Open for business – 4 easy ways Open Platforms help drive partner revenue

Partnering with an Open Platform POS vendor for increased business opportunity

Innovative retailers understand the benefits of an Open Platform POS and retail management system. They know Open APIs give them the flexibility and control they need to satisfy the ever-changing demands of the retail business.

But what about the partner eco-system – how does an Open Platform make sense to partners, value-added resellers, alliance partners and developers?

Read how partner TRC Solutions helped retailer Evergreen integrate iVend and SAP.

If you’re looking to partner with a retail platform vendor, why choose that uses an Open APIs? Here’s the top 4 reasons why iVend partners love working with our Open Platform.

Integration services

For our service provider partners, offering integration skills, Open Platforms offer a greater opportunity to add value and drive significant revenue.  Many retailers purchase our POS with a view to implementing it in conjunction with an ERP, CRM or other existing systems such as payroll, data security, operations and payment processing.

If the retail system is a closed, proprietary one, integrations need to be done by the vendor. But with Open programming interfaces (APIs), the customer or their partner has access to the ‘hooks’ into the system and can do the integration work themselves. Client’s love having the choice of choosing their integration partner, rather than being tied to the vendor, and for our services partners, this offers a great opportunity to deliver valuable services.

Development Services

No matter how good the functionality of a retail system, individual businesses will always have their own operational requirements that may not be met by the ‘vanilla’ version of the software. They may need modifications to functionality or whole new modules. A jewellery store might need a specialist module to manage repairs, a bookstore might need to manage bookings for an author signing event, a curtain store might want a module to estimate the amount of fabric needed based on the customer’s window measurements and type of curtains wanted.

Many of our partners are developers, who see the opportunity to offer their services to build these modules. The retailer knows that he can ask them to develop a piece of software to his exact specifications, safe in the knowledge that he will be able to integrate it fully into his existing core application. Open APIs give developer partners a wider market for development work and increased revenue opportunity.

Extend your own platform

We have partners who are software vendors themselves, with their own products. They understand that our Open API retail platform gives them the opportunity to extend theirs. They can embed iVend functionality into their offering. This ‘white labelling’ approach allows them to significantly increase the functionality of their existing software offering through integration, rather than development from scratch. It allows them to complement their expertise with ours.  One, for example, might have a great payments system, but want to offer a complete POS and payment end to end solution. By partnering with iVend and taking advantage of our Open Platform APIs, he has the opportunity to integrate iVend functionality into his payments product and significantly increase its value, and the range of clients he can attract.

Offer innovation

Some of our software vendor partners are super-innovative, bringing new, often specialist, technology to the retail market. For example, a partner might have an innovative product in the field of fraud protection, or an offer for micro-verticals. For them, partnering with an Open API platform vendor gives an unparalleled opportunity to expand their market from their niche to a far broader range of clients than they could on their own. By partnering with a well-established, Open Platform vendor, and integrating their specialist offer within it, they make it easier for more customers to access and use their software.

iVend has always valued strong collaboration with its partner network, which includes Value Added Resellers offering implementation and support services; VAR Developers, technology specialists who extend the iVend platform and Global Alliance partners who integrate their own product with the iVend suite.

No matter which type of integration or development partner you are, choosing to work with an Open Platform vendor like iVend makes sound business sense and delivers our partners the opportunity to increase their software and services revenue.

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