With the growth of an online business, syncing VirtueMart data with external systems becomes a priority.
We developed GPos-Sync, a standalone piece of software that is flexible enough to synchronize VirtueMart data back and forth from / to pretty much any system.

Since the birth of our retail store, we were in need of a synchronization software.
Both the checkout system at the retail store (aka Flexo) and VirtueMart were capable of stock management.

Keep in mind that the webshop usually keeps much more information that the retail checkout system!
VirtueMart holds article descriptions, ingredients, prices, images and all that in multiple languages thanks to JoomFish.

So, the first goal was to populate Flexo with all the articles present on the website so we can start selling offline.
We already had experience with exporting products from VirtueMart and we took this step a bit further.

We are in fact loading all VM products into simple Java classes thanks to Hibernate technologies. Classes are then exported in XML.
The XML file having a VirtueMart database layout can't be just injected as is into Flexo.
We have first to transform this VirtueMart XML layout into a Flexo XML layout. This is done thanks to XML and XSLT technologies.
The Flexo XML layout can now populate Flexo Java classes which will be stored in the Flexo database thanks to Hibernate again.

The whole process can be depicted like this:
VirtueMart DB (Hibernate) <-- VM Classes --> [VM XML] + XSLT + [Flexo XML] <-- Flexo Classes --> (Hibernate) Flexo DB

The same principles apply to synchronize retail store sales into VirtueMart to keep stocks in sync.
We are also able to synchronize Virtuemart user accounts and details...

Why passing through XML / XSLT will you tell me? Well because we need flexibility here!
There are thousands of retail checkout system in this world and this architecture proves to be flexible enough to adapt itself to all possibles cases.

Want to use GPos-Sync with a new checkout software?
All we need is the layout of the database and the creation of a new XSLT file for the data mapping between your system and VirtueMart.

We already applied this solution to many different systems with syccess.