Bridging the gap between physical retail and eCommerce is a challenge that many businesses face. Keeping your inventory, prices, and sales in sync can be a labor-intensive process. Chris Muench and his business, PHP Point of Sale, provide a robust and flexible solution to this problem with built-in WooCommerce Point of Sale integration. Read on to get the story behind PHP Point of Sale, and what Chris sees for the future of multi-channel selling.
The roots of PHP Point of Sale reach back to Chris’ high school days, when he belonged to a tennis club and helped the local pro shop keep their computers running. When the owners asked for his help in finding a new Point of Sale system, he couldn’t find anything that fit into the budget of a small business like theirs:

The did like it, and used it up until they retired more than a decade later. Chris had identified a market that at the time was being ignored by the big Point of Sale vendors, back when Square or Clover referred to a shape and a plant.
In 2010 Chris decided to make a bet that this market was big enough to build a business on. He launched a product based on a new and improved evolution of his high school project.
Today PHP Point of Sale is used by over 2500 small businesses all over the globe. As his customer base grew he saw a need for an affordable yet powerful ecommerce platform that businesses could connect to PHP Point of Sale:
Chris was able to build his integration relatively quickly by using WooCommerce’s official API. An API (Application Program Interface) provides a predictable and well-documented way of integrating with a software platform, so you don’t have to figure it out through trial and error (if you can figure it out at all). WooCommerce’s API means that it’s straightforward to integrate your software with any site running WooCommerce. Of course, things are always a little more complicated in real life:
Fortunately the open source code and collaborative community around WordPress + WooCommerce means that there is almost always a way to meet even the most outlandish customer requests.
Of course, WooCommerce isn’t the only game in town, and Chris kept getting requests to integrate with other platforms. So he took a page from WooCommerce’s book and wrote his own API:
After working with so many businesses, I asked Chris he things is the most important thing for businesses to keep in mind when they set up a POS system. His advice was to give yourself the time to get it right:
Based on the trends he sees, Chris thinks that the future will only bring physical retail and eCommerce closer together:
Along with this, he sees the current trend of more cross-platform integrations leading to more and more services being connected to businesses’ Point of Sale systems:
And in a future where the ability to connect to other platforms is a crucial feature, platforms that provide full-featured APIs, and can be customized to connect to other APIs, will have the advantage. It’s an interconnected world, and PHP Point of Sale is living in it.
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