This month we check in with Vice President of Engineering Nathan Horter. Nate’s primary job is to make sure that your vendors are seamlessly integrated with MerchantOS, so as to cause you as little pain as possible. Nate also works on the back end infrastructure of our software, ensuring that everything is running smoothly behind the scenes.

What are you working on lately that customers might be affected by?

I’m currently working on overhauling our Shopify integration to improve it’s efficiency and squash some bugs. There shouldn’t be a huge difference in functionality once this update is released, but we will have solved most of the bugs that people have reported to us about the Shopify integration.

I’m also working on fleshing out some missing functionality in our API and starting on implementing webhooks. This will add Sale write capability to our API, which is a much needed feature for several integrations people are working on. Webhooks will allow our users to send notifications from our system to other web based services when certain actions are taken (like when an item is saved, or a transaction is completed, etc).

What’s your big idea for the future (that you’re willing to share)?

The biggest thing we’re working toward right now is separating the backend data (the numbers, and information stored in our system) from the front end representation (the experience that our users have interacting with the system). This allows us to be more flexible in creating our front end design and gives our users the opportunity to adjust the front end to their needs more easily. It’s a slow process, but it means that our software will become more scalable, flexible, and robust.

What is one thing you want every customer to know about you?

I’m always interested in helping our users get their vendors integrated with our system. It usually works best if a retailer talks to the vendor about integrating with MerchantOS. It’s difficult for us to get our foot in the door and convince them that integrating is in everyone’s best interest. Having a retailer, who does business with them, ask them to integrate makes more of an impact. If you’ve talked with a vendor and they are interested in integrating, have them contact me at nate@merchantos.com or 866-554-2453 ext. 95.