hey everyone,
I have been the creator/maintainer of an online skate shop for more than a year now.
From the first moment I chose Magento to be my project foundation I knew I took the right decision...Modularity of magento along with very wide availability of modules as reference and guiding documentation helped me alot to improve my php programming.
At first, I was very noob in php, only knew the very basics to just customize the small requirements of the shop. And I always checked that the admin modules are adequate for daily work flow.
For 4 months now I've been researching the sync of Magento with a POS for our walk-in customers as well as for invoicing flexibility...Magento is powerful for online/phone orders but not helpful having 10 customers waiting for 15min to get their invoices, pay and leave.
Well, I'm a very big fan of Mac, and I believe it's a very powerful OS to work on, especially that security risks and viruses are very rare. So I searched for solutions to not depend on OS first so that we don't have to throw all the PCs we have in our office.
First came OpenERP magento module, worked on it for 2 months but honestly it's a big project and it's far from being ready to implement...yet I believe when it's done, it's gonna be huge success. OpenERP is powerful ERP system, but customization needs someone advanced in python, and since all my knowledge is html/php/js I tried to stick to these because I don't even have the time to learn new stuff like python.
Checked Adempiere's POS, posterita...lack of features and poor interface....why reinvent the wheel.
Tried Quickbooks POS, it has plenty of features, but the module of integration with Magento from eCC webgility costs a fortune, especially if you need inventory sync...so this was out of the way. Few other Quickbooks POS integration modules are there, but they are expensive, plus I then remembered I don't want to stick to one OS, especillay to be Windows, it has always been a pain having to format the PCs from time to time to fix them.
Quickbooks also lacks the power of having an SQL database, as well as remote access...Quickbooks is amazingly powerful for single terminal single stores, highly recommended, but in case of online orders, the integration is not easy to achieve.
Since I'm a big fan of Mac, I've searched for the available POS, and came to realize that Checkout App POS is fantastic, I'm sure alot of people will say "hey, lightspeed is way amazing", I'd say "Filemaker database not that simple to access and work on as much as PostgreSQL on which is App is based. This makes it alot easier to integrate and hey I'm doing this project as Open Source, so lightspeed hasn't been cracked so far....Checkout App, oh yeah it has been [K]'ed"
well, enough introduction. Since I believe this is the first Open Source Magento POS solution module project, I thought of blogging my achievements for knowledge and learning. Feel free to contribute, and I will start blogging all I've done in the past week in this project...achieved quite beautiful results.
CIAO
