Clover and Tuckly

Clover’s App Market model

Clover’s approach sits between Square’s open platform and Toast’s partner programme. Developers build against a sandbox without asking permission, but a production developer account is reviewed and approved by Clover, and apps reach restaurants through Clover’s App Market. For a restaurant, that means a Tuckly connection would show up as an app you install on your Clover account, authorise with OAuth and can remove the same way.

Clover’s documentation says production approval is granted per market and that a developer from any region may apply in any market. Clover lists twelve: the United States and Canada; the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands; Argentina, Brazil and Mexico; and Australia and Singapore.

What Clover is

Clover is a point-of-sale platform with its own hardware, sold widely through payment processors and banks, and an App Market of third-party software. Its REST API covers inventory items, orders and transactions, and Clover requires OAuth with expiring tokens for API access in every region. For an ordering site, the inventory and orders parts are what matter.

What the connection would do

Take a lunch order on your Tuckly site. Without the integration, the order is on your order screen and someone keys it into Clover so it prints and counts. With it:

• The order would be created in Clover through the orders API, so the kitchen and the reports see it as a normal sale.
• Items, variants, modifiers and prices would be read from Clover’s inventory into the ordering site, so a price change in the POS reaches customers without a second edit.
• An item marked unavailable in Clover would hide on the site, and the reverse if you prefer to manage availability from Tuckly during service.
• Status changes in Clover would flow back so pickup and delivery orders move along at the right moment.

Money would not pass through the connection. Online payments on your site settle through your gateway; Clover records the sale. Reconciling the two is bookkeeping, not integration.

What slows it down

Two things. First, Clover’s production approval is a review that Clover controls, and it is per market. An integration approved for the United States would need approval again for the United Kingdom or Australia. Second, expiring OAuth tokens are good security practice but mean a connection can occasionally need re-authorising, which the app has to handle gracefully so orders do not silently stop.

Neither is a reason not to build it. They are reasons the status on this page reads contact us rather than available, and why the build would start in whichever market asks first.

Until then

Direct orders work today, entered into Clover by hand. For a single outlet taking a few dozen direct orders a week, that is a small cost against what a marketplace commission would have been on the same orders; the commission calculator puts a number on it. When the re-entry becomes a bottleneck, the integration is the answer. If you run Clover and want it, tell us on the contact page which market you trade in.