User stories

Tekla: POS and omnichannel commerce with Medusa

Jun 08, 2023 by

Shahed Nasser and Nicklas Gellner

How Tekla built a POS system using Medusa.

Tekla & Agilo: POS and omnichannel commerce with Medusa

Tekla ventured into physical retail in early April 2023, accompanied by a point-of-sale (POS) app to bring delightful in-store experiences to staff and customers. The app was engineered by Tekla’s implementation partner, Agilo, as an iOS application built with Expo and React Native on top of Medusa. Using Medusa’s modular building blocks, Tekla successfully launched a modern omnichannel experience in record time, laying a solid foundation for future expansion and innovation.

A Medusa-powered POS

Medusa already powers Tekla’s global e-commerce sales in more than 50 countries. With its headless API, Medusa enabled Tekla to reuse its existing commerce infrastructure to handle in-store operations through the POS app, unlocking omnichannel functionalities without additional effort.

“
Our priority was creating a seamless omnichannel experience. The new POS app enables a customer-centric experience where staff can move around the store, take orders on the spot, and leverage the knowledge of customers’ previous online purchases to provide personalized guidance. All with a strong on-brand feel.
Kristoffer Juhl
//
CEO at Tekla

Shipping the system as an iOS application eliminated the clunky-ness of traditional POS systems. This allows staff to be present with the customer, yet provide cutting-edge features like:

Endless aisle experiences where customers can purchase items in-store and have them delivered to their home in case of stock-outs or customer preference.
Clienteling allowing clerks to quickly lookup customers’ profiles to understand their preferences based on existing customer data.
A barcode scanner to quickly search Medusa products, add them to orders using Draft Orders, and offer personalized discounts with Dynamic Discounts.
Provide exchanges, returns, and claims across online and in-store purchases.
View inventory details across store and warehouse locations.
Send receipt directly to email post-purchase using the SendGrid plugin.
Accept payments through Stripe Terminal as a Medusa payment processor.

“
A US customer in the Copenhagen store can have their items shipped directly to their home instead of bringing them on the plane back. With Medusa, it was surprisingly simple to build delightful customer experiences like this.
Josip Matić
//
Agilo’s lead developer on the project

Agilo used Medusa’s modular building blocks to create Tekla’s new POS application.

Using Medusa’s Sales Channel and Multi-warehouse modules, Agilo was able to quickly create a seamless omnichannel experience across both in-store and online purchases.

Expanding to Omnichannel Experiences

A big challenge when opening a store is the added complexity of logistics and operations. With the new store, Tekla had to track inventory in their existing distribution center and the new store’s stockroom while ensuring that the store’s stock would not be used to fulfill global orders placed online.

These complexities were easily solved with Medusa's Sales Channels and Multi-warehouse modules which give Tekla control of associations between stock locations and sales channels.

“
We were surprised with how easy it was to set up all the necessary features for the POS app and the omnichannel experience. From the sales channels to the multi-warehouse features, all of it was easy to integrate with Tekla’s existing backend.
Josip Matić
//
Agilo’s lead developer on the project

The Agilo team was simply able to open a new sales channel for the Copenhagen Store and associate the store’s stock location with it. Tekla also chose to make its distribution center stock available to the store to enable endless aisle functionalities.

With Medusa’s multi-warehouse modules, Tekla can also get a real-time overview of inventory movements, levels, and stock reservations across locations. Having this information at the fingertips of store staff ensures that they can always give the best service to visiting customers.

A Scalable foundation

Tekla's commerce stack composes several systems, each chosen for its ability to meet Tekla's needs best. Medusa's developer tools simplify the complexity of operating a composable stack like this. For example, Medusa React helped integrate the POS app into Tekla's setup by allowing Agilo to reuse code from the storefront in the React Native app.

“
Being able to use familiar technologies and Medusa’s intuitive API was a great win for speed and developer experience. We are really happy with how things came together.
Josip Matić
//
Agilo’s lead developer on the project

An open commerce stack ensures that Tekla can continue to create wonderful omnichannel experiences that delight customers and deliver great business results. With a solid foundation for point of sale (POS), opening new retail locations will now require only creating sales channels and stock locations from Medusa's admin dashboard.