I ended up reaching out directly to Shopify, and they put me in touch with one of their "Retail Specialists". She provided a lot of answers for me, so I'd recommend getting in touch with them.
For keyboards the answer was simple. If your keyboard is compatible with iOS or whatever device you're running Shopify POS on, you shouldn't have any issues. But if you're uncertain, there's nothing stopping you from downloading POS light (which is free) at any time and testing out the connectivity yourself.
For receipt printers, the following devices are support:
- Epson TM-m30II, TMm30III
- Star Micronics TSP100III, TSP100IV, mC-Print3
For cash drawers, I didn't realize until after making this post that ours' aren't actually connected, we just open them manually. So compatibility isn't an issue. But as far as I could tell, the only one that's supported by Shopify POS is STAR mPOP.
We didn't have to purchase any additional hardware aside from our card readers, but there's a chance we just got lucky.
We just made the change to Shopify POS last week, so I can actually provide you with some other specific info that wasn't readily available when I was doing research.
- Shopify POS is slower than Vend/Lightspeed. Everything loads a second or two slower and transactions take a little longer to process.
- I can't speak for the other card readers that Shopify offers. but the Wisepad card reader that's available here in Canada communicates with the POS slowly, and it takes a little while for the app to show that a debit/credit sale has been complete.
- Searching by SKU is very unintuitive. We don't have barcodes, so we ring everything in by typing the SKU number and adding to cart. This was very quick and easy using Vend, but with Shopify the products load very slowly and instead of showing just the variant that the SKU is designated to, it shows the whole product listing which you then have to click through and scroll through all the variants to find the right one.
Those are the negatives, but I think the positive far outweigh those issues.
- Debit and credit transactions are sent to the card reader automatically, and we don't have to input them ourselves like as was necessary with our old Moneris terminals.
- Gift card activation and redemption is much easier, and having them compatible with our online store is a huge improvement.
- Opening and closing is very quick and easy.
Overall, our staff are quite pleased with the new system. There are a few annoyances but they all agree that Shopify is an improvement over Vend. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, I'd be happy to provide more info if I have it.
