Shopify POS

Shopify POS was quick and easy to set up and use. Having already set up my ecommerce store in Shopify, it was a simple matter of installing the Shopify POS on my iPhone and start selling. The direct links between my store and pos for products, customers, and orders make management very streamlined. The free version (POS Lite) is full featured and meets most of the needs of my small business.

I wish that I was able to add at least one additional staff role using the Shopify POS Lite version. I am not willing to upgrade to Pro for $89 per month just to add this feature. It would be nice if Shopify offered a mid-tier subscription... something around $30 per month.

When using it to process payments, it's intuitive to use. Simply use the search bar to search product name or SKU and relevant products with photos comes up. It's best used for products with few variants or with detailed variants. In our cafe, it allows baristas to show all customizations of drinks right on the receipt which increases efficiency in our store. We can also adjust what tax applies on each order or product in the order, and can create discounts on the spot.

Also, it offers a 'quick sale' function which allows the staff member to add a product without going to the back end of the system. Additionally, customers can be added to the order meaning that our stored customer information can be added once the customer is ready for checkout. This is particularly useful when some customers have credits on their accounts, or have tax-free status.

While searching, even if the whole SKU is put in, Shopify POS (in its tile view) will only show the product, not the variant within it. Also, it doesn't show the SKU unless you press and hold the product image. This can be time-consuming and can sometimes lead to staff accidentally selecting the wrong product, despite knowing the exact SKU of the product they were looking for.

Also, if our wifi ever disconnects in the store, the POS on the ipads is rendered useless. There should be some way of temporarily logging orders placed while offline then uploading them to the system. And since the latest update, it takes about 4 steps to let a customer pay once the order has been input if they are paying with debit/credit since we use external terminals.

VALUE. Shopify allowed us to have a free developer account to test and work through our hesitations before paying a penny for the cart. The POS system comes with the cart for free, it works flawlessly on any apple device, I haven't tried the android offering, but I'm sure it's great as well. The account comes with multiple logins for managing employees with specified permissions for keeping eyes and fingers out of places they shouldn't be. And to top it all off it has a fantastic API connection that allows us to connect it to our Fishbowl Inventory Management system, which brings in the orders from both cart and POS and sorts the inventory out, handles the shipping with shipstation, posts back tracking and fulfills the orders in shopify and all the while capturing all the financial data in QB. I could seriously fire multiple employees for all the time and work this automation is doing for me.

If I had to complain it would be that there are some things you can't customize that you might be able to with one of the self hosted carts such as magento, woocommerce, or even magento 2.

The Shopify POS is linked to my product list, which makes it easy to select which product(s) shoppers are buying.

It was hard to set a temporary sales tax. I live in Oregon where we don't have a sales tax, but sometimes travel to other states for conventions or shows. While at the show I need a way to set a location-based temporary sales tax and at the same time allow my online customers to check out without any sales tax. That was surprisingly hard to do last time I used Shopify POS. It's possible the problem has been fixed by now... I haven't used it since before the pandemic started.