PSA: How to checkout while Shopify is down

[John24]

Hi everyone,

For those of you who are trying to checkout even through Shopify is down, simply turn WiFi off on your iPad and that will force the Shopify POS app to enter offline mode. You can't process credit cards while it is offline, however it will let you do cash transactions.

Would love to see Shopify fix this as the exact thing happened during one of the last big outages.

[MountainMadness]

Thank you for that info. It sure beats writing down cash transactions during an outage. We’re getting killed with this outage right now - it’s Sunday afternoon and our store is packed. We are literally losing hundreds of dollars in sales since we can’t take cards. Time to put a backup PayPal swiper into place as a contingency. It will be an accounting and inventory nightmare, but at least we would be able to take cards.

[John24]

Glad it is helpful. When Shopify comes back online, and you reset (close / reopen) the app so that it reconnects to Shopify, all of your inventory sold should re-sync. Do NOT uninstall the Shopify app before you close / reopen the app otherwise all of the offline sales will be lost.

[MountainMadness]

Our clerks reported that this did not work for them. After disabling WiFi, Shopify just crashes. They did a full restart on the iPad and still no dice. Back to pen and paper for us.

[John24]

That's really odd-- it is working for all our systems. Perhaps Bluetooth was turned off instead of WiFi? Also make sure that Wifi is turned off, not just disconnected from a network.

Depending on the iPad version, either swipe up from the bottom of the screen and make sure the Wifi icon is white (disabled), or if it is a newer iPad, swipe down from the upper-right hand side and the WiFi icon should be white (disabled).

[MountainMadness]

Thanks John. Yes, they have done all that. We’re very tech savvy (I’m a systems programmer).

[John24]

Oh bummer! You've got it, wish it would have worked for you!

[premiervii]

It's so nice for Shopify to throw an update that fails and locks out the credit card system in the middle of the Sunday shopping period, it seems like to most convenient time of day to do it, it's not like people are out shopping or anything. /s

[jackspremium]

Can not log in at all

[Gregarican]

@John24 : quick question about the proposed WiFi workaround. Say that WiFi is disabled and Shopify POS can still sell stocked items against customer using cash as the payment method. When Shopify POS is online again, will those offline transactions automatically sync up with "the cloud?"

UPDATE: I just tested this out, and found that the offline test transaction I rang indeed synced up once I turned WiFi on again. Looks to be a good workaround. The iPad had Shopify POS up and logged in while I had good WiFi connectivity. I only disabled WiFi once I was "in" the app. That might explain why it didn't work for others. The initial app launch and login probably syncs up with the cloud to pull products, validate PIN's, etc.