Point of Sale

I have mixed feelings about this application. On one hand, I think it really does work great. Reporting is sub-optimal, especially the tax reporting (as mentioned by others) and the hardware isn't great. But they are releasing brand new readers this year that will hopefully fix the hardware specifically. Other than those issues, I find it an amazing hub for retail businesses. If you're selling a product in-store that you cannot sell online, in general Shopfy is probably not right for your business.

THE BIG ISSUE - As others have mentioned, the pricing scheme is absolutely ridiculous. I almost gave this a 2-Star rating and that is entirely due to the inability for feasible scaling. "Lite" is great for on-boarding and testing the waters, but there are a number of features that are essential to an ecommerce-centric platform (like "In-Store Pickup Management") which are placed behind a paywall. This paywall is STEEP. For a lot of small businesses, all of the extra reporting features and staff management are not necessary. This leaves the small business owner considering an $89.00/mo fee for nothing more than allowing customers to order online and pick up in store. It is an unbelievably stupid (for lack of a better word) model and I would love to see Shopify remedy this with an in-between scaling option.

So far this has been a good app to add to my business. There are many issues with the card reader. Like others have mentioned before, it falls asleep every 10 seconds and sometimes it disconnects in between transactions, one right after then the next. This has been extremely frustrating and overshadows the reason I transferred from Square, (which was a dream to work with and never gave me any issues), to Shopify Point of Sales. I initially transferred from Square because I wanted to add barcodes to my products to make it easier to check out customers when at popup markets. This has been a great addition and makes it almost worth having the garbage card reader. It sounds like this is an issue across the board and something that Shopify should look at and fix. Also, what is the deal with only offering a free plan or a super-pricey plan? How about one in between? Or better yet make it so I can create a shipping label regardless of if the order was placed via my online store or the point-of-sale app! That's a pretty basic need when selling goods at a pop-up market. Oh also, Square was super easy to work with when I was in a location with a different tax rate. That would also be an amazing thing to add to the free plan for the point of sale. Since that is what it is for. I figure if Square can do it so effortlessly, Shopify should be able to get it handled as well! A little rambling yes. My main points are that the hardware is not reliable, the app shuts down and fails to do its job on a regular basis, and the free app needs more features added to make it run smoother and user-friendly. Obviously, Shopify needs to care more as these issues have been going on for some time and nothing has been done to fix them. Buyer beware is what I would say if you are not looking to add barcodes to your products, stick with Square.