Why is migrating from QB POS to an online platform such a nightmare?

[SingingCook]

I have been trying the migrate from QB POS to Shopify since the first week of August. After the first 2 migrations I was unable to get the hardware to connect and lost support after 2pm because I am in Colorado and the support line is only open until 2pm MST. After contacting various entities at Shopify I was promised a dedicated specialist to help. This NEVER happened. I got an email from one guy and he subsequently disappeared and did not respond to emails. Last Monday (9/18) I was finally able to connect my hardware by calling each manufacturer separately, but was unable to re-migrate my QB Inventory because Shopify did not reset my account until Wednesday 9/20. Of course, I had to go back to using my QB POS in the meantime. Yesterday (9/24) I did the migration again after we closed at 4pm. When it was finished I discovered MANY problems with the data transfer, including barcodes that don't scan and incorrect sales tax breakout. I was unable to troubleshoot with Shopify Online help. So today (9/25) I have been trying to get live support but the support line must be overwhelmed because it disconnects you immediately. I have called QB POS and all they can do is transfer me to Shopify. This entire process has been a disaster and I am at my wits end. I doubt I will get my problems solved and will most likely have to close my shop for more days and lose money can't afford to lose because these issues will not be solved today. I am infuriated. What recourse do I have with QB for forcing this switch and with Shopify for their piss-poor support? They advertised this a simple and painless - it has been nothing short of a catastrophe. I am a small independent business doing this alone. Horrible.

[DaphneOlive]

I am very much not Shopify support - just a person a few weeks ahead of you in what has been an exhausting process. 

If you haven't unlocked the scanning thing, maybe I can help form our miserable experience of trial and error:

the way we have gotten scanning to work is to make sure all barcodes have either 6 or 12 digits. where QBPOS would take a 3 digit item number like #123 and make a barcode that was essentially 000123, but recognize both as the same, shopify requres that the barcode entry be 000123 - which means we had to make the sku be 123, for employess to be able to key that number in. 

with the vendor supplied barcodes, many (if not all) ended up with an extra zero at the front of the number in the transfer that I needed to delete. 

Where most systems that use barcodes kind of overlook the zeros, shopify sees them as number like any other number.

Once I figured out the problem, I still had days of adding and deleting zeros, and had to write  very intricate directions for my employees, but now it is working (knock on wood)

I hope that helps. we aren't happy with the POS but at least we can make sales now. 

[bjvincmrs]

Thank You for sharing this information. I was told yesterday by Shopify Migration Support I could not use the SKU field to put our QBPOS item #'s=barcodes because it was a filter and not searchable field. So to verify you are able to pull up products at the register that have the old #'s=barcodes from QBPOS because you put those numbers in the SKU field? 

[UTX]

I am in total agreement with you and with everything you are saying.  We are a Quickbooks Premier Partner and September 2022 after much internal debate and consideration, we moved to Quickbooks POS.  We spent over $3,000 for two locations and all the promises the Quickbooks sales person told us never materialized.  In addition, you would have thought Quickbooks would have told their Premier Partners that they were going to discontinue Quickbooks POS by October 2023. 

While I believe that Shopify POS is light years ahead of Quickbooks POS, the promises of a smooth transition to from QB POS to Shopify was another false promise.  I think Shopify totally underestimated the human resource impact this migration would have on Shopify and their team.

From my experience with accounting systems, I know this is not what you want to hear, but I would not try to reimport your QB POS data, but work with what you were able to bring over and make corrections from there.  Letting go, will allow you to move forward.  This business decision to move forward allowed us to successfully process sales via Shopify POS since June 2023.

Shopify is not going of able to help!

Intuit is not going to help at all.  they are the ones who put us all in this compromising business problem.

At this time, after using Shopify POS since the first week of June 2023, I am interested in setting up a Class Action Lawsuit against Intuit.  I do not think Shopify is to blame except for making promises that I am sure they were told by Intuit that they also found out was false.  Maybe we can get Shopify to join us in this Class Action Lawsuit as well.

Just in case Shopify decides this post violates their policies and they delete this comment, we said it and we are hoping to move forward with our lawsuit.  It is not our intention at this point to involve Shopify.  We hope you help us all and not judge this action.  I think we both were told a bunch of lies.

[SteelHead]

Count me in on the class action lawsuit.  This is infuriating!!!

[Generic1user]

INTUIT ditched the product so they don't care. Shopify's issue now is going to be that I seriously doubt they will get anywhere the number of customers they forecasted to come over from QB POS. We found out recently none of the assembled items import...We have almost 3,000 item assemblies, its how we sell almost all of our products. If we have to start from scratch, no reason to use shopify POS. 

[Savannahga]

Hi. We are in the same boat as others have mentioned here. I would like to join the class action against QB. 

How do I get involved?

[UTX]

Please see my post.

[growersunited]

All in on the class action lawsuit. We are another member that would happily join this process. 

[TresaM]

Tax codes - Did you set up collections for each different tax code?  Did you go into Shopify Admin to settings to set the correct tax amount?

Barcodes - You must have 6 digits on barcodes.  We had to add zeroes in front of most of our barcodes.  No problems scanning after doing this.   With variants we had 17K to update.  It was time consuming.  

Reports - To get anything similar to QBPOS reports, download the Data IO app

I'm happy to help.  We've been using Shopif POS for 3 weeks now.  It's not QB but it'll do.

[digitalbeans]

I'm afraid I have to agree. I am an Advanced Certified QB ProAdvisor in QB
Desktop and QBO and QB POS (and everything else) and have been for 15
years. I am also a Shopify Partner. This has been kind of a disaster. In
my experience, the underlying problem is that Shopify support doesn't know
much at all about QB POS and absolutely nothing about QB Desktop. And
Intuit support (I mean Accountant Support, not the consumer level) so far
doesn't even know that QB POS is being discontinued so they know zero about
Shopify.
I actually went through this process a few years ago when a client wanted
to move from QB POS to Shopify so I did the migration the old fashioned
(i.e. very manual) way, it was a pain but it worked, BUT they also
transitioned to QBO in the process, so they get sales info but nothing
about purchased or inventory or COGS.
I have more or less been successful in migrating the data from QB POS to
Shopify, but I have not been able to have Shopify connect to Quickbooks
desktop successfully, and NO ONE can tell me what data is supposed to flow
from Shopify/Stocky to Quickbooks and how it does it (are there sales
receipts, item receipts, bills, deposits, sales taxes, who knows). But I
can't connect so it's a moot point. Many, many hours down the drain.
At this point I am resigned to transferring the POS data by hand to
Quickbooks as I do for my Square clients, but obviously very much NOT the
way it was supposed to work.
I have another QB POS client who does not need the web site so he's going
with Lightspeed with my thanks.

[drillmalibu]

Hi! I am furious with Shopify's lack of knowledge and support through the QB migration process. Do you have clients that have successfully migrated from QB POS to Lightspeed? Are you a professional who charges to help companies do this? If so, I would love to chat more and see if you can help us. 

Thanks so much!

[ocncarts]

Me too Me too!!

[UTX]

please see my post

[UTX]

please read my post

[barbhoney]

DO NOT choose Lightspeed. Compared to Quickbooks POS, it's a bicycle compared to a Rolls Royce. The transition has been incredibly rocky. They recommended a third party program called POS Accounting to transfer financial data from Lightspeed to Quickbooks Accounting. NOTHING is mapped correctly. We don't even get the customer's name transferred. They drop taxes completely on the transfer. My husband has spent hundreds of hours trying to unscrew the tax data. I really cannot convey the nightmare that this has been.

[bjvincmrs]

We are dealing with this issue at the moment. Shopify Migration support told be yesterday to change all my barcodes in my product file to 5 digits because that is how they were generated in QBPOS, in order to make them scannable. I asked if that would cause problems because I keep reading that Shopify requires 6 digit barcodes. She said no worries you can change them to 5. I'm not sure what trouble that might bring. I wonder if anyone else was told to do this and what the result was.

[SingingCook]

I was told 6 digits, which does work. I also had a local expert help me free of charge and she was able to transfer BOTH barcodes and UPCs. Bottom line is that there are many things the Shopify support people do not know or have no real way to fix, and they have given me bad advice more than once. Shopify is meant for online sales and they have missed A LOT of details when trying to adapt it to POS for in-person sales. Returns/exchanges are a problem, especially with items sold through QB POS. There is no way to return an item without a receipt. Redeeming/honoring gift cards sold on QB is also a problem. The people who developed this app clearly never worked in-person retail or owned a store. I am making a list of items that they need to fix. They need to do better.

[bjvincmrs]

Thank You, did you need to reprint all your barcodes? Ours labels printed from QBPOS are the "item numbers" in a Code39 barcode format that generates 5 digits

[SingingCook]

No, I did not need to reprint all my barcodes....thank god, since it takes 3x as long to print a sticker with this system!

[Ellen8]

How exactly are you using the QBPOS barcode labels with Shopify? I have all my merchandise tagged with the old labels and would love to be able to scan them somehow.

[tiffanybubriski]

Make sure you have the item numbers from QBPOS as the barcodes in Shopify. And then from the Socket Mobile scanner manual, there should be a barcode to configure the scanner to scan ITF-6 barcodes. I think it says to disconnect the barcode scanner from the tablet first, and then scan that barcode in the manual. Once the scanner is set up to scan ITF-6 barcodes, and if your barcodes are big enough, it will scan correctly.

We had trouble scanning due to our old labels being too small that the socket mobile was unable to scan the barcodes generated by QBPOS, hope yours are bigger!

[SingingCook]

The QB barcodes work if you make them 6 digits. For instance, item 3541 must be changed to 003541. Shopify is supposed to convert them automatically.

[SteelHead]

I also agree with you.  It seems every time I make one step forward, then it's two steps back.  I don't know how I am going to make this work.

[HammergirlAnime]

Not to mention everything is an extra app at an extra monthly charge.  It looks like the in person POS was just hastily tacked onto the web business with no thought as to the differences in needs between online only, brick and mortar or hybrid businesses.  Not every business is a small shop with only a few hundred SKUs.  Shopify doesn't seem to scale for larger inventories.

[HAWC]

I agree with the class action suit against Intuit. my non profit had been using QB (pos v 11) for years and after a year deliberation and shopping around, we paid for QB POS with two licenses at a cost of almost 2 grand. We don't have a big budget and that expense hurt our 2022 bottom line.

We're slowly migrating to Shopify. So far, I have been pleased with the Shopify support. Everything migrated successfully, products, customers and vendors. However, for some reason, my new orders are not syncing. I'm hoping that the Shopify support team helps get this resolved soon. Fortunately, even though, we were given an Oct 3 date for end of CC processing, everything is still working in our QB pos system.

[Danceman1]

Double check your bank if you are using their payments! I got a Intuit email yesterday saying it’s all been discontinued.

[UTX]

I cannot take listening to this any longer.  While I feel I am in a much better position with my technical and accounting experience, this has cost me, my company, thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours putting the pieces together so we can get back to business.

We made the decision to move away from Shopify and Intuit after our preliminary testing of a program is proving to be promising in ever respect.  We have been exploring this since the middle of summer when we learned the Quickbooks integration is a joke and another slap in the face.  We see who is laughing next!

Please copy my contact information before it gets deleted.

I am on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/edpodowski

Ed Podowski, Chief Experience Officer

UTX, Inc.
10768 York Road
Cockeysville, MD 21030
Office: 410-667-3500

UTX, Inc.
3252 Keswick Road
Baltimore [Hampden], MD 21211
Office: 410-366-1212

I am the person almost two months ago suggested we file a class action lawsuit against Intuit for putting us in this situation at the busiest time of the year for retailers.

What defines a class action lawsuit?
A class-action lawsuit is a civil lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of people or business entities who have suffered common injuries as a result of the defendants' conduct, with at least one individual or entity acting as a representative of that group.

I think we would all agree this describes our situation.

I reached out to a national law firm who has successfully won against huge corporations.  I am hoping they call me by Monday which I will post it here, if I still have access to this formum.

Please copy down my contact information and please repost this everywhere so our fellow small business owners can join us.  We can spread this action through social media.

I hope you join us!

About our timing...

we sell and implement business solutions among other services like website development and IT network support.  This is for background purposes only and for full disclosure.

It has taken us some time after we determine Intuit is discounting other programs and Shopify is not the right program for us.  So, once we felt comfortable with our next [and I hope final] systems migration in less than a year, I was reading more comments today and I just said enough is. enough.

Even if they shut down our applications, we have our data and we have another system in place.

i have been posting about starting a class action suit.  I have taken the first step.  I hope we can find a way to communicate our progress here and I hope this brings some relief to all of my fellow small business owners.

One last suggestion...  Some of you have chosen to return to Quickbooks Desktop POS and do credit card processing outside of Quickbooks.  I think this is a really great decision and it will get you past your busy retail season.

When ever we run into an issue going from one system to another, which is very rare, we always have a path backwards for us to regroup while our client is able to continue to conduct their business.  I should have said this earlier and I am sorry I did not.

Go back to something you are familiar in operating and you will move forward faster...

Lets keep in touch!