The Benefits Of POS Apps + How To Integrate Them With The Shopify App Bridge
4 Min. Read
Very often, online merchants find it difficult to make technology decisions that can grow their business. This is part of the reason Shopify started: to take the stress out of building Point of Sale (POS) apps. However, with stores moving into new premises both online and in the brick-and-mortar world, the questions on how to handle POS transactions have come bubbling up to the surface. Thankfully, Shopify is here with an answer yet again, by providing the capability to extend your POS app with the Shopify App Bridge.
How you use your POS app will be specific to your business, so before even beginning to look at the App Bridge, determine where you use your POS app. Most sellers use POS apps for up to four things: administration, adding to cart, editing the cart, and completing an order.
Administration
The first of these four is the only one that has nothing to do with checkout: these include features like staff training and employee management systems like timesheets and wage calculation. Teresa Malik, an app developer at 1Day2Write and Britstudent, points out that “You can use a POS app to automatically track clock-in and clock-out of employees, as well as send virtual schedules over email or apps, helping to keep track of employee management without having to rely on paper records.
A POS app can also be used for managing top-level information about your stores, both online and on the high street. Apps can track foot traffic and online clicks, helping you analyze where to best allocate your marketing attention. This information can also help you create staff rotas, determine recruitment needs and make informed decisions about store opening times.
Checkout Functionality
The remaining three are essential during the checkout process. Adding to the cart can be simplified with an integrated app that bundles commonly bought items together, includes donations in purchases, or non-product purchasable services like installation or customization. Using apps integrated into cart editing can be useful for non-sales aspects like loyalty programs or discounts that nonetheless affect the customer’s checkout experience. Finally, completing an order can be amplified by a POS app that provides receipts, surveys, and item or delivery information.
POS apps can also continue to help after a sale has ended. Accounting and tax management services can help to keep track of purchases (and purchasers) after the end of a transaction, contributing to better asset management and easier tax reporting.
What is the Shopify App Bridge?
In short, the Shopify App Bridge is a JavaScript library specifically tailored to embedding your POS app in Shopify. It allows Shopify merchants to seamlessly transition from their service to your app, creating a consistent user experience across platforms and devices.
Tomas Aquinas, a tech writer at Write My X and NextCoursework, points out that the Shopify Bridge App, “is wonderfully easy to use for developers as well as customers. First of all, it reduces the amount of time you have to spend coding, as it creates a single access point across desktop and mobile devices, across apps and web-based platforms. Secondly, it’s flexible enough to facilitate modular JavaScript, CDN or TypeScript.”
How To Engage the Shopify App Bridge
If you’re interested in integrating your POS app with the App Bridge, you can do so easily following Shopify’s instructions. How you initialize depends on your store’s set up, whether you use a build system, CND-hosted versions or JavaScript. Examples of the various code are available through the Shopify website.
Takeaways
POS apps are incredibly useful for a wide range of commercial merchants and are flexible enough to suit however you run your store. On top of that, Shopify’s App Bridge is easy to use for both customers and developers, providing plenty of room for customization.
At the end of the day, regardless of whether you want to simplify your internal administration or improve your customer experience, the way in which you integrate these technologies together is up to you and will depend on what you want to get out of your business.
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Mildred Delgado
Mildred Delgado is a responsible marketing strategist at Academic Brits and PhD Kingdom. She works closely with organizations to develop fully-functioning websites in-keeping the organization's brand image and mission statement. The majority of her work regards eCommerce functionality, and her many marketing proposals are available to view at Coursework Help Service.
