Overcoming the challenges of integrating with PoS devices

Point of Sales (PoS) such as terminals used in retail are provided by multiple vendors (e.g. Aloha, Brink, Clover etc.) through a heterogeneous technology stack. Hence, integrating with them to receive transaction or event information to build analytics around them to detect user behavior and capture potential fraudulent transactions becomes a challenge. This is because typically, businesses use multiple PoS device providers across locations.

To help resolve this, PoS device aggregators are available in the market like Omvivore, APIDeck etc. that provide a uniform interface to interact with these heterogeneous devices, typically as SaaS.

As each customer requirement is different, there is no single solution for PoS integration, hence what is needed is a set of features to quantitatively choose the right partners by working closely with the customer.

Following is the feature set we have used which has been found to be quite useful.

• Varity of Supported POS Devices – More, the better aligned with customer stack
• Rest API support
• Push/Pull support
• Feature List
• SDK for extensibility or custom implementation
• Out of the Box implementations w.r.t use cases
• Orchestration engine
• Dashboard
• Monitoring, Communication & Alerting
• Implementation - SaaS/Cloud/On-prim
• Pricing
• Customer Support
• Documentation