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Fast product and customer search across a large Magento catalogue.
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4x4AT / Custom PHP POS / Call-centre sales
A custom ecommerce POS for phone, trade and B2C orders.
First implemented around Magento for 4x4AT, this portable PHP sales platform supports custom quotes, customer-group pricing, credit accounts and Stripe deposit payments—and can connect to other API-enabled ecommerce platforms.
One staff workflow / several systems of record
Sales staffSearch / quote / sell
4x4AT POSTransaction intent
MagentoCommerce record
StripePayment authority
01Phone + tradeStaff-assisted selling
02Customer groupsCustom pricing and terms
03Credit + depositsFlexible payment flows
04PHP applicationMagento-first, adaptable
01
The problem
A normal ecommerce checkout could not support the way the sales team actually sold.
Sales staff needed to serve both trade and B2C customers during a phone call, applying the right prices and credit terms while preserving quotes, deposits and Magento order integrity.
Custom quoting
Save, reopen, revise and complete negotiated customer quotes later.
Customer-group pricing
Apply the correct trade or B2C price and commercial terms.
Trade credit accounts
Create orders against agreed credit and track the outstanding balance.
Stripe deposits
Take full or deposit payments securely during a telephone order.
Store-aware selling
Respect storefront, currency, customer-group and VAT rules.
Competing sources of truth
The staff-facing total had to survive Magento collectors, third-party extensions, Stripe and final order creation.
02 / The solution
A Magento-native POS with a portable PHP application layer
The delivered integration uses Magento catalogue, customer, quote, tax, inventory and order services. Its staff workflow is separated in PHP so another ecommerce platform could replace that commerce boundary through equivalent APIs.
01
Customer
Load the correct B2C or trade account and pricing group.
02
Search
Resolve store-aware products, options and services.
03
Quote
Build a restorable transaction with negotiated pricing.
04
Pay
Authorise Stripe deposits, account credit or other tenders.
05
Order
Create Magento order, invoice and transaction records.
06
Trace
Link the quote, customer, payment and final order.
Staff experience
A fast browser cart for call-centre and account sales
The frontend gives staff specialised catalogue and customer search, reusable custom quotes, customer-group pricing, shipping calculation and complete transaction restoration.
That simple surface hides a much more involved order pipeline responsible for translating staff intent into Magento-native commercial records.
Store-aware product and customer data
Trade and B2C customer-group pricing
Configurable, bundle, service and option products
Custom quotes that can be saved, revised and restored
Stripe PaymentIntent processing for phone and deposit sales
Trade credit accounts, balances and purchase orders
Invoice, transaction and traceability records
Temporary stock bypass with configuration restoration
Detailed payment and operational logging
Standalone platform architecture
The sales workflow is the product. Magento is one commerce adapter.
The 4x4AT implementation proves the workflow against a complex Magento estate. The PHP application can be adapted to another ecommerce platform when catalogue, customer, pricing, inventory and order APIs are available.
Reusable staff experience
Customer search, quotes, pricing, deposits and credit workflows stay consistent for the sales team.
Replaceable commerce boundary
Platform-specific services translate products, customers, inventory and completed orders.
Business-specific configuration
Pricing rules, payment options and approval flows can be adapted to each business rather than forcing a generic POS model.
03 / The hardest engineering challenge
Financial reconciliation was the product.
Magento, the POS, shipping collectors, payment providers and store-credit extensions can all calculate the same transaction differently.
Repeated quote collection can change shipping, tax, credit allocation or grand totals after a salesperson has already agreed a price. The system therefore treats reconciliation as an explicit stage, not an incidental side effect of saving the order.
Agreed total
=Recorded total
Across POS / Magento / Stripe01
POS-displayed versus Magento-calculated totals
02
VAT-inclusive and VAT-exclusive shipping
03
Penny rounding across tax and line items
04
Partial payments, deposits and overpayments
05
Store-credit allocation and outstanding balances
06
Order, invoice, amount-paid and amount-due state
07
Duplicate Stripe confirmations and interrupted flows
Payment safety
Idempotency reduces the risk that a repeated Stripe confirmation becomes a duplicate Magento order.
Correct totals matter more than clean demos.
See the operational outcome04
The outcome
One operational layer for staff-led sales across multiple stores
No unverified revenue or efficiency figures have been added. The defensible result is a unified workflow with Magento retained as the commerce record and Stripe as payment authority.
AreaOperational complexityDelivered state
Phone salesSeparate catalogue, quote and payment stepsOne call-centre transaction flow
Customer pricingTrade and B2C terms interpreted manuallyCustomer-group prices and terms applied in context
Payment stateMultiple tender paths to coordinateStripe deposits, trade credit and mixed payment methods
Order integrityRisk of drift between systemsExplicit total reconciliation before order creation
TraceabilityQuotes, payments and orders difficult to followLinked quote-to-order and payment records
Separate website project
The Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration is its own case study
4x4AT's customer-facing website is a separate project: a performance-led Magento 2 multi-store migration with a custom theme, predominantly bespoke modules and WMS plugins. The POS connects to that estate, but it is a distinct staff-sales product with potential beyond Magento.
Read the website migration case study05 / Honest retrospective
Trade-offs worth being explicit about
The system grew around consequential business rules. Its next phase should preserve that correctness while reducing coupling and increasing testability.
Direct Magento integration
Bootstrapping Magento unlocked its existing catalogue and commerce logic quickly, but tightly coupled the POS to the Magento environment.
Responsive browser state
A browser-based cart kept the staff workflow fast, while also placing important in-progress state on the client.
Correctness before elegance
As business rules expanded, large PHP and JavaScript modules accumulated. Payment and total integrity took priority over ideal modularity.
Future direction
Make the payment boundary easier to change, test and observe
Centralised server-side authentication and CSRF protection
Clearer services for checkout, quoting, payments and reporting
Server-side validation for every submitted price and permission
Contract tests around Magento quote-to-order conversion
Automated deposit, credit, shipping VAT and rounding scenarios
Webhook-based Stripe recovery for interrupted checkouts
Environment-based Magento bootstrap configuration
Stronger payment-to-order observability and alerting
Have a commerce workflow that standard software cannot handle?
Let’s map the operational rules, payment state and platform boundaries before choosing what to build.
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