IDEA: auto api integrating ecommerce sales to automatically update inventory

[Resonant Harmony]

Hi,
We are a new retail natural foods store. We just started with everything we had, which isnt much, and would like to expand to an online sales channel option to reach more potential customers. We have ECRS Catapult point of sale, which manages inventory, not sure what best ecom/cart solution would be, woocommerce/opencart? The pos was expensive but provides demand-based inventory management to more accurately anticipate sales to optimize/minimize purchases and prevent over-ordering. We will use Quickbooks unless were able to find a free act. solution. They offer an integration api, but with their own proprietary platform only and it is very cost prohibitive, especially for a new startup without the capital needed. There is no reason why we would not be able to use other options, except there is no support or information about how we could do this. Is it possible to do so? If anyone would be willing to help us overcome this obstacle, we could reimburse you afterward, with sales from revenue from the new channel.

Thoughts are that one could access inventory once a day or preferably immediately or hourly, or one could possibly interface with the pos to make the inventory think its just another sale in store; This seems like it would be an easier more practical route, but I have no experience or insight, just a guess.

Thank you so much for your consideration and attention.

Genuinely,

Lost in Translation jk
Darby Smith

[Resonant Harmony]

"When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it."  -Ford

-Resonant Harmony (June 30, 2018, 09:20 AM)

[Shades]

You could use 'Floriant POS' for inventory management. It is actually intended to be a complete POS solution for restaurants (so it is also able to predict your inventory, based on the ingredients that make up each item on the menu). Also does time-tracking for employees etc.

Last time I looked, it was open-source and free to use. It is Java based client-server setup, but can be run on one system. And if I remember correctly, you can select between several different databases like MySQL, PostgeSQL, Oracle and MS-SQL Server. The first two you can use without paying.

[KodeZwerg]

MySQL, PostgeSQL, Oracle and MS-SQL Server. The first two you can use without paying.

-Shades (June 30, 2018, 03:22 PM)

For Oracle you can get the XE (Express Edition). (Just to complete it)
FireBird SQL is OpenSource and well updated.
For business as general hint, read carefully disclaimer if it apply to your company and local laws.
And sorry if i misunderstood!

[Shades]

The first time Oracle made their XE offering public, it was Oracle version 10 and it was limited to 4GByte of user-created data (system tables didn't count). While that may seem a lot, it isn't. The web interface of that database was actually very enjoyable. Then a new version of XE came out, same limitations, but now based on Oracle version 11. That was quite a big letdown, compared with the ease of the previous version.

Never looked back at the XE offering anymore. Microsoft made a similar offering with their SQL Server with a much bigger limit of 10GByte of user-created data and as such was (much) more interesting. However, I did follow the link provided by KodeZwerg to see if Oracle based their XE offering on their Oracle version 12 database software (which is also around for quite a while now). Unfortunately that is not the case, but Oracle did increase the limit to 11GByte of user-created data.