Building a WooCommerce Point of Sales

Zach: Hey everybody, it’s Zach Stepek here with Carl Alexander for another episode of the Woo DevChats. Carl, how are you doing, man?

Carl: Doing good. I’m all tanned in Greece, so I’m living the nomad life.

Zach: Yeah. So you stayed after Europe and how long are you going to be in Europe after WordCamp?

Carl: I’m leaving this weekend, but I’ve been in Crete.

Zach: Leaving this weekend.

Carl: Yeah, I’ve been in Crete working, going to the beach. Tough life. Tough life for the last two weeks.

Zach: Horrible. Horrible. I can imagine that it has just been taxing. The sun.

Carl: I’ve grown used to the world’s smallest violin playing behind my ear.

Zach: Yeah, I could see that being an issue. So you’ve been enjoying yourself in Greece, in Crete, and you’re headed back home. What was your biggest takeaway I would say from WordCamp Europe?

Carl: Oh, it’s still the best WordCamp of the three major ones. I mean, Asia was really good, honestly. But Europe still towers above all of them. If you don’t know me or even met me, I’m basically crashing all the parties. So I did 10 parties in four nights at WordCamp Europe, so…

Zach: Sounds about right.

Carl: Yeah, so some people were like, “How are you still alive?” And things like that. But yes sleep is for after WordCamp. But the site parties were really good. The Pride Party, if you saw any footage of that, was actually just Yoast and [inaudible 00:01:50] just knocked that one out of the park. It was a great time. But tons of people, tons of networking. Hallway track was a plus. If you ask me about any talks, I did not see any talks, so I can’t speak to the content of the actual conference.

Zach: Yeah, that’s normally my WordCamp experience as well is just a lot of hallway track, couple of talks maybe that I want to see, and I try to get to them if I do. But if I don’t, there’s just as much value in the hallway track and in the vendor area generally for me. So the exhibit hall is also a big focus for me most years. So next big WordCamp we have coming up is US. And I know we’re both going to be there and I’m bringing some audio gear. So chances are we’ll be doing some podcast recording on site there. So that’ll be fun. It’s going to be a good time. There’ll be a lot of people from Do the Woo there. And I’m really looking forward to it. In other news, I just started a new job.

Carl: Congratulations.

Zach: So I am now at Convesio. And we’ll talk more next month about what my role is there, but I can summarize it as, my role is to make sure that everybody who is a customer or client or agency partner of Convesio is successful.

So I am the point of contact if you want to run a high volume WordPress site on Convesio’s architecture, I’m your point of contact to make sure everything goes smoothly. So that’s exciting news. So beyond that, we do have a guest this month and I’m excited about this one. One of the things that I wanted to do when I had my agency was build technology for onsite point of sale and card processing through WooCommerce for in-person retail.

Never got around to it as a project, but it was something that we, we bought the Stripe dev kit for building technology around their platform. And we were looking at how we could pull it off. And I’m glad that I had the idea to go that direction, but I’m also glad that somebody else was able to execute on it. So we have Mathias Nielsen from Oliver Point of Sale here with us this month. Mathias, how are you?

Mathias: Hey, good. And you?

Zach: Good, good. I’m really excited about this. So your own site Mathias, says it really well. It says, you were building WooCommerce stores and you had somebody that wanted to connect to a point of sale system, so you set out creating your own solution. So that’s where this journey started. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that?

Mathias: Yeah, sure. So I lived a bunch of years in China and actually built a lot of WordPress sites out there and when I moved to Canada I decided to start an agency that were building high quality WordPress and WooCommerce sites for governments, big enterprises and whatnot. And a lot of our customers would say, “Well, now you’ve built is really advanced online, build your own solution or hotel checkout solution or whatever. Now find us a POS that works with it.”

And I went back to Google and said, “Sure, no problem. I got this.” Googled, and as you so nicely put it, it was a bit of a shitshow out there. And then we decided, “Well, this might be actually our next venture.” So we set out to build it ourselves and really just build on the ethos the same as WordPress and WooCommerce to be extremely adaptable. I’ve always loved the ecosystem for that where you are allowed to get a bit dirtier and build and tweak how it works. So that was how we started out.

Zach: That’s awesome. And now you’ve got, from that start of having a client who had a need and then trying to fill that, your team has grown considerably. So you started from that small beginning to over 30 people now in three continents, which is awesome.

Mathias: Yeah, it started out basically myself building websites. Then the agency grew quite a bit. We did like four good websites a week or so. And then I just knew that I wanted to try and build a software solution that worked well with WooCommerce. So we kind of little by little phased out the agency and got more and more dedicated on building Oliver POS that now have grown, as you mentioned quite a lot in both product and headcount and whatnot.

Zach: And you, and your headquarters are based in Newfoundland, right?

Mathias: Yeah. Newfoundland Canada.

Carl: Can’t believe that’s where you decided to move in Canada.

Mathias: It wasn’t for the weather, I could tell you that much. It was minus degrees yesterday. But no, I had some family here. I lived many years in China and I just knew that I wanted to get to a place where my children could grow up safe and sound and I really like the nature as well.

Zach: That’s awesome. And offices in Germany and India as well. I love Germany, [German 00:08:18]. So I get myself in trouble. So really cool to see. And so you started to tackle this problem of building point of sale. And it’s expanded considerably beyond just the point of sale application itself now into hardware and payments platform and a whole bunch of other stuff.

But when you first started building the point of sale solution, what type of pitfalls did you run into? Because we know that when you’re building anything that scales on top of open source software and is more of a commercial product, sometimes things get interesting. And 2017 was a great example of things getting interesting. WooCommerce 3.0 came out and lots of things broke because they added these CRUD classes to enable things that are finally happening six years later. What pitfalls did you start to see as you were building this? What were some of the technical hurdles you had to overcome to make this a successful product that would sync correctly and do all the things you needed it to do?

Mathias: So we started out very blissfully ignorant with saying, “We can build a good plugin here that becomes the full POS and turns your site into a POS.” And built for that for almost a full year, I would say, trying to make everything work as fast as you want. So a couple of things that we ran into was really, every WooCommerce and WordPress environment is different in terms of server speed, how much memory you allocate to the admin panel and whatnot. Building on top of WordPress has all of these pitfalls overall and we wanted to create a solution… When you’re selling in person, it needs to be as fast as you can possibly click. And we really needed a solution that you can checkout, there’s no delay. Everything runs as quick as it should be.

That is just really, really hard in WordPress when you’re working with different servers, different setups and whatnot. I would say that that’s probably the biggest challenge. It took us a long time to figure out an environment where we were able to really make sure and guarantee the speed and safety of being able to checkout everything and see everything at the point of sale. So speed and then when you work with payment processors that are handheld terminals and semi-integrated terminals and whatnot, there’s a lot more restrictions and certifications and getting all of that to work.

So we had to change our whole base multiple times and it ended up with a little bit of a different approach to how most traditional WooCommerce and WordPress plugins work. Where we have a bridge set up and we sync it over to a server. But we still wanted to maintain that flexibility for developers to be able to tweak it, although we have to push some of it over to our own servers.

So it’s been definitely a challenge to make sure that we can give that adaptability and flexibility for programmers still to interact with the solution and stay true to looking at WooCommerce as a single source of truth, but while guaranteeing the safety regulations and security that they require, and working smooth on hardware installs where you have a 100,000 products or whatever. That needs to work and you need that to be instantaneous checkouts. Which we want to guarantee even when you’re on a $1 month kind of server. So a lot of challenges in one go. And something that we’ve been chewing on over the last couple of years and trying to get right.

Zach: Well, and the point of sales solution and Oliver Register here, that runs on devices, tablets, phones, computers, like you said, that single source of truth is living in WooCommerce, which I think is a very important thing. Because inventory management is a nightmare if you don’t have a single source of truth. And having that inventory management happen on the site makes sure that the customers who are browsing on the website are getting real time inventory at the time of purchase.

And the worst experience that I’ve personally had is going in and ordering something from a company that has a retail location and then somebody bought it while I was buying it. And so that kind of a collision of somebody in a retail store is holding it and somebody just bought it on the internet is a very interesting thing to try and figure out. And I always recommend that my customers keep their inventory levels slightly below reality in WooCommerce. Just a couple of items just to cover those overages, just in case they happen. But this is a really, really big topic. Inventory management and how you handle.

Carl: And that applies even without the point of sale. You could have a really high volume sale happening. That’s what was happening with my friend with microbrews. They send a newsletter, they only have a 100 cases of the beer and have thousands of people hammering the site to get it. How do you make sure you don’t oversell 101? You know?

Zach: Yeah, it’s one of those things where the further into all of it you go, the further into the hole, you begin to fall further and further and further. So with that being said, the more you talk about inventory management, the crazier the restrictions and requirements end up being, and I’m sure that you’ve had to solve some of this, right?

Mathias: Absolutely. Now you can’t all see it, but I got gray hairs here and I’m sure one of them are from inventory management, trying to solve those issues. But yeah, I think we’ve found a pretty delicate solution to it. It’s a very vast topic in itself. But yeah, the second you add anything to the cart inside of the POS, we actually reserve it directly on the WooCommerce store. So if you can then take it back [inaudible 00:15:49] and we put it back, but we’ve just really never wanted that to happen. We had it happen early on and we’re like… That’s one of the things of why we exist is we wanted to solve that proper omnichannel setup where you can sell seamlessly in person and the second you create a customer in the POS, it’s online now. They can go and find their orders there and all of those things.

We just wanted to be sure that that’s what we pride ourselves in is, looking at WooCommerce as the single source of truth. So all of our inventory, you can’t add a product directly in Oliver, you’re adding it to WooCommerce and then it shows up in Oliver. And it really was very vital for us to get that right. Since then we have added multi inventory, which is a requirement when we grow in our merchant sizes. So while we needed to have multiple locations with their own inventory running with WooCommerce and whatnot. So yeah, definitely a vast topic, but I think we’ve tried to simplify something that is really advanced and hard to do.

Zach: And obviously part of point of sale is handling the transactional piece. Actually taking money from a customer. In that regard, you’ve got some solutions for streamlining payment and point of sale wasn’t enough, was it? You just wanted to handle all the difficult things?

Mathias: Yeah, I’m maybe a little bit of a perfectionist and I kept getting frustrated when, now we’ve solved this, but now the next is not a nice solution. And we wanted to make a good solution that we could look everyone in the eyes and say, “We built this and we’re proud of it.” It kind of came out of necessity and you mentioned some of the struggles before. We start building a POS thinking, “Yeah, we’re just a nice touch friendly UI for WooCommerce and that’s it.” And blissfully ignorant.

Then we built that and we say, “Okay, how do we handle cash?” WooCommerce actually are not able to handle cash and cash rounding because we said we want to be global from the beginning, just like WooCommerce. So we suddenly needed to handle every currency in the world with every cash rounding in the world. And now when you talk cash management, we need cash management and tender floats and all of those kind of things.

So it was just a lot of things that we said, “Well, okay, challenge accepted. Next thing now.” Because now we’ve solved, yeah, you can checkout, but people need more for it to be a proper POS. And there’s a lot of good POSes. The Square, Van, Lightspeed you mentioned or referenced earlier a little bit. There’s great POS solutions out there that I respect a lot. We wanted to look at them and say, “How can we build something that is as nice to use but actually work properly with Woo?” Like really deeply integrated with Woo. And that was the mission. It wasn’t just to build a traditional POS because we could probably build that in a fourth of the time if we just wanted to build something that works in our little bubble. We wanted to tightly integrate it. So a lot of challenges on that. And with payments, that’s just the same.

We saw that very few have built an omnichannel payment solution. Where, yeah, it’s great that it works online, but now you need another MID or merchant ID for your payment processor for install. And then I found that one of our merchants, well, she does $1.6 million online and $400,000 in store. And what that really means is, now she’s getting a pretty bad rate in store, because she’s a little bit of a smaller merchant. Good rates online and we’re like, “Hey, couldn’t we combine this? It’s one merchant.” And we managed to get her a much better deal and that was kind of like, “Okay, we could do this a lot more and a lot better.” So we just wanted to streamline and that’s kind of how these products come to life.

Zach: Yeah. That seven figure mark is really one of the break points in the payment processing world where you start to be able to get more of the points back that are above interchange that are being charged to you. So there’s a lot of power in being able to combine those two channels into one, especially because the larger the number is, the more negotiating power you have.

So that’s really cool that you’ve been able to do that. And on top of that, you’ve built kiosks now where customers can self-checkout with a point of sale that’s powered by WooCommerce. Which is awesome. You’ve gone into that hardware side of things, which I love the hardware piece. I’ve run hardware projects before. And that marrying of physical technology with virtual technology is just a really cool feeling.

Mathias: Yeah. It really is. And it comes back to that, let’s build something that we can be proud of. And we found that most people were opening it on a laptop that was standing with its fans spinning loudly and whatnot, and it was like, well, the good solutions that we look up to and respect out there wouldn’t do it that way. They would get a proper hardware set up. So we started on that journey too where you can have a build in printer or we work properly with printers and barcode scanners and whatnot. So it comes from that. And then love of giving the merchant a really good solution and trying to build that. And then we just love building as well.

Thanks to our Friends Hostinger and Weglot

Zach: And of course eventually it was going to go back to some of what you were doing beforehand, the agency side of the world. And so you have a SITES product now where you can deploy your store to Oliver SITES as well. Pretty cool. Yeah, it looks like you’ve done some work to make that an easy process and for the store owner. Why don’t you talk just a little bit about what the impetus was for creating something like this?

Mathias: Sure. So it comes back to being a former agency owner and always looking back, what would I have wanted? When I was out, I hit the streets selling websites and whatnot myself. Never were really good at it, but I did it anyway I guess. And it keeps coming back to that, well, how can we help agency owners, and you’ll see us go much more in that direction now. So we actually started seeing ourselves more than just a POS, but what we call a commerce development kit or CDK for short. And what it really is, it’s we’re selling mainly to agencies and marketing companies that are building developers that are building cool websites and then want to be able to match that with a good POS and then a good payment solution and whatnot. So SITES were really just a, how can we make agency owners do what they love of not worrying about maintenance of keeping the plugins up to date and those kind of things that I always hated.

I wanted to build sites and have fun building custom things for those sites. I didn’t want to maintain the customer’s website over the next four years while they don’t really know what to do behind the scenes and they don’t really know how can you quantify asking for a monthly price for that. So I wanted to make it really easy. So we built a multi tenants product kind of thing.

Where you’re able to build your initial setup. We wanted to streamline the WordPress dashboard behind the scenes and WooCommerce dashboard where merchants don’t really want to be deep in WooCommerce. They want to have an Excel sheet and drop in products. And you don’t want to have the hassle of sitting, having to individually upload these products for them. So we try to streamline what it means to be a developer so you can be busy building nice designed sites or custom setups and whatnot. So it was really with that in mind and then helping developers and agencies to the best of our ability. Scaling their business without all of the maintenance headaches.

Zach: That’s awesome. Looking at some of the infrastructure related things, that’s something we talk about pretty frequently here. I work in hosting, Carl works on a platform for serverless WordPress. So it’s something that we definitely talk about quite a bit. And infrastructure matters a ton. And not a lot of people understand what goes into running something like that at scale. So from containerization and scalability and auto-sizing and auto-scaling and all of that fun…

Carl: I talk about that all the freaking time with Amazon. People complain about Amazon.

Zach: That is a good product, something that is a necessity for people and I love that you’re focused on enabling agencies and agency owners to do better work, right?

Mathias: Do what they love. Spend the time on why they started in the first place. Not the maintenance part. Very few people like sitting, maintaining stuff. They want to build and design and whatnot. So we wanted to make them focused on that. And I think it’s actually a great solution for hosting companies as well. But we found that is a big challenge going a little bit back to the earlier topic as well, and we found that a big challenge of, well, people don’t understand that they need a proper host and they don’t necessarily need to be on this small shared hosting environment. So we started building up what we call immunity, which is really just informing the customers on why it matters to be on a good host and optimize your site and whatnot. Because it helps them both sell better from Google referrals to checkout experience and whatnot, but also with Oliver.

So it’s something we’ve actually spent quite a lot of time on trying to get right of saying, “Hey, your site is actually really slow here.” So it’s helping merchants and agencies and whatnot realize, “Okay, you don’t security set up.” And whatnot. So we call it immunity because we often find that when people set it up, they blame us if it’s not working. So we wanted to say, well, how can we make them more informed so they understand that a $1 a month servers is not ideal. Or $10, whatever it is, for what they have. So we built a lot of technology up being able to make them more informed about their decision on hosting.

Zach: That’s awesome. Carl, I think you were trying to get a word in earlier.

Carl: Yeah, I was. I think people underestimate. I think one of the things that I tell people the most often is just, with Amazon people complain about the price of Amazon, but I think the one thing that Amazon did is abstract away a ton of complexity to a simple API call. And then you think, “Oh, it’s just a server.” But no, it’s like self-healing, it’s regional failovers. It’s all this stuff that you never have to think about. But that’s just basically, “Oh, no. I just spinned up EC2, but I’m paying a lot more for that.” But there’s so much going on behind the scenes that you’re unaware of with hosting and infrastructure especially that I think people take for granted.

Zach: Well, and it’s funny because most of the managed WordPress hosting that you see out there is single instance, no load balancing, no containerization, no scalability, no beyond, here’s this one instance, and if you expand beyond this, well, welcome to failure. Because that’s what’s going to happen. It’s just going to stop working. And that’s the majority of the managed hosting world. For something eCommerce that just doesn’t work. Because how do you as a business owner know when somebody with some influence is going to tweet about your brand? They may discover you organically and they tweet about your brand and suddenly your site is just down. And it’s the story I tell about when I first started working in WooCommerce with Oscar Mike and they had an email server on their web server. And that crashed their website. Because they got enough emails sent that entered the email spool to run the server out of memory when they were interviewed by the voice of the Chicago Bears during a Bears, Packers game on Thanksgiving day.

So they knew there was going to be a traffic event, but never in a million years as a store owner did Noah think that, “Okay, when this happens, email is going to crash my website.” That just wasn’t on his radar. It wasn’t something he was worried about. So yeah, this stuff becomes incredibly important for the just in case. And so having a host that has experience with WooCommerce matters a ton. So beyond that, you also have a product modifiers product, which helps to make it easier to sell things that can be more custom, more customized to what a customer may want. You show an example on the website of a T-shirt company. Where the user gets to pick their size, their color, maybe even add a custom logo and decide whether or not the logo is on the front or the back. And potentially even add personalization, I’m guessing for a sports team of some sort. But all of these pieces that just enable new things inside WooCommerce that aren’t part of core, that also work with your point of sale system.

Mathias: Absolutely. Same as before, it’s the necessity of being able to do something in an omnichannel environment. So we looked at some of the current solutions out there and have done some integrations, but found some of it to be a little bit flawed. And therefore we decided to build product modifiers for Oliver. Which is really, as you say, an ability to go beyond the traditional symbol and variable product and whatnot within WooCommerce. And be able to add on text or modify how that works, to also scheduling. So we had some clients that say, “Well, we have a happy hour in our bar from that to that time and we need a discount happening on that. And we just couldn’t find anybody that did that well.” So all of our product modifiers, which works similar to an add-on or anything else to the traditional WooCommerce products, they can be scheduled to run at certain times and days and whatnot.

And that goes for both the POS and the website of course. So it was just another frustrating part where we take it on ourselves to try and make that better. Where it’s thought out on a grander scale, being able to run with many thousand products and whatnot. And be easy to, instead of having to add it to one product at a time, we said, “Well, how do you normally…” If you know what you’re doing within WooCommerce, you would add your variations with attributes or tags or whatever as well. So we wanted to say, “Well, let’s target product items for this attribute.” Or whatever else. So let’s say it’s fast food, you want to be able to say, “All burgers, they should have add-ons like fries and whatnot with them.” So being able to be efficient and quick and then say, “Well, fries on sale on Friday. So yeah, add that in for free.” Or whatever. So it became a really complex but pretty cool offering I would say.

Zach: Now getting back to our core audience here on the Woo DevChats, one of the things that I see as a focus area for you at Oliver is enabling other developers to extend your ecosystem. So let’s talk just a little bit about Oliver apps and how that works and how developers who are interested, who may have products around WooCommerce can integrate with Oliver Point of Sale.

Mathias: Yeah, sure. So there’s a couple of different ways it can run. Traditionally what we wanted to do is just take any plugin that are running on… Even as simple as, let’s take an example of saying I have built something with a block builder, Gutenberg or Elementor, whatever, and I wanted to just have that Elementor form for my newsletter running at the point of sale. How could we do that? And that was basically where it started with a lot of people saying, “Well, we have all of this good stuff living in online, how can we merge it in?”

So we started using iframes to load in stuff from the website. We’ve gone pretty nuts on the complexity of how deep you can go on that, because then we built a bit of a command structure that I can get into a lot deeper, but it’s really a way for us to, or for developers to say, “Let me pull in this form.”

So at the point of sale, somebody comes up and I’m a store owner and I want to be able to say, “Hey, dear Zach. If you sign up for newsletter, I can give you a 10% discount right then and there.” So how could we take an Elementor form or a custom form and be able to add functionality into the cart or add that form into create a customer inside of WooCommerce and whatnot. So it started with that, but now where we are is we’ve built what we call Oliver commands, and it’s really a post message structure structured very similar to an API where you can say, “Hey Oliver, what’s the name of the customer in cart?” And now you can take all of that info and go nuts. You can quarry WooCommerce. We may already have a lot of that info that you can get out from us.

And then you can say, “Let me build a custom cart recommendation.” Is something we got the other day that we haven’t actually added. But any developer that knows what they’re doing, we would happily buy that from you guys or help sell that to our merchant base. But really imagine a customer coming in and saying, “Now we’re adding this computer to cart, a MacBook.” We could now quarry and say from the WooCommerce, “Hey, Oliver. Who’s the customer cart? Whenever you add something to cart, let me know.”

When I get that information. Now you can say, “WooCommerce, have that customer ever bought anything else?” Well, they’ve never bought AirPods Pro, let’s say. Okay, now you can actually say, “Hey Oliver, let me add AirPods Pro discount coupon code to the receipt or on the front facing display and give them that discount.” So if they come back now they have a coupon printed on the receipt. So we really wanted to be able to do all of those cool cart recommendations or anything, but add that flexibility to the point of sale as well. So you’re able to tell Oliver, add a discount, add a customer to cart, do something based on what you know as a developer into Oliver. And that’s what I like to spend most of my time doing is unlock developers to do really, really cool stuff within the point of sale that traditionally nobody have ever been able to do at the point of sale, but only online.

Zach: So if you are a developer and you’re listening to this and you want to build stuff for the Oliver Point of Sale and get involved in this ecosystem or expand your existing products into this ecosystem, there’s information on the Oliver website. There’s developer documentation where you can see how some of this stuff works. And I’m sure Mathias would be happy to talk with you as well.

Mathias: All day long.

Zach: If there’s something where you’re interested in…

Carl: If you want a nerd on this shit, he’s got you covered.

Mathias: Absolutely.

Zach: Exactly. Well, that’s awesome. It’s really cool to see another ecosystem plugin existing alongside WooCommerce. And as my friend Jonathan Wold likes to say, ecosystem plugins are kind of a big piece of what the WordPress ecosystem has become, right? So this is an ecosystem within an ecosystem and it’s really awesome to see that that’s growing and that there’s demand for even more.

So it’s really neat technology. I’m excited about it. I love cool tech, right? And so when David reached out and started to explain to me what was going on, I was excited. Like I said, I wanted to build this and you did it. So really, really cool. I really appreciate you coming and taking the time to explain a little bit of the technical details behind how it all works and what some of the pitfalls were and the fun that went into building a solution like this. Obviously a single podcast episode is not enough to cover the whole journey because I’m sure it has been full of fun steps and missteps and things along the way, because they all are, right?

Mathias: That’s half the fun.

Zach: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the discovery of what the solution becomes. Once you build it, it becomes its own thing, right? And its journey may not be what you intend it to be. Just like a child. Right?

Mathias: Definitely. I got to say, one of the most exciting things is seeing what developers can do with us. There are some pretty crazy examples out there and really the things that we haven’t thought about that they’re able to build on top of it. That’s what wakes me up in the morning is when we’ve unlocked the developer to do something really cool from online to in store.

Zach: Well, that’s really cool. And there’s an expert program as well that you’re working on launching. So if this sounds like something that you as a listener want to add to what your agency offers, now is the time to get involved in the expert directory and start to really expand your offerings into the physical space. Which is really a cool opportunity. Man, I look forward to seeing what our audience does with this technology and where it goes from here. So do you have any final thoughts, Mathias or Carl to leave us with?

Mathias: Yeah, I would say any developer out there, we are bombarded every day with merchants that would like to tweak Oliver but are not able to do it themselves. So now that you bring up the experts from Oliver Experts, you don’t need to necessarily be an agency. A developer working from their basement or from Athens or wherever. We would very much like you to come in and help us build. We have a lot of merchants that are fine with paying for custom development or tweaking something to Oliver. So yeah, sign up and we would love to chat with you. It’s what gets us up in the morning.

Carl: That’s great. I don’t have any closing thoughts. It was just great hearing you two nerd out about it. I am not familiar with point of sales stuff at all. If you want a nerd out infrastructure though, I can do that all day. But I will agree that there’s something cool to be able to blend software with hardware. I talk about it a lot. I feel like when I did computer engineering, I feel I was just at the wrong time for that because now you can do so much.

I used to love chip design and things like that, and now you can do so much and just have a foundry in China build it. You can have… Before you needed an entire department budget to buy a 3D printer. So there’s just cool stuff now that I feel like I missed out a bit on. Where you can do this kind of blend of hardware and software that wasn’t as accessible, but that now somebody like you, you can just be like, “No, we’re getting into the hardware POS business.” And that’s completely reasonable for a developer to do actually. So I think that’s really cool.

Zach: Yeah, it’s an industry that traditionally has been controlled by this group of companies that have built traditional point of sale software. And when Square hit the market, it changed the industry because it enabled merchants to finally, for the first time really, control their point of sale. So this is really an extension of that. Of that movement that began with Square becoming a way that merchants can own their point of sale experience.

Before you had to go to a point of sale company or a register company and they would sell you your point of sale. If you ran a restaurant, you probably were going to end up on something like Aloha. And you’d have your touchscreen restaurant interface that you were able to do your point of sale with. But that had no concept of what the internet was. Just like the internet had no concept of what Aloha point of sale was.

So when these two worlds met, it really created opportunity that just didn’t exist before, not only for developers, but also for merchants to have more ownership of that experience because retail stores traditionally either had to staff their own IT department to build their own point of sale system, which happened a lot. Or they had to farm that work out to a company that would charge a $1000 to have a technician show up for a day to change some prices.

And so this world is still new. It’s the Wild West of this new merchant focused point of sale world, and it’s really cool to see something living in our ecosystem that does that. So thank you for building what I couldn’t.

Mathias: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Zach: How can people get in touch with you, Mathias?

Mathias: Well, I’m trying to be very approachable, so my email is MN@oliverpos.com or else hit our support line and our chat line and say, “I want to talk code.” And then I will jump in immediately, or some of our developers will as well. So yeah, anybody out there that want to talk about how they could bridge their current WooCommerce plugin or whatever, over to a physical environment too, we love chatting that.

Zach: Well, thank you so much for your time today. We’ll be back hopefully next month with another episode of the Woo DevChats for you. Not sure what our topic is going to be yet. If you have an idea for a topic and you want to submit that to us, just go to the Do the Woo website at dothewoo.io and there’s a form there you can fill out that Bob will get. That will let him know that you have some interest. So if you’re an agency owner doing cool things in the space and you want to talk the dev side of things, reach out. If you’re building plugins and you want to talk about the dev side of that, feel free to reach out as well. And as always, thank you for being a listener, but it’s been great having you Mathias, and have a great day.

Mathias: Yeah, again thanks for having me.

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