Getting started 📚
A friendly guide to help our retail partners get started with introducing Pendoo to their brick-and-mortar stores. The real new era of retail awaits, so let's get going 🚀
🔬What's Pendoo?
In Latin? Well, pendo relates to the concept of value. And Pendoo? Think of it as value added, or value+, if you will. We have added an extra O, you see...
On the face of it, Pendoo is a scan-and-go technology. It allows retail consumers to use their mobile device to scan product barcodes, add them to their digital basket and ultimately check-out. All on their device.
Pendoo is distributed as a web-application. From a consumer-perspective, this means that we eliminate the need for a native application download, such as an iOS or Android application. While we appreciate a big part of the consumer audience have grown to like native applications, in this instance we feel that the saying there's a time and a place is quite fitting. Our priorities are such that a download requirement would hinder our barrier-less setup.
Ultimately, we aim at making it as easy as possible for retail customers to complete a checkout as quickly and painlessly as possible. All the while, retail staff are reallocated onto shop-floor-critical tasks — assisting and actually selling to customers, instead of being stuck behind a screen.
Let's re-think retail. Let's re-build it around a key pillar: human interaction. Let's promote human ingenuity and let's not confine our retail staff behind a screen — portable or not.
Pendoo integrates seamlessly with Shopify in the form of a custom app. As a true plug-and-play solution, integrating Pendoo takes less than 5 minutes and requires no additional work. We are currently working on introducing stable integrations with other popular platforms such as Lightspeed and Squarespace.
📨Feedback and support
Please report any issues, usability improvements, or feature requests to our sales and development teams.
You can also always email us at info@pendoo.io.
Installation 📦
Get Pendoo up and running in your store in under 5 minutes. No developer needed. No hardware required.
To install the app, a Shopify account with an active Shopify shop is required. You must either be the shop owner or have the appropriate permissions to carry out the installation.
👩🌾Merchant account
First things first — go ahead and create your merchant account. Every plan starts with a free 30-day Enterprise trial. No credit card required.
🔌Shop connection
A Pendoo merchant account is required prior to connecting your shop.
Log into your account and head to your dashboard. Enter your domain and click Connect. Establishing a connection can take up to 3 minutes to complete.
The initial connection sets up a 2-way communication channel used exclusively between you, the retailer, and us, the sales channel. This channel is created on a per-retailer basis to ensure data security and integrity.
The domain can be your custom Shopify domain (e.g. my-store.com) or your permanent Shopify address (e.g. my-store.myshopify.com).
🏗App installation
An initial shop connection is required prior to installing the app.
If the connection has been made successfully, your dashboard's Connected shop card will be updated. Click Install app — this is where the magic starts.
To process orders and route them to the correct location, Pendoo requires access scopes around products, customers, orders, locations and fulfillments. These are explicitly requested during installation. Questions? info@pendoo.io.
👾QR Code placement
Your customers scan a QR code to launch the Pendoo web-app. You'll find your store's QR code(s) in your Pendoo dashboard.
Strategic placement is key. Depending on your store layout, this could be a single large QR code at the entrance, one per product section, or at every checkout point. The goal is frictionless access — your customers should never have to search for where to pay.
After all, we are trying to make things easier, not complicate them 😌
Features ✨
We've worked with retailers across markets with widely different needs. Below are the features that emerged from listening to them — built to streamline operations without adding overhead.
Introducing new software almost always creates overhead. Let us take care of the admin while your customers shop. Below are the key features that keep things running without you worrying about a thing.
Every market has different popular payment methods. Beyond Apple Pay and Google Pay, maybe you want to accept instalments via Klarna? Or MobilePay for Denmark and Finland? We strive to be flexible regardless of geography.
Default methods include Apple Pay and Google Pay. Missing a method? Let us know at info@pendoo.io.
Regardless of how prominent the English language is, localisation has been proven to increase customer satisfaction and revenue. As Pendoo enters new markets, we work closely with our retail partners on localising the checkout experience.
After all, Pendoo er utrolig!
Upon a successful transaction, a customer record is created or updated in your Shopify admin. The user's email is used for a look-up — if a record is found, the order is appended to their history. Otherwise, a new record is created.
Running a Shopify shop with multiple locations? We don't just blindly fulfill orders — we route each order to the location where the sale took place, update the fulfillment order's assigned location, and fulfill it accordingly.
Your reports have never looked neater 🧹
Set your brand elements — starting with your logo — to determine how the Pendoo checkout appears to your customers. You can even use your own domain as a Pendoo subdomain, making it clear that mobile self-checkout is an extension of your brand's shopping experience.
Collect customer reviews at checkout. Gather invaluable feedback with a non-intrusive review form. Decide whether you'd like Pendoo to follow up with customers whose reviews are less than excellent — or engage with them yourself, directly.
A disappointed customer presents you with an opportunity to win them over. We give you all the tools to do just that — turning disappointment into brand loyalty.
Fuel your checkout how you see fit. Control the fields you collect during checkout — an order tag, a referral field, a discount code. Tie checkout fields to specific locations for targeted offers at newly opened sites.
Product enablement gives you precise control over which products customers can purchase through Pendoo's mobile checkout. Curate your catalog, tailor availability to inventory or promotions, and adapt quickly to market shifts in real time.
Pendoo collaborates with leading anti-theft solution providers, including Nedap, to ensure robust protection for retail partners. Using RFID or magnetic tags? We're interested to hear your approach and ready to devise a secure plan. Get in touch.
Feeling extra? 🤸
Bonus details, barcode formats, and known limitations — for when you want to know everything.
🔍Barcode support
Depending on the legal realm within which your store locations operate, your products' Universal Product Codes (UPCs) or European Article Numbers (EANs) will need to comply with the relevant standards.
Typically, UPCs are used in retail settings across the United States and Canada. EANs are the European equivalent. If your barcode format isn't listed below, get in touch at info@pendoo.io.
🚫Limitations
Claude AI 
Ask Pendoo anything. The Claude AI connector gives you a natural-language interface to your shop's orders, customers, and real-time checkout journeys — no SQL, no dashboards, no waiting for a report to be built.
The Pendoo MCP connector is in General Availability (GA). It is production-deployed, actively maintained, and available to all Pendoo merchants.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets Claude securely connect to external services. Pendoo's MCP connector gives Claude read-only access to your shop's analytics and real-time checkout data — scoped entirely to your account, enforced server-side.
🔌Connecting Pendoo to Claude
Setup takes under a minute and requires no technical knowledge. All you need is an active Pendoo account and access to Claude.ai.
Once connected, start a new conversation and ask away. Claude knows your shop's data — and only your shop's data.
💬What can you ask?
You don't need to know which report to run or how to filter a table. Just ask in plain English — Claude figures out the rest. For anything beyond the pre-built reports, Claude can write and run a custom query against your data on the fly.
⚡What Claude can and cannot do
| ✅ Can do | 🚫 Cannot do |
|---|---|
| ✓Query orders, customers, and products in natural language | ✗Modify any data — everything is strictly read-only |
| ✓Analyse real-time self-checkout journey events | ✗Access your Shopify API credentials |
| ✓Run ad-hoc SQL queries for custom questions | ✗See data from other merchants' shops |
| ✓Generate reports across any date range | ✗Execute any write, update, or delete operation |
📊Available reports
Pendoo exposes 16 tools to Claude. Most merchants will never need to think about this — just ask your question and Claude picks the right one. But if you're curious, here's what's available under the hood.
Four reports covering your transactional data — volume, daily trends, channel breakdown, and incomplete orders with their lost-revenue totals.
Understand what's selling, what's being bought together, and — uniquely — which products are being scanned but not making it to checkout.
From acquisition and repeat rate through to lifetime value and long-term retention cohorts — a complete picture of who your customers are.
Journey reports are updated in real time — you're seeing live checkout activity, not yesterday's export. Track where customers drop off, how long checkout takes, and whether your barcodes are working.
Journey data updates as customers check out. Ask Claude about your checkout funnel and you're seeing what's happening right now.
Need something the pre-built reports don't cover? Just ask. Claude writes and runs a custom SQL query against your data on the fly — still scoped entirely to your shop, still read-only. You never need to touch SQL yourself.
All custom queries are validated server-side before execution. Write operations are blocked at the query level — there is no way to modify data through Claude, even accidentally.
🔒Your data stays yours
We know handing an AI access to your shop data is a big deal. Here's exactly how Pendoo protects it.
If your Claude session expires, Claude will let you know. Simply reconnect the Pendoo connector in Claude settings — it takes seconds.
📨Feedback and support
The Claude connector is new and we want to hear how it's working for you. Missing a report? Getting an unexpected result? Let us know.
Email us at info@pendoo.io — we read everything.