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Prestashop for POS (offline) and online sales


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My name is Billy and and working on a project for a non profit org to open an ECO Store (physical bricks and mortar environmental store) and integrate the inventory of the physical store with the online store (prestashop - my favorite :-) I tried all types of online shopping carts and the last one was Magento and found it too complicated in the back end managing products and didn't go far to see if there was any integration with using for an offline store somehow.

It was a BIG relief to finally discover Prestashop and see how easy it is to manage the inventory in the back end and manage the whole online shopping experience from the shop owners perspective as well as the interface for the end user.

So along with this into to who I am, I am also inquiring......I hope it is OK to do it here or if not, is there a section to post this question, please let me know....

Is there anyone who knows if there is a module or a way to have Prestashop used as the POS for a physical store also? I have seen one solution called Effortlesse http://www.effortlesse.com/ which is a online POS system but do not like their shopping cart at all as it is so very basic http://pos.effortlesse.com/. Prestashop could lead the field in this new integration as there does not seem to be many solutions available at the moment from what I can see.

Example: A customer wants to buy a product in the physical store, the cashier scans the product with the barcode scanner, the product information (from prestashop database) is displayed on the screen, they swipe the customer's credit card and the order is processed, the customer receives their product receipt via the thermal printer and walk out of the store. Meanwhile, the prestashop database records the sale, product is subtracted from inventory and the order recorded in prestashop for accounting purposes.

Does anyone know of some solution to use Prestashop for an offline store too and integrate a credit card swiper, barcode scanner, thermal printer and use ONE database (prestashop) for inventory?

Thanks for the development of such an easy to use eCommerce software package. I'm totally impressed with what it can do already!!!!

Billy

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Thankyou!!!!

This would be a fantastic feature and one that would have Prestashop be THE software of choice for stores needing to utilize the ONE database and ONE accounting system for their offline AND online stores..........and then to top that off, to have an easy integration with Quick Books...... :-) mmmmmmmmm would be totally awesome !!!

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  • 4 months later...
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  • 2 weeks later...

The problem is in order for ths to work, you need a seperate application running on your desktop that takes physical orders, then sends those orders to prestashop.

Prestashop by itself can't do this. There are already POS systems out there, so perhaps someone just needs to write a prestashop extension for one of these systems.

It would of course be much better if Prestashop created it's very own app! This all takes time and patience!

Actually, i think the best bet would be for prestashop to create an API system so people can develop addons for any system they choose.

The app would need to connect to your website, and send the appropriate data. Prestashop would simply need an API to handle the data.

An API as well as a prestashop app would be awesome!! :D

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I was just thinking about it a little bit. One easy way to do it would be to create a prestashop account (e.g. username: myPOS, pass: *******) and the POS application would send a request to log in with this username through the front end of your website with POST method, then simply send out the GET method URLs to purchase the item.

Or (i haven't checked if it's possible) have it log into the backend, and add the transactions using GET method. Perhaps use GET method to manually reduce the product inventory count.

But of course, you need a desktop application to begin with! aaaaaah! hehe

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  • 1 year later...

Hmmm, just thinking about it though. it's possible to have PHP look at your POS's database and use cURL (a php extension) to manipulate the data on your presta site. cURL allow php to interact with web sites (navigate through them, send or retrieve information), etc.

The easiest thing would be to grab the product that was scanned on added through your POS from the database, then just look at what GET or POST variables would normally be transmitted and to which pages they get transmitted, then just imitate that (as if someone actually went on the site and bought an item). You could literally imitate the whole transaction all the way through paypal. You'd pay for your own product, but you'd have the cash from the person that gave it to you in the actual store, so no worries.

You wouldn't be aware of all this, you'd just scan the item and that's all. PHP can be checking the database every 5 min or something. Or you can make a keyboard shortcut that launches the PHP script.

Wow, i just might have to do this sooner than later. hehe (or hopefully have encouraged someone to do it by writing this!)

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This will probably be exactly what I want when it is working. However, I was wondering if a facility might exist to tackle this another way. I am using a POS software for my shop sales called 4POS. It produces a database as a .csv file. However, it does not quite work when I try and import it as a database, because the categories are not recognised. I am sure that with a bit of tweaking, if this worked there could be a facility to upload my updated .csv on a daily basis to Prestashop. I am very interested in the outcome of this thread. At present it is very time consuming to keep the website up to date manually as I have a lot of products.

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Well I suppose you can use PHP (or similar) to read from the CSV locally and send the info to another PHP script on your site that can update the database. You'd have to program in the local PHP script how the CSV data will be converted to fit the format of the prestashop database.

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Yes except I don't know where to start with that. I tried outputting the entire database as a .csv file and used prestashops upload and mapped the fields, but I don't know why some fields worked and some didn't. I think the output from my shop software could have been more clearly headed so I knew which fields to map to which headings. It did partly work, but my Categories appeared as numbers and not Category Names.

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I used my last cart for a pos setup. Just created a button at the top of the menu that created a blank order for X "in store" customer than i had a Product id "barcode" field that i scaned the sku into. Hit enter and it added the item to the order.

I always needed an internet connection for this to work unless i ran wamp. But this worked great. I plan to do this with prestashop once i get to using it more.

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I just realized (kind of late) that Presta can accepts barcodes (EAN or UPC format). I think the solution I am most likely gunna go for is to create a theme for prestashop that behaves like a POS so I can use it on a touch screen. Also, since presta already accepts the use of barcodes, a scanner might work nicely too. That way there'd be no need to worry about external software, and prestahop can be like a POS.

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  • 1 year later...

There are a couple packages out there, they are made for running ps as a cash register. I cannot think of any of the names off the top of my head, but at the same time I have never tested one either.

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  • 2 years later...

Hi, 

 

several years passed since 1st post and, I guess, still a valid solution was not found!! am i wrong?

 

I'm installing (as 1st time) Odoo openERP and I'll test it with openerp_prestashop_sync (by bitbucket.org).

 

Until now I use a paid italian software (working with .mdb) and I still didn't find any solution to sync automatically my ps website with my physical pos.

 

Did someone of you find any solution to sync .mdb files? 

 

Thanks to you all,

Filippo

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We run bricks and mortar stores and use a really basic POS now, its simple cheap and has never let me down, I have tried a few over the last couple of years  and they all seem to have niggles  that I couldn't iron out  then I found Point of sale pro by PrestaMonster.com  I installed it 6 month ago  and haven't looked back

 

My first thoughts were  if my 250 euro modules don't work 100% then this 50 Euro one aint got a chance  12000  transactions later  and I couldn't be more pleased,  add to this  I keep throwing ideas  at him and he adds them to the to do list it can't get much better.

 

It is quite basic though but works with scanners, prints tickets  reduces stock  have a quick search  feature or search by category, multiple screens open,  split cash and card purchases I even added a loyalty voucher scheme to it,

 

I can honestly say not found a fault yet and if these guys implement the last couple of suggestions I will be happy as Larry.

 

I also use store manager for other stuff and that has a built on POS  the interface looks very nice  I only used it briefly it was a little more complicated for my staff  so decided to stay with POS Pro 

Edited by puffdade (see edit history)
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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi Puffdade

 

Thanks for your contribution and comment. I had exactly the same reservations - how would a substantially cheaper add-on work or would I simply be wasting my time and money.

 

You seem to have cleared that up rather emphatically - and without wishing to derail this thread may I ask what you use to create (and then scan) your retail products bar codes and labels? (having sold 12 000 items I'm assuming you are using bar codes and scanners, rather than manually entering products at the PoS screen).

 

I would appreciate your further insights and comments please.

 

Kind regards, Dieter

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