Choosing a Magento Point of Sale software for your physical stores might be difficult as there are many POS available for you to choose. They all have their strengths and the prices are not much different from each other.
If you’re a Magento retailer and is considering different POS for your brick-and-mortar stores, we hope this Magento POS review series will be helpful to you.
In this post, we will compare ConnectPOS and X-POS.
Overview
Background
X-POS is one of the household names among Point of Sale extensions for Magento. X-POS can work with Magento 1 for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. It has a web app, iPad app and Android app. However, due to many reasons, X-POS has been ceased developing.
ConnectPOS is the new generation of Magento POS and promises to surpass X-POS as it is faster, more stable and has many more features. ConnectPOS is compatible with Magento 1 (1.8 and above) and Magento 2 (2.1 and above), for both CE and EE. It is available for the web app and iPad app.
Now, let’s explore some details of the similarities and differences between X-POS and ConnectPOS.
Magento POS Review: Things in Common
Like many other Points of Sale, both ConnectPOS and X-POS have functions to help shop operators fulfill their daily tasks:
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- Create orders and checkout for customers
- Customer Management: search existing customers and add new ones
- Accept different payments and manual discounts
- Add notes to orders, save and retrieve on-hold orders
- Synchronize stock with Magento
- Provide sales and shift reports
They both synchronize data fully with Magento and have Offline Mode that allows transactions to be processed without the Internet and synced to Magento later.
These two Magento POS offers a wide range of integrated payments in its iPad app, including PayPal Here, Payment Express, and iZettle. For web POS app, they both have Tyro, an integrated payment for Australian retailers.
They can work with different POS hardware: cash drawers, receipt printers, and card readers so it’s likely that you can continue using your current hardware peripherals.
Last but not least, they have web and iPad versions so you can choose which devices you want to use (or both!)
Magento POS Review: Differences and Highlights
Since ConnectPOS is the next generation Magento POS, it has learned from X-POS and made many improvements in many aspects such as design, functions, speed and performance.
Design
If you switch from X-POS to ConnectPOS, the first thing that may catch your eyes is the intuitive design of ConnectPOS. You don’t have to look at the Sell Screen and wonder where on earth the checkout button is. The interface of ConnectPOS is really user-friendly and optimized for quick performance, especially the checkout process.
Speed and Performance
This may be the next thing you’ll notice. ConnectPOS works faster, more smoothly and stably compared to X-POS.
After being installed in Magento backend and activated with a license key, ConnectPOS will start syncing the data from Magento to POS quickly. ConnectPOS has been tested and proved that it can handle large numbers of products (including configurable products and all types of products with custom options) and even customers, which X-POS couldn’t do before.
Tip: If you have a huge database of customers and want to raise the performance speed of ConnectPOS even more, turn on Customer Online Mode in POS Settings.
Since then, ConnectPOS will automatically synchronize data between Magento and POS but unlike X-POS, it can do so in REAL-TIME. Changes in Magento, especially special prices, promotions and inventory, are reflected in ConnectPOS almost immediately.
Newly created orders and customers in ConnectPOS are also synchronized fully and instantly to Magento, so you can rest assured that there is no data loss.
Features and Integrations
To meet the new demands of merchants in the competitive retail industry, and especially to help them catch up with the omnichannel trend, the developers at ConnectPOS have added many features and integrated it with other Magento extensions to create a complete Magento retail system. Here are some highlights:
Split Tenders and Layaway
ConnectPOS is integrated with many payment methods: PayPal Here, iZettle, Payment Express (for iPad POS app) and Tyro (for web POS app and iPad POS app) so your cashiers can accept payments quickly without fearing entering and charging the wrong amount.
Non-integrated payments are also available to help sort out the source of payments.
Refund and Exchange
The flow for refund in ConnectPOS is very natural and you can do it easily by (1) searching for the order (2) selecting the item(s) the customer wants to refund, and add a new item to the order if (s)he wants to exchange.
You can even choose not to put the refunded item(s) back to stock in case they need sending back to the supplier or manufacturer. On checkout, you can offer a refund with cash, via card or to gift cards or pay the difference with different methods.
Reward Points
ConnectPOS is integrated with Reward Points by Aheadworks for both M1 and M2. Customers now can view the point balance, earn and spend reward points when shopping online and offline. They no longer have to worry about losing their brand value when moving from a channel to another one.
Gift Cards
Gift Card is surely a good way to generate more sales for retailers. Customers love it because of its convenience. Now they can purchase and redeem gift cards wherever they want thanks to the integration of ConnectPOS and Gift Cards by Aheadworks.
Multi-warehouse Inventory
This must be one of the top issues to be solved by merchants with multi-store. Magento allows managing stock at the global level only but a multi-warehouse inventory extension will enable you to create warehouses in Magento and assign stock to each.
ConnectPOS then can pull the information from Magento and display stock for each store. The orders made in each store will be counted towards the assigned warehouse.
There are many little details that make big differences in ConnectPOS such as:
- Support decimal quantity of items
- Support all price types of Magento
- Search online orders, send cart to online wishlists
- Advanced reports
- PIN Code Login and Auto Logout
Conclusion
If you’re happy with X-POS, we’re sure you’ll be even happier with ConnectPOS because it’s faster, more stable and full of new useful features. If you’re not happy with X-POS due to any of the problems listed above, give ConnectPOS a try and we guarantee you won’t be let down this time.