Point of Sale

Super easy so far. I am a physical store and purchased the iPad stand, barcode reader, receipt printer and chip reader. I purchased a cheaper cash drawer off Amazon. Everything was able to set up smoothly, including the cash drawer. I am not tech savvy, but I was able to set it up myself with no issues. With the barcode scanner, checkout is a breeze. The app makes it possible to personalize options. Add discounts in a click. Very user friendly. Once I am financially able to justify it, I would like to upgrade to the pro, but it's not feasible at this time. I would really like to be able to print a survey but haven't found one yet. I don't know if it exists?

In the 6 months we have used it
It's been fraught with problem s
At one stage it failed to recognize
All the barcodes in excess of 500 which all had to be replaced
Time and time again it won't recognize the barcodes and or you can't search
For the item
The latest glitch fails to show all the sizes in pos when when they are available online? Which rather defeats
the purpose
It should at least be free until it works
Properly

After nearly 5 years of use, the Shopify app is now easier to use and has alot of new functions that cover different needs than in the beginning. Love dealing with the Shopify Gurus who are always friendly, knowledgeable and professional. They have really started to focus more on those of us who use the app in a bricks and mortar location only but always strive to encourage you to get an online store, which hopefully someday I will attempt.

I really wish this could be a 5-star review. After decades with our prior in-store POS, we made the switch to Shopify POS so our online store and our in-store systems were on the same platform. While Shopify works great online, Shopify POS is nowhere near ready for prime time for a business like ours (small retailer, thousands of SKUs, many product variants, owners who are analytical about inventory). Issues include but are not limited to -
- POS Bluetooth hardware that constantly disconnects - Practically unusable barcode apps. Needed two apps: one for printing from purchase orders and one to print individual labels when needed. The labels look different and the apps were exceedingly difficult to set up and use. - the inventory app, Stocky, only holds inventory data for 90 days. This means you must perpetually pull data into Excel via this app called Matrixify and then run all your analytics for YOY purchase decisions in Excel. What a pain. - Shopify POS support is absolutely inadequate. Extremely hard to get a tech on the phone, and their responses are often emails that just include links to pages in Shopify Help. They cannot log onto your POS and assist with troubleshooting or quickly resolve issues in an emergency. I could go on, but I think you get the point. We entered into working with Shopify POS with our eyes open and a lot of consideration. Ultimately, we invested several thousand dollars in hardware and hundreds of person-hours in data preparation to make this change. In the end, we pulled the plug and returned to our prior POS provider. We simply could not put our business at risk during the holiday season with Shopify POS. It's just not an integrated platform and it's not well supported.

Great app, easy to use and install. Fantastic, thankyou

Absolutely terrible, and missing so many basic features that should be included in any POS system.

Admin access is required to login to the store, ok not a problem. Except that the app automatically logs out several times a week and requires the admin credentials and password to get back in. There are staff PINs, but they only work once you are logged into the store with an admin account.
There is no way for a POS or limited access account to login. I am rarely at the store, so I have to give all my employees all my login info so they can use the POS app. That's insane! All of my minimum wage, part time employees have full, unrestricted, admin access to all areas of the POS app and online store.

When it does logout, it also loses a lot of information when you log back in. The integrated Moneris terminal for one. Under payment methods, the toggle is turned off by default, and when you turn it on, none of the config setting are saved. You have to get the IP address of the terminal again, input the ECR ID as well as the merchant ID, and reinitialize. This happens every time! I have lost hundreds of dollars in sales from customers coming to the checkout to pay, only to have the terminal not work, and my employees not able to get it running before they get tired of waiting. My employees have called me while I'm at my other business (a restaurant) so I can try and trouble shoot it for them over the phone. During which, I'm losing customers there too! Losing customers at two businesses at the same time because Shopify keeps logging out and losing important information like terminal settings.

Aside from constantly losing me money, it is also useless when trying to remotely manage a business. If you have multiple locations, don't even bother. It doesn't track employee hours, you can't see when employees are clocking in or out, you can't see how much money should be in the till at any given time, how much cash is being deposited etc. You can only check these from the actual physical iPad at that location. Why can you not check these from the admin console instead of me having to physically go to all my store locations to check each individual iPad?

The only reason I migrated my store to Shopify was to have a POS app that synced with my online inventory. What a waste of time.

We're extremely happy with Shopify Point of Sale. This is the third point of sale system we've used in our 7 years as a store, and I think it's the best. It is very intuitive and easy to train employees on. It's easy to add and delete items and discounts. The back end analytics are amazing. The only irritating thing is how basic it is because they want you to add (purchase) an app for anything beyond basic functionality.

BIGGEST ISSUE: Shopify cannot guarantee that the stock for items on the POS is the same as on the back end. Given I display one variant in my store and rely on the software to inform me of availability THIS IS A HUGE FLAW.
I've been using the software for 8 months and raised this issue with shopify some 5 months ago now and the problem persists. They have not been able to solve it in that time and don't see the issue as a particularly grave one. considering the cost to add this to the Shopify plan it is absolute obscene that this is acceptable.

POS just suddenly stopped working for my retail store and the tech was unable to help. Seems like a terribly unreliable system to depend on for your business.

Shopify has helped Good Records survive 2020. It has enabled us to ship globally, deliver, offer curbside service, and offer preorder capability for upcoming releases.