How To Use a CRM POS System To Grow Sales (2026)

Customers don’t shop in a straight line anymore. They browse online, buy in-store, return by mail—and expect brands to remember everything in between. 

So when your POS and CRM systems don’t work together, customers are like strangers at checkout. Your team is stuck sending duplicate emails, missing context on support calls, and flying blind during the most critical moments in retail sales. 

A CRM POS fixes that by creating a single customer record that updates automatically across online and in-store transactions. Ahead, you’ll learn the basics of a CRM POS system, the benefits of integrations, and how to roll out a CRM strategy on Shopify POS. 

What is a CRM POS system?

To fully understand a CRM POS system, first get to know how the two operate separately:

• A customer relationship management (CRM) system is the database used to manage customer relationships for your business. It captures customer profiles, interactions, service history, segmentation, and life cycle status, so teams can get a single view of customers and act on it. 
• A point-of-sale (POS) system is the in-store checkout system. It processes transactions and captures in-person order details while syncing with your inventory management software. 

Now, a CRM POS system combines these two so they work as one. POS transactions automatically update the customer record, and the record is available at checkout. It creates a unified customer profile that combines ecommerce, POS, and other first-party data into one view. 

Retail today is demanding. Customers move across channels—like your online store, physical store, social profiles, and email—and they expect you to remember them. To make this possible, retailers take a unified commerce approach to operations management. 

With unified commerce, product, order, and customer data flow from a single source of truth, ensuring stock, pricing, and customer profiles are consistent across marketing and support. Unified data is tied to benefits like higher omnichannel growth and lower total cost of ownership when data stays in sync. 

When CRM and POS don’t talk to each other, customer data fractures into silos. For example, you may end up with duplicate profiles and send emails or direct mailers to the same person, wasting your marketing spend. Or when a customer calls with an issue, a support agent cannot see their history with your company, which leads the customer to repeat their entire history every time, and quickly becomes frustrating. 

In PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 52% of consumers said they stopped using or buying from a brand because of a bad experience, and 29% stopped specifically because of a poor customer experience. A CRM POS system helps you deliver a consistent customer experience to build deeper relationships and grow your retail business.

The benefits of integrating POS and CRM systems

Get a single view of the customer

When your CRM and POS are integrated, understanding your customers becomes easier. The system creates a single golden record for every interaction they have with your business. 

According to Deloitte’s 2025 US Retail Outlook report, omnichannel shoppers spend 1.5 times more per month than single-channel shoppers. If you want to drive revenue and improve customer satisfaction, a unified view is essential to win over shoppers who move between online and offline touchpoints. 

In store, that means:

• Returns and exchanges are easier because staff can pull up a customer’s profile and start a refund or exchange from the POS.
• If your store uses a credit system for returns, associates can automatically apply it at the next checkout. 
• Staff can also see purchase history and loyalty status and tailor interactions accordingly. 

For Mizzen+Main, CRM and POS integration is what makes its loyalty program work. Connecting Shopify POS with Yotpo and the retail CRM Endear, store teams can see exactly how many points a customer has earned online and apply those credits right at the register. They even use this data to send win-back messages to people who usually shop in-store but haven’t visited the website in a year.

As Natalie Shaddick, Mizzen+Main’s VP of ecommerce, puts it, “The experience and benefits that customers have in their profile online is the exact same within the store.” 

“Shopify allows you to create a very large omnichannel business at a relatively low cost,” she says, “and its ease of use really minimizes the burden on your team.” 

Improve clienteling and personalization

Retail clienteling means using customer data on the sales floor or at checkout to sell in a personalized way. 

Store associates use purchase history, past visits, interests, and feedback to create experiences like offering a preferred beverage while you shop, or recommending a product that goes with the boots they bought last month. The goal is to make smart recommendations that feel relevant to a customer instead of giving them the usual spiel. 

Western-wear retailer Tecovas uses custom POS UI extensions to surface clienteling information natively at checkout. With details on hand, such as boot size preferences and purchase history, directly in Shopify POS at checkout, staff can deliver authentic, memorable experiences that build long-term relationships. They can also upsell higher-end products or cross-sell related items like socks or boot care kits. 

📚Read: Shopify POS Customization: 3 Use Cases from Top Retailers

Create automated loyalty and retention marketing

Brand loyalty is a fragile thing. In 2025, only 44% of global consumers consider themselves “very” or “extremely” loyal to brands, down from 48% the previous year, according to Twilio’s 2025 State of Customer Engagement Report.

Nonetheless, loyalty programs are the main reason customers stick with a brand, provided the experience is seamless. The traditional approach to omnichannel loyalty relied on a standalone POS system and clunky middleware. Customers’ rewards didn’t update in real time, and staff couldn’t identify what a customer could redeem. 

With a CRM POS system, the real-time data guarantees that any event, online or in-store, updates automatically and becomes usable marketing data. This lets you automate touchpoints that acknowledge customers’ stages in their purchase journey, such as:

• Location-based outreach. Since Shopify POS profiles include location-specific activity, you can target loyal customers who live near a specific store with invites to exclusive in-store events. 
• Contextual follow-ups. No one likes receiving a generic thank you email. Now, you can send automated, location-aware messages like: “Thanks for visiting our SoHo store today. Here’s a special offer for your next visit.”
• Behavioral triggers. Integrations with tools like Klaviyo allow you to sync the entire order history and marketing preferences. Your automated SMS and email flows can be triggered by actual purchase activity, which can increase sales.

Scaling personal relationships is tough, but it’s where automation shines. Skin First linked its ecommerce and CRM using Shopify Flow, which allowed them to tag and track customer behavior across every touchpoint. 

The unified view improved retention, resulting in a 62% return customer rate. It’s proof that when you use a CRM POS to make customers feel seen, they’re far more likely to come back.

Native Shopify features vs. dedicated CRM integrations

Utilizing Shopify’s built-in customer management

For many retail businesses, Shopify’s native CRM tools get the job done efficiently. Right from the POS interface, associates can create and manage customer profiles that store contact information, purchase history, and preferences. 

The profiles include contact information like shipping addresses, tax-exempt status, and marketing preferences, as well as custom metafields for data like birthdays or shoe sizes. 

Associates can view all sales transactions on the POS Orders screen to process seamless refunds, exchanges, or reissue receipts. For internal communication, staff can use Order Notes at checkout or the Shopify Timeline in the admin to log non-customer-facing comments.

A unified system of record gives your team the same memory. When a customer walks in, your staff isn’t starting from zero. They can see that this person usually shops online but prefers to return in-store, or that they’ve been waiting for a specific shoe size to restock.

When your systems talk to each other, your team spends less time acting like tech support and more time acting like experts.

When to upgrade to a third-party CRM

At some point in your growth, you may end up needing to upgrade your tech stack. Shopify covers the unified profile as standard, however, dedicated CRMs like HubSpot and Klaviyo can help run complex marketing automation and account-level pipelines. 

Some signs that tell you it’s time to upgrade include:

• Marketing automation gets complex, and you need personalized messaging at scale. 
• Sales needs pipelines, tasks, and account-level workflows. 
• Your staff needs more sophisticated clienteling tools. 

A dedicated CRM like Endear can enable workflows, like tracking WhatsApp conversations or attributing a digital sale to an in-store associate. As Leigh Sevin, founder of Endear, explains, the goal of an omnichannel strategy is to create a data-driven environment in which “salespeople are still an incredible resource.” 

Overall, the website and the physical store stop competing and start working in tandem to design a customer’s autonomous path to purchase. For brands like Gorjana, this high-touch approach leads to a 20% higher average order value (AOV). 

Top CRM POS integrations for Shopify

Endear

Endear is a popular retail CRM and clienteling platform designed to help store teams drive proactive selling. It integrates directly with Shopify, so all data stays unified between your store and the CRM. 

Best fit: Multistore or high-touch retail brands where clienteling is a growth strategy.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing automation that positions itself as an AI-first B2C CRM on top of Shopify commerce data. Klaviyo’s Shopify setup centers on connecting customer profile and order data so brands can run targeted messaging and enable onsite tracking events.

Best fit: Businesses that want life-cycle automation—like post-purchase, winback, and VIP campaigns—anchored to Shopify order and customer data.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular CRM platform for marketing, sales, and service. With a Shopify integration built around structured data sync and CRM-native workflows, it’s a good option for B2B and enterprise brands. 

Best fit: Businesses with a sales/service motion like B2B, high-consideration products, or heavy support.

Shopify Global ERP Program

Shopify’s certified program for ERP connectors offers curated apps that integrate Shopify with enterprise ERPs. For large retailers, the Global ERP Program is a way to keep commerce and operations aligned with real-time syncing of orders, inventory management, and financial data. 

Best fit: High-volume merchants where ERP integration is required for operational control at scale. 

Implement a CRM strategy on Shopify POS

1. Audit and clean your data 

A CRM strategy falls apart if customer records are messy. Standardize what complete means for a profile—name, email, phone, and a small set of custom fields like preferences or sizing. Enrich in-store profiles with structured fields that can be added to new or existing profiles in Shopify POS. 

Next, remove duplicates and normalize segmentation fields. Shopify’s customer management tools support bulk editing key fields like Tags, Email, and Accepts email marketing. They also support the use of CSV import/export for larger data cleanup.

2. Set up your integrations

Unified commerce depends on Shopify serving as the hub where online and in-person activity is recorded in a single record. On Shopify POS, the Orders screen displays all orders so a single order history can drive CRM workflows like retention and service.

From there, connect the stack in the simplest way possible:

• Native controls. For POS Pro locations, required checkout information can be configured so staff consistently capture customer details during checkout, useful for attribution, clienteling, and marketing. 
• Apps and embedded workflows. Shopify’s POS UI extensions allow CRM-like features inside the POS interface, including the Customer details screen. You can also use one of the apps mentioned above that integrate with your store. 
• APIs and webhooks. The Admin GraphQL API exposes core objects like Order, and webhooks keep external CRMs updated in near real time. 

3. Train staff

Your staff is the most important touchpoint between your product and your customers. When employees know how to use your CRM POS, they are your best salespeople and brand ambassadors. 

Staff are more likely to collect information when they see it as a benefit to the customer. Explain to staff the how and why, focusing on:

• Seamless returns: Explain that a digital profile means no receipt is needed for future exchanges.
• Personalized loyalty: Show how data capture unlocks rewards and early access to new drops.
• Post-purchase support: Ensure the customer can be reached if there is a problem with their specific order.

Train your team to use CRM notes and purchase history to be helpful. For example, you could train them to say something like: “I see you bought the indigo denim last month; we just got a shirt in that pairs perfectly with that wash.” That may sound less invasive than saying, “I see you spent $400 on Tuesday at our other location.”