Brick & Mortar Store w/ Zen Cart integration? POS?

[rtw819]

Hello,

I have done a fair amount of searching through the articles and support forums for this issue, and have not found much information. Perhaps you can help.

We are in need of finding an easy way to provide a Brick & Mortar Store Point of Sales interface for Zen Cart. We love our online Zen Cart and want to continue to use it for inventory control and order processing and we will still be selling primarily online. However, now we're growing into a physical store and want to find some easy way of checking people out? (Keeping track of inventory, etc. as best we can.)

Our business is a cash based business, the business has no debt and no credit available. Since we're using a free cart (Thank You Zen!), we obviously don't have a ton of money for expensive POS equipment or software... We simply ran out of room in the house for the inventory, didn't want to close the business, hence the brick and mortar and now rent and store hours!

Any suggestions on a brick and mortar Zen integration?

Thank you for your time and consideration in advance!

[afo]

Why don't you consider the Add Customers from Admin mod? You can add customer and order info into your ZC.

Good luck with the new phase of your business!

[rtw819]

Hi Afo,

Thanks for that suggestion! And Thanks for the good wishes! That modules is a great way to add a new customer really quickly. I like it.

For posterity's sake, and for anyone else looking to do the same, I ran across a few other POS type alternatives:

- We're also looking at OllaCart (http://ollacart-pos.com/) as possible add-on for a POS. It's not free, but does look like a fairly viable solution. Thanks to this thread: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=337890

- These folks have a Zen POS solution, but I haven't gotten a return email from them yet: http://www.florentinedesign.com/oscommerce-pos.htm

- A free option is PHP Point of Sale on SourceForge (http://www.phppointofsale.com/), but it looks like a lot work up front. It's missing a lot of out-of-the-box functionality we need, but hey, it's free.

Hope this information helps someone else out someday.

All the best, and thanks for all that you do!

[vickilapp]

Hi,
I've been looking into the same thing.

I've downloaded the free trial for T-Hub, which I found on the Intuit website:
http://marketplace.intuit.com/AppID-2771-Overview.aspx.

I haven't gotten it to work yet... The description sounds promising, though. I have a busy retail shop, and use Quickbooks POS Pro 7.0. Would love to find a solution that brings together the inventory management function between ZenCart & POS.



Vicki Lapp
www.beadinspirations.com

[tuor]

As I have mentioned in a another thread, I got some POS Services for Zen Cart working, including a simple demo for making orders. I currently have it in use for a shop.

Anybody is welcome to grab the code and adapt it to their needs

[misty]

As I have mentioned in a another thread, I got some POS Services for Zen Cart working, including a simple demo for making orders. I currently have it in use for a shop.
Anybody is welcome to grab the code and adapt it to their needs

Thanks for sharing....is this mod suitable for latest version of
zencart i.e. 1.3.8.a?

[tuor]

Yes, I have been testing with 1.3.7 and 1.3.8a

[tuor]

I recently wrote an article on this topic, opinions and comments are welcome!
nicolasschudel.name/bridging-the-gap/

[cfisupply]

Hi All,

I don't know if anyone is (still) interested at all, but I have been working on a Point of Sale/pos add-on. I still need to do some cleaning and other feature coding, but I thought I'd get a preview out there.

So far the POS I'm working on is quite basic, though I think it will suit my (and most peoples) needs.

You can see a demo of my pos option at http://posdemo.cfisupply.com/

Currently I use a barcode scanner to scan the upc of an item, like most stores use. I added products_sku and products_upc fields to the products table, I believe this was part of an add-on but I can't find it right now.

More information about the pos can be found on the demo site.

I have built this to work on Internet Explorer. I am working on getting it compatible with FireFox and others.

Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

-tuor I tried your services and couldn't seem to get them to work correctly, so I gave up and decided to try to make my own.

[TRuble0003]

The company I am working for switched to zen cart in late 2007. I was the only programmer there, so I cooked up a quick POS system that I have built into a pretty solid program since then. However, our company is currently in the middle of a transition also where we will be manufacturers, and also have a store-front and remain selling online also. So - I am an amateur with programming for barcode scanners and whatnot - however I am currently building a complete "Zen Cart: Desktop Manager" Software using VB.net that will become our own custom CRM, POS, and warehouse solution. I am thinking of making my custom software a little more dynamic so as to allow people to build their own 'cloud' type data structure along with drag-drop form functions using just VB.net. I am thinking that if I do all of this, I would still offer - unlimited licenses for 1 flat low fee, just enough to compensate myself for the work. This would also include any future upgrades all included in the flat rate one-time charge.
If any of you have any recommendations on things that you'd like to see added into this type of software, or and suggestions on anything at all, please let me know. I wanna make sure that there is a solution that is well-rounded for all users of zen cart.