What’s an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s a way for programs to communicate with each other. You’ll need some programming skills to use the API but our hope is people will create and share/sell applications that integrate with MerchantOS. For example a company that has web based rental software could integrate their application into ours and you could then use their product if you wanted to add rental capabilities to our point of sale system.
Getting Started
We’ve created a developers page and a set of API documentation. If you have any questions just call or email support and we’ll be happy to help out.
Some Examples Of How The API Could Be Used
All of these will require a programmer, but for someone who has experience using web service APIs, this should be fairly simple.
- Display stock levels and price on your website.
- Build a web application for customer’s to look up their workorders or sales history.
- Synchronize your MerchantOS items with your Ecommerce site.
- Build a utility to import your purchase orders into MerchantOS.
- Create a custom integration with an accounting system.
What The API Can’t Do
The API can be used to do an almost unlimited number of things. But it isn’t magic. Here are some things it can not do.
- Change the interface to MerchantOS. The API only works with the data from your account. It can’t change how MerchantOS itself looks.
- Get notifications of events in MerchantOS. We hope to add this at some point.