How do you handle offline POS orders during internet outages?

[fencetalk]

What are people doing during situations when internet or cellular service goes down and credit/debit transactions are needed?

Send Cart

This isn't ideal for us because we lose the impulse purchase, since they can decide not to complete it later on their own.

Draft Order

It doesn't seem possible to create a draft order from the iPhone POS app.

Custom Payment Option

This method automatically marks orders paid, so it would have to be canceled and reordered, and it still requires copying credit card information someplace for placing the payment later (not ideal).

Thank you.

[hstb]

Are customers walking off with merchandise? Or this is for sales orders
that aren't being fulfilled immediately?

I've never tried this but I guess you're wanting POS to capture and
securely store the CC info even if it isn't able to connect to a network at
that moment to execute a transaction? I personally don't use Shopify
Payments for POS sales so I don't know how POS's "Offline Mode" works with
regards to payments.

[fencetalk]

The vast majority of in-person sales are shipped to customer, with only a few exchanging merchandise during the transaction.

Shopify's POS can't do offline credit card transactions. Square can though.

[MotoBonnie1]

Unfortunately, this is the BIGGEST FLAW with Shopify. There is simply no way to scan a credit/debit card (the overwhelming method in which patrons make purchases) without internet access. We have come so close to switching our POS away from Shopify for this reason, as there are plenty of other POS systems that will accept credit card payments without internet and process them once internet is regained. It's a headache. During a recent power and internet outage, my team had to manually write down more than 500 credit card purchases by taking all card details from everyone on a single day (one of the busiest of the year) and then manually we entered them into our POS once internet was regained. It was a nightmare for me and my staff, and most importantly, it backed up our check-out line considerably which meant we lost sales to people unwilling to wait.
SHOPIFY if you're reading this, please do something about accepting offline payments.

[Summer]

Hey, @MotoBonnie1! Thank you for taking the time to write your feedback. I understand the inability to process payments offline is taking a toll on your business. While this isn't available at this time, I'm pleased to let you know I've shared the need for this feature with our development team. We genuinely consider the feature requests or comments from our merchants, so you can be assured that your voice is heard. Please keep your eyes peeled as we may implement this in the near future. If we do, we'll let you know via our changelog.

[strewbacca]

Summer,

we run our cc slider seperate from our pos just in case this problem occurs. So, I did several offline checkouts today, and was able to take cc payment thinking there would be an offline checkouts under orders, so that I could convert the sales in our reporting and have the items be taken out of inventory. Is this possible?

-Jason

[Victoria]

Hi there, @strewbacca.

Welcome to the Shopify Community, and thanks for joining the thread.

At this time, it is not possible to process credit/debit payments offline on Shopify Point of Sale. Shopify Point of Sale needs an internet connection to sync with your Shopify admin, send receipts by email, and take card payments. I recommend checking out our Offline Point of Sale resource for more information.

[jeff2662]

I just switched from Square to Shopify but didn't know this.  This is a terrible flaw in Shopify.   I check your Offline Point of Sale Resource which only says you 'might' be able to take transactions and have them sync later.  What does 'might' mean????  

Wondering if we need to go back to Square until you 'might' implement this in the near future @Summer