support.

Magestore will cease releasing new features, updates, and maintenance for the Professional plan based on the EOL timeline below.

Definitions:

(1) End of feature development date: The date that Magestore will stop developing and releasing new features for the package.

(2) End of product patch date: The last date that we release the Magento version upgrade, bug fixes, and testing for the above products.

(3) End of maintenance date: The last date to receive maintenance services including bug fixes, Magento version upgrade, host transition, extension upgrade or installation, customization, and user guidance from Magestore.

We recommend that you plan to respond to the changes before the end of the patch date (April 1, 2022) and the maintenance date (January 1, 2024). This ensures you always have the best working system and can enjoy timely support.

Please contact your project manager or account manager to help with your plans or if you have any questions regarding the change.