Making omnichannel retail a reality: Why the future of POS is headless

Unifying offline and online experiences is often one of the toughest challenges facing retailers - but also one of the biggest opportunities. Both come with their own strengths: the flexibility of online commerce means endless opportunities for personalization, while in-store offers a unique, immersive experience. But with the right point-of-sale system, retailers can marry both, and finally make omnichannel retail a reality. 

In this blog post, we’ll cover:

A point-of-sale system refers to the hardware and software involved in helping customers purchase products. Many people associate POS solely with checkout or payment software, but a reliable and future-proofed POS system should consolidate various data sources, for example linking to your inventory, CRM, or promotion and loyalty software. This is key to accessing more precise customer data and gaining a better understanding of your customers and their spending patterns.

The POS market is highly diverse and segmented, with each solution offering different functionality. But the industry is also dominated by several large corporations, who offer legacy-led monolithic POS systems that make any customizations or additional functionality hard to integrate. This makes buying, integrating and maintaining point-of-sale systems a huge headache, particularly for enterprise companies with large networks of shops.

Because of the constraints from monolithic systems, there’s a growing trend to modernize the point-of-sale - with what Forrester calls a “new generation” of POS applications. “By judiciously exploiting cloud and mobile distributes data and functionality for secure reliability”, the point-of-sale goes “from transaction to experience”.

Forward-thinking brands in particular are turning to modular-based or headless POS solutions, and breaking out features such as reporting, price calculation and promotions from their monolithic POS. Companies can build their ideal POS stack from the ground up - adopting a best-of-breed approach to the products or vendors they shop from, and embedding scaleability and flexibility into their workflows.  

From a technical standpoint, a headless approach means decoupling the front-end (user interface) from the back-end (data management and processing) of the POS system. By decoupling the front- and back-end, a headless POS system enables easy integration with other systems and services, such as inventory management, CRM, analytics tools, promotion platforms and marketing automation platforms.

Modernizing the point-of-sale system is crucial to being able to react to customers’ actions in real-time - immediately recognizing purchases, updating loyalty points or status, and ensuring the user is recognized & celebrated across channels. But the benefits of real-time also help avoid financial and reputational damage: namely fraud control by instantaneous redemption, ensuring only valid customers redeem offers, and immediately rolling back earned benefits for returned items. It also helps manage offline periods in-store, through locally-stored promotion data to validate during offline periods. 

As omnichannel becomes a bigger focus for our clients, we’ve worked on a range of different POS integrations to make omnichannel promotions a reality for them. Each integration is fully-customized to our clients’ needs and tech stack, meaning no two POS integration with Talon.One looks the same. However, they usually fall into one of three categories: 

So, what does this look like in practice? Here’s how we’ve done it for leading european retailer Twinset. 

Twinset is an accessible luxury womenswear brand, with a booming e-commerce business and close to 100 retail stores across Europe. The brand was looking to build a truly omnichannel strategy that unified their online and offline offerings, and turned to Talon.One to help with implementing omnichannel promotions. Twinset was looking for a solution that would:  

Using Talon.One, Twinset was able to revamp its sales campaigns and finally start creating campaigns and promotions that could either be used online or within their physical shops. To make this happen from a system integration point of view, Talon.One needed to speak to different systems in Twinset’s tech stack:

For Daniele Nigro, Chief Information Officer at Twinset, implementing a one-time set-up for omnichannel campaigns instead of separate set-ups for physical and digital channels has been a real game changer. 

Working with Talon.One also means Twinset has been able to remove at least two middleware from their operating system - not only saving dev time and on-going costs, but also increasing efficiency across the business.