How to integrate with Zelty API?

Zelty is an innovative digital solution for cashiering, order taking and management, designed from the start to digitalize multi-site restaurants. If your product serves the hospitality industry, integrating with Zelty allows for powerful automations for your users.

Integrating your product with the Zelty API allows you to:

• Automate order data synchronization and sales reporting
• Sync customer information and payment records across platforms
• Minimize manual data entry and reduce errors
• Enable real-time analytics and performance tracking

This guide covers everything you need to know about setting up your Zelty integration, best practices, and real-world use cases supported by Chift's Unified POS API.

What is the Zelty API?

Zelty offers a REST API built on modern principles to serve restaurants, cafes, and food service across Europe. The API is specifically designed for iPad-based POS operations and leverages a microservices and serverless architecture for reliability and scalability.

Technical foundation:

• RESTful architecture with JSON responses
• API Key authentication (token-based)

The Zelty API covers a comprehensive range of restaurant operations data:

• Products & Categories: Menu management and inventory tracking
• Orders & Order Lines: Complete transaction history with line-item detail
• Customers/Contacts: Guest data for loyalty and CRM systems
• Payments: Transaction records for reconciliation and reporting
• Locations: Multi-site support for chains and franchises
• Closures: End-of-shift and end-of-day financial summaries
• Sales Reports: Analytics data for performance monitoring

What makes Zelty particularly powerful is its focus on the hospitality sector. Unlike generic POS systems, Zelty understands restaurant-specific workflows, and exposes this data through clean, well-structured API endpoints.

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Example of Zelty use cases

Order synchronization

Accounting platforms can retrieve order data and automatically push daily transactions into downstream systems, such as accounting or financial reporting tools, eliminating manual exports and reconciliation.

Track stock levels

‍ERP systems can now monitor menu items and their stock levels, marking dishes unavailable if ingredients run low. This prevents customers from ordering items that cannot be fulfilled and helps manage inventory effectively.

Location-based tracking

Multi-location management tools can retrieve store location data to structure sales by site and monitor performance across restaurant networks.

Setting up your Zelty API integration

Setting up a Zelty API integration requires access credentials provided by Zelty.

To create an integration:

• You must obtain a Zelty API key
• Authentication is done via token-based API key authentication
• API keys must remain confidential and should never be shared publicly or embedded in client-side applications

Once authenticated, your application can start consuming the relevant Zelty endpoints depending on your use case.

Getting you started with your Zelty API integration

To begin integrating with the Zelty API:

1. Request API access and credentials from Zelty
2. Define which data you need (orders, products, payments, reports, etc.)
3. Implement secure authentication using the API key
4. Build data synchronization logic (real-time or scheduled)
5. Handle errors, retries, and data consistency

While the API is developer-friendly, managing data normalization, maintenance, and scalability across multiple POS systems can quickly become complex.

Our recommendations for integrating with Zelty

Here are some best practices to ensure a reliable and secure Zelty integration:

• Secure API keys properly
• Store API keys securely, restrict access, and rotate them periodically to reduce security risks.
• Respect rate limits & implement resilience
• Even though no official rate limits are documented, always implement retry logic, backoff strategies, and graceful error handling.
• Use caching wisely
• Cache static or semi-static data (such as products or categories) to reduce unnecessary API calls and improve performance.
• Normalize your data model early
• Zelty data should be mapped to a consistent internal model to simplify downstream integrations and analytics.

Why Use Chift’s Unified pos API to Connect Zelty?

Integrating directly with Zelty is only part of the challenge. Maintaining multiple POS integrations across different providers is costly and time-consuming.

With Chift’s Unified POS API, you can:

• Connect to Zelty and other POS systems through a single API
• Access normalized, standardized POS data
• Reduce development and maintenance effort
• Scale faster across multiple markets and POS providers
• Focus on your product instead of POS-specific complexities

Chift handles the technical fragmentation so you don’t have to.

Zelty API integration FAQ

How do I get started with Zelty?

To get started, you need to request API access from Zelty and obtain an API key. From there, you can either build a direct integration or use Chift’s Unified POS API to connect faster and at scale.

What are Zelty’s API rate limits?

Zelty does not publicly document specific API rate limits.