At this point March 2024, I have not been able to find a pos system that can accommodate both cafe/restaurant and retail needs in online, brick and mortar, and app environments.
Square has a retail pos and a restaurant pos that are two separate products. Lightspeed same thing. Both in online, brick and mortar, and app channels.
You would need to set up 2 pos stations at each brick and mortar. One to handle food and drink products and a second to process retail item products. If you have both in your store then customers will come up to you with both. So you have 2 iPads there at your station and you tell the customer that you will need to charge their card twice on two different card readers…? This simple is a terrible customer experience and we need to do better.
It is my opinion that Shopify has an amazing opportunity to solve this obvious problem across a huge part of the economy that is made up of retail food establishments that also sell retail items. They are so close. There are only a few features left to add and they along with thier app ecosystem would have it.
Here is what is needed in my opinion:
- Product page with the 2,000 variants as promised in February 2024.
- product page with at least 5 option sets up from the 3 option sets currently. I can’t find any information if the number of options is also being increased or not.
- product page with Modifiers. I would suggest modeling these off of lightspeed. This would be a separate UI section where we the users would build out our modifier groups, individual modifiers inside of those groups, and then be able to assign them to collections or individual products. I would highly suggest making this as unlimited as possible.
- The above mentioned then needs to work seamlessly on the Shopify POS app, online fulfillment, and any Shopify 3rd party app builder.
- The flexibility to control the UI of the pos app to a tile based UI like toast, square restaurant, lightspeed restaurant, etc. We need to be fast and searching and scrolling is not fast.
Currently the best solution Shopify has to offer all of the food establishments with retail items is the infinite options 3rd party app integration with the pos app. This sounds great but is not a solution that can be used in real life. This solution requires the pos operator to add all the base Shopify products to the cart first. Then hit the infinite option tile on the pos screen. Then go back over the entire order and ask the customer in line to go through the options for each of the products they already asked for. Can you imagine a customer ordering a 16oz hot coffee with whole milk and vanilla syrup and a breakfast sandwich with egg, sausage, provolone cheese, on an everything bagel.
Having to add the base products first and then go back to add the “modifiers” is not how humans order. They order the 1st item with the 1st items modifiers and variants. Then they order the second item with the second items modifiers and variants.
While this solution meets the need from a technical standpoint it is simply unusable in real life with real staff and real customers in a real line. We need the modifiers to show up for selection with the product just as the variations do now.
You can accomplish the KDS using 3rd party app “order management-trackeasy”.
We need your help Shopify. You have an amazing opportunity to be the first to market with a comprehensive solution on 1 platform. It really comes down to building out the flexibility your customers need to create their products on your platform.
All the selling features and AI in the world is useless to us if we can’t create the base product configured as we need it.
If you want to reach out, feel free to do so. I am happy to help as able.
