Generally, there are just a handful of good ways to connect QuickBooks Point of Sale to an online shopping cart, same for QuickBooks desktop (QuickBooks Online will be covered later). You have to use middleware. Middleware is the software that translates the data between QuickBooks and your shopping cart.
Preferably you are going down this path with the horse in front of the cart. Meaning, do some research before building a website and then wanting to retroactively connect to QuickBooks as you’ll find that not all shopping carts will connect to QuickBooks without spending a lot of consulting dollars to make it work.
To make all this work, you need QuickBooks POS or QB desktop (Pro, Premier or Enterprise) or QB Online; a shopping cart and website and middleware. My personal favorite is QuickBooks POS with a connection to QB desktop, my own website hosted on my domain name using WordPress as a content manager and WooCommerce as my shopping cart.
I am going to focus on the middleware for this conversation. Both QuickBooks POS and QuickBooks financial software are similar in how they connect. Of course there are some differences that I’ll mention as needed.
A lot of the middleware out there provides similar functionality. They all offer comparable functionality in levels such as basic, pro, multistore, etc… And they are all priced as an ongoing subscription service.
This is not an all-inclusive list of middleware providers nor are they rated in order.
Webgility eCC: Webgility offers eCC for desktop versions of QBO and QB, and eCC Cloud for QBO. Offered as a subscription service with levels based on features and order volume. Sync with QBPOS for inventory quantity starts on the first level of Premium (a step above Lite). A bit pricey in my book but offers a boatload of integrated features. Webgility is also a well-established company with top-notch support. I think it fits well with a medium to large scale company with lots of sales volume in ecommerce.
11/10/2021 – if you use QuickBooks Point of Sale V19 and a webstore, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to Webgility and their integration. They have provided a great pricing structure that is super economical for new businesses and increases as your business grows in volume – that’s fair. My clients on it are loving it. Saves time and saves money; and if you have to call support – it’s a breeze and they are super helpful.
A while back, a very inexpensive WooCommerce connector called 61Extensions came out and was a hit but they had bad business management and went under. Some of its customers got together and bought the website and now point to a connector called MyWorksSync. A moderately priced subscription service connecting WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento (and others) to QBPOS and QB.
6/17/2020 – so far so good on using a new connector between QBPOS v18 and WooCommerce. It has a wordpress interface that talks to Intuit’s Web Connector that then transfers data to and from QBPOS. Their pricing is very reasonable and they actually answer their phones, respond to email, and provide a Slack account access.
11/10/2021 – after running MyWorksSync for a year with a couple clients, I wanted to review the software again. Personally, it works pretty well and the price is competitive. We had some BIG issues with the sync tool not being able to handle matrix items from QBPOS. Because of this, we had to look for new solutions or review old ones because if you deal with size and color variations, you would have to build the matrix in MyWorksSync and then sync down to QBPOS. While this may be OK for new businesses, it was a complicated mess with existing merchandise at the store and on the web. As such, QBPOS V19 now has direct integration with Webgility that works AWESOME. I recommend that path first and MyWorksSync second.
Atandra T-Hub: Atandra offers an online version for QBO and a desktop version for QBPOS and QB. Offered as a subscription service with various levels – note that you connect to QBPOS with the Pro version, you can’t sync inventory quantities until the Advanced level. You pay for features – not volume. Pricing is reasonable to me for the Advanced feature set. Atandra has been around for a long time and support is reasonable in its turnaround.
6/17/2020 update – It is disappointing to say this but Atandra’s support has slipped a lot. It has taken a lot of brow-beating to get them to respond, if they respond at all. T-Hub does not sync categories from QBPOS to WooCommerce – what a major fail! Just based on this lack of support – I can no longer recommend Atandra T-Hub.
Connex for QuickBooks: Connex is a subscription service with various levels – note that you can’t sync inventory quantities or attach to QBPOS until the Pro level. You pay for features and for order volume. For QBPOS, it uses a proprietary web connection to send data between QBPOS and your shopping cart. For QB, it uses Intuit’s Web Connector.
If you want an assist on getting this up and running for your business, give us a call at 843-936-0632 or email sales@mortonbusinessconsulting.com