What are POS Integrations and who needs this feature?
POS Integrations connect your in-store Point of Sale system directly to your customer platform and e-commerce site. This feature is vital for retailers and brands running both physical stores and online channels. It is designed for any business seeking a unified view of their customer, inventory, and sales data across all touchpoints.
Hoop eliminates the data silos created by disparate systems, ensuring orders, refunds, and customer identities reconcile automatically. This real-time sync is crucial for unlocking true omnichannel experiences without the manual headache of using CSV files.
How do POS Integrations improve customer identity and loyalty management?
Hoop ensures that every in-store purchase is correctly linked to the corresponding customer profile, eliminating ghost accounts. This is achieved by linking purchases at checkout using email, phone, or a loyalty ID. The integration also syncs customer consent and opt-ins, ensuring compliance for all marketing efforts.
The system allows you to:
- Attach in-store purchases to existing online profiles.
- Dedupe profiles to maintain a single source of customer truth.
- Respect region-specific consent for all marketing channels.
- Automatically enroll new shoppers into post-purchase journeys.
This unified identity data powers personalization and loyalty programs across all channels.
Which Point of Sale systems and providers are supported?
Hoop supports leading POS providers through prebuilt, certified connectors. These connectors are designed for rapid deployment and high reliability. For less common or proprietary systems, our platform offers flexible integration methods.
You can connect long-tail or homegrown systems using our robust API. Alternatively, you can use batched SFTP with field mapping for consistent data flow. Hoop is committed to normalizing transactions, taxes, and identity keys regardless of your current setup, ensuring reliable reporting across every location.
What specific sales and financial data are synchronized by the integration?
The integration ensures a near real-time, comprehensive sync of all transactional data between your POS and the Hoop platform. This level of detail is essential for accurate accounting and business intelligence.
The synchronized elements include:
- Ticket lines, tenders, and total amounts.
- All taxes, tips, and applied discounts.
- Refunds and voids, reconciled to the original order.
- Reason codes and clerk IDs for clear auditing.
Furthermore, end-of-day summaries, often referred to as X/Z summaries, are automatically posted to analytics and finance export tools for streamlined reporting.
How are inventory and stock updates handled across multiple locations?
Inventory management is a core function of the POS Integrations feature. Hoop provides real-time updates for on-hand inventory levels, ensuring web stores reflect accurate stock available in physical locations. This prevents overselling and improves fulfillment accuracy.
The system supports multi-store operations, offering tools for inter-store transfer workflows and safety-stock rules to prevent stockouts. The integration manages SKU/variant mapping between systems and handles stock adjustments resulting from returns, giving you a holistic, single-source view of your operational health.
What occurs if a physical store loses its internet connection?
Hoop is designed to ensure business continuity even if a store's connection is temporarily lost. The transactions continue to queue locally within the Point of Sale system until connectivity is restored. This queuing prevents data loss and minimizes disruption to daily sales operations.
Once the network returns, the integration automatically resumes the sync process. It is built with robust mechanisms to resolve duplicates and reconcile all transactions seamlessly and automatically, ensuring data integrity and providing a clear audit trail for all sales and financial activities.
What are the pricing plans available for POS Integrations on Hoop?
The POS Integrations feature is available across three main Hoop pricing tiers: core, pro, and enterprise. The feature's availability across these tiers reflects our commitment to supporting businesses of all sizes, from growing retailers to large, complex organizations.
While core plans offer essential synchronization, the pro and enterprise plans typically provide more advanced capabilities. These advanced features often include higher transaction volumes, greater multi-store support, access to complex data normalization tools, and more dedicated POS health monitoring and retry dashboards.