Introducing the Point of Sale Foundation
Tags: bigcommerce, stripe, pointofsale, bigcommercedevelopment
Published: 2023-01-05 18:34:25


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/cywqx22hte48utw836bh.png)

_“Introducing an open-sourced point-of-sale app to unify the online and in-person payments experience with Stripe Terminal.”_

BigCommerce previously announced the release of the [Subscription Foundation](https://github.com/bigcommerce/subscription-foundation#readme) and now the [Point Of Sales Foundation](https://github.com/bigcommerce/point-of-sale-foundation/blob/main/README.md). You may be asking what the Foundations are.

To help you with your ecommerce journey, BigCommerce is now offering a faster, more flexible path to custom commerce solutions for enterprises. The BigCommerce Foundations are open-sourced apps that provide a base for enterprise merchants to create highly customized customer experiences with less upfront development work. 70% built by BigCommerce, merchants can customize 30% on top of our foundations with the help of developers and third-party agencies. This foundation means you get access to a base layer of open-source technology that’s easy to build on, so you can acquire the right capabilities faster.

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## What is the POS Foundation?
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In a nutshell, Point of Sale Foundations unifies your online and physical stores. By using Stripe Terminal as a point of sale solution you can connect your on-site and online business using Stripe’s POS hardware. Once connected, you can use the POS terminal to select products from your online store and accept in-person payments. This setup is great for ecommerce merchants who need to accept in-person payments.

POS Foundations accelerates your Stripe Terminal implementation by removing hundreds of hours of upfront work and offers a head start on building a customized POS solution that uses secure, pre-certified EMV card readers. Merchants can unify their online and offline channels and create experiences tailored to a variety of retail use cases and business models. With the POS Foundations, you also benefit from automatic reconciliation, cloud-based fleet management, and a single view of their customers and products.

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## What the POS Foundation Provides:
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- Merchant and employee onboarding experience
- POS Front-end
- PIN-entry login
- Category, product, and option selection
- Customer lookup and selection
- Connected terminals selection
- Integration to BigCommerce customer groups and promotions management (including automatic, customer group, order-based, and product-based discounts)
- Integration into APIs and webhooks
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## What the POS Foundation Gives You:
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- A faster path to POS customization
- Enable your omnichannel vision by bringing your in-store experience together with ecommerce and other key channels
- Less upfront development work so you can spend time on building standout in-store experiences
- Expansive possibilities beyond the limits of off-the-shelf POS solutions

Foundations takes Stripe Terminal to the next level by removing hundreds of hours of upfront development work. The POS Foundation is a manual connector app that uses a store API account. Customize your in-person payment experience with an open source point-of-sale application. Easily set up, manage, and use pre-certified Stripe card readers that ensure secure transactions to unify your online and offline channels for all kinds of retail use cases and business models. BPOS WisePOS E card readers are industry-certified and end-to-end encrypted to manage payment card data. Order readers from the Stripe Dashboard and have them shipped to a location of your choice.

While currently only available in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. We are looking to expand this foundation and would like to collaborate with interested agencies. If you would like to submit a PR for contribution, [you can do so here](https://developer.bigcommerce.com/docs/495a2058c70b4-pos-foundation). We also invite you to join other developers working with POS Foundations and the BigCommerce platform in our BigCommerceDevs Community space on Slack; if interested [apply here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeQApTpd4T9lEX7hPgUjTyoq0vb8UbiCiWseuurJjdMHGBaGQ/viewform).