What missing features do you find in POS systems?

[Max_Sadlowski]

Hi everyone! I am looking to understand what features you all feel are missing from Shopify POS. I would love to hear what issues you come up against, where there are stumbling blocks, where things don't work, or where you just can't seem to find a solution to a problem. Anything and everything, let me know! 

The reason we want to know is to help build solutions that work for Shopify POS merchants. We have built a number of POS apps now, and want to continue to build out new options that help merchants succeed!

[Red_Stick_Spice]

MERGE CUSTOMERS- This is a glaring omission, and until its fixed I dont want any other feature added.

[Max_Sadlowski]

@Red_Stick_Spice Thanks for this, I responded to the separate thread on this and think we might be able to come up with a solution on this. For reference, here is the other thread.

[Roostcollection]

We are a 98% Brick and Mortar business. Most of this is POS issues.

MUST HAVE
• Ability to for simple manual returns at retail POS when a customer does not have any type receipt or know the actual name it was purchased under. Just like custom sales only reverse. Return, Select item, How to credit customer, Cash or gift card. See next post for detailed explanation.

• Ability to do as many returns or exchanges on the sale as the merchant wants.

• On the Home page in the admin, Post what shopify is working on. Updates to system, iPad etc. COMMUNICATION!!!!!!!!

• How about a TAP & CHIP reader that is not bluetooth. Or just works. 8 months we've had 4. Constantly looses connection. Can't make a sale when you can't take a card! Purchased a second system to use the swipe reader, because it cost more to manually enter the card. Employee time as well.

• Vendor list under products. Basic info account #, Phone, Rep, Address, email......

• Ability to put an entire collection on sale at one time. Or add the sale price to the initial product listing and be able to activate sale price by collection.

• Print pick ticket with sku#

• A (note) field on the product page so owners can make a note on something specific about the product they sell. IE where it is stored, shelf, or manufactures true name etc. We change the product name to protect our sources.

• Sell an online gift card and have the gift card go to the recipient with an note field attached on why they're getting the gift card.

• Ability to capture credit card sales when internet/power is down. Square and Clover have this ability.

Wish List

• If Shopify is going to have an purchase order page, How about when inventory is received it is added to inventory. Currently it just receives it. That I know, because I have a packing slip.

• How about a preference page, so products could be sorted always the way the owners sees fit. Or current price, or SKU. Most times we know the vendor and type of product.

• Ability to have the sort order on products be random. Not just Best seller, price, alphabetically. Better yet Best sellers with every third or so item randomly imputed. Keeps things interesting

• Under purchase order, we can add a supplier info. But can’t see or have access to the list of suppliers? Then when we receive items on PO they are not added to inventory, So why create a PO?

• Stop with the apps. These only allow fingers to point back and forth, And we the merchant are left with no answer. If apps are shopify approved make them shopify accountable.

[Roostcollection]

Manual Returns: Lets say a customer purchases items one being a gift. Does tell us, just a purchase of items. The then give an item to someone as a GIFT. That person then comes to our store to return the GIFT. No gift receipt. Now we are supposed to interrogate this person.

Here's what shopify wants us to do.

Do you have a receipt? No. If was a GIFT. (maybe it was paid by cash)
Who or when was it purchased? I don't know when, But it was by Sandy P....
This can now go two ways.
1. Let me look up Sandy P. in our system. Hmm, We don't show a Sandy P. in our system. (feeling odd she says) She told me she purchased it here. (possibly used husbands card under another name)
-----OK, Maybe she paid cash, we can give you a store credit in the form of a gift card. Let me run into the back office and login to my admin and issue you a gift card. (This takes time, for which the customer has to wait. This also tells the other customer in line that they have to wait. And this leaves the counter unattended.
2. Let me look up Sandy P. in our system. OK, Here it is. We returned the item and issued you a gift card.
----Later we get a call from the original buyer Sandy P. saying. I just got an email that an item I purchased was returned and it wasn't me. It was the gift I gave.
----Now we have to explain that your friend returned the item you gave them. This is a very odd and bad conversation to have. Our guess is that Sandy P. will not be buying gifts from us for fear of the embarrassing situation.
All this could be avoided in a simple timely fix. On the POS a simple Manual Return. Select the item in our inventory, Then select the way we would like to issue the return, Cash or Gift card. Simple, fast and most important no embarrassing situations.
*Now what if the person that returned the item wanted something else (a candle). The balance would still be handled the same way as scenario #1. Embarrassing!
Then if the gift receiver later wanted to return the candle (say it was the wrong size) the shopify system would not allow it to be returned because only ONE return per transaction.

Simple Manual Return

Hi I have a return!
Do you have any receipt? No.

(Our Policy, If we sold it, we will return it. even if it was from another business)

Look up item, select and issue gift card or cash. Our discretion.

Customer is happy, we will sell the returned item and the cash stays in our business. Just gained a repeat customer. That's customer loyalty.

[Max_Sadlowski]

@Roostcollection Thanks for all of the details. Ill try to respond to each of these:

1. Unfortunately, Shopify in general wouldn't support this. We could add a system to introduce inventory increases/restocking, but not associating it to an order already in your system isn't going to be possible. It would require a lot of reconfiguration on Shopify's internal systems to make work as well.
2. I suspect that you are looking to return more than what was originally sold, as multiple returns are allowed on an order. If thats the case, it's the same answer as #1 unfortunately.
3. It's something I would love to see as well, but this is something Shopify would have to do. They can be secretive about new features and what issues are being fixed though, I agree it would be better if there was better communication. 
4. Unfortunately the hardware side of things is all Shopify, so I can't help here. I do know your pain though, hardware has always been difficult.
5. This would be very interesting, the ability to add vendor information to products in an app and then display/allow the search on that. 
6. Updating prices on mass is best done with an app. There are a few different apps that can handle this. 
7. Order Printer is a great app for this, and you can customize the printout to your needs to include SKU if you want.
8. I would suggest looking at something like Custom Fields. It uses a plugin in Chrome to add custom fields directly on product admin screens. It's also free for up to 10 fields and stores data in your store, so it won't get lost. 
9. There are a few apps that handle this. I agree though that gift cards in Shopify need a better system to automatically send the card to the recipient.
10. This would again be something that would need to be handled by Shopify

In terms of your wish list, many of these relate to admin areas that are POS specific or anything that we really are able to handle. 

In terms of apps, while I feel the frustration, apps are a critical part of Shopify and the reason why it has been able to accomplish so much. It's important to remember a few things about apps as well:

1. Any fee you pay Shopify takes 20% before it gets to the developer. There are also transaction fees, so assume the developer only every sees 75% of it.
2. Most apps are produced by small indie, grassroots agencies (Like BentoSMB!), so you are truly helping t support another small business with your app fees
3. The API and what can be done by apps is limited and often complicated. Just because it seems simple doesn't mean it is. Order editing is a good example, it is very complicated to simply change a variant of a line item.

Hope my answers help and please let me know if there are any other POS specific issues you have seen!

[offermagl]

Hi Max,

A couple of things we would like to see is:

• More reliable options for hardware.  Scanners and credit card swipers in particular.  We have found that the Bluetooth connections with the various devices are spotty.  Many times our front line staff have to struggle to try and repair these devices with lines of customers in front of them.  If there was a way to have wired options to avoid using bluetooth, that would be great.  It is currently a big problem for many of our retail stores.
• When looking at a product in the POS, the ability to see if that product is "on order" via Stocky.
• Location specific POS.  The old POS did this an it was helpful.  Many of our retail stores dont need to sell another stores products and it can be confusing when searching for products.  Or at least maybe have read-only access to other locations/products so you can easily tell what products are yours and which ones are at other locations.  We have some payment methods that are specific to location, but because of the POS setup, they have to be visible to all locations

Thanks!

[Max_Sadlowski]

@offermagl Thanks for your input, this is awesome to see and super helpful.

1. Unfortunately, as an Expert and app developer, I cannot help with the hardware side of things, that is something Shopify has to do. I agree though that this is frustrating and has been an issue with our merchants in the past. Have you found that hardware integration with the new POS is better?
2. It would be interesting to hear more about the on order status and stocky. I wonder how they store these details and if its something we could request and show in our applications. 
3. Unfortunately, this is again another thing built right into Shopify POS that we wouldn't be able to help with. We could rebuild the product search in an app, but that experience wouldn't be very good unfortunately.

Please let me know if anything else comes up that we could potentially help with. Ill see what we might be able to do about integrating with Stocky.

[offermagl]

@Max_Sadlowski Thank you for the update.  We were excited to hear that Shopify was taking over support for Stocky in May of 2020.  This is one of the reasons we selected Stocky to do our ordering.  However, since May 2020, there has not been a single feature upgrade or improvement on the Stocky side.  We are completely limited to what this unchanged app has had to offer for the past year.  

A tighter integration with Shopify and the POS is what we were looking forward to, but so far have been disappointed.  Any progress you could make on the Stocky side would be leaps and bounds ahead of anything Shopify has done.  Happy to chat in more detail about the lack of features if you would like.

Thank you!

[Max_Sadlowski]

@offermagl Thanks for the insight. The Stocky transition has been a rocky one to say the least, a lot of people have had a rough time with it when the new POS rolled out and required the Pro version to access it. We for sure think there should be some updates on this as well, but for the time being there are not. I am hopeful that we will get some new information about updates to POS soon.

[sosewboutique]

The ability to enter a custom price on a pre set card on the pos. We do embroider and some things have a custom price. We need to be able to enter that under a preset custom card. 

[Max_Sadlowski]

@sosewboutique This is a common problem we run into. The biggest problem with this is that the price can't be dynamic in Shopify. What we would like to do is setup templated products that you could then choose from, name the price, and then add to the cart. The product would be added to your store dynamically though, would that be ok? Or could we simply use custom sales for this? Would love to hear more about the need and how we might be able to solve this for you.

[sosewboutique]

@Max_Sadlowski So the only real time that we need something like this is when we are dealing with our embroidery customers. We do have set prices for certain sizes of monograms, but if a customer orders a custom design or a business wants their logo on a shirt we need to be able to enter the custom prices for these products at checkout. While we can use the custom sale for this, it messes up our sales analytics when we are tracking the amount and types of monograms sold. What we would need a couple different product cards (Custom Boutique Embroidery, Custom Commercial Embroidery, CE Left Chest Logo, and CE Name), that we could add or change the price of from the register. As long as it works and is easy to use, i'm not particularly picky on how it's implemented. Does that answer all your questions? 

[sslair]

we went from a "paper" system to POS

Lots of advantages but the one thing I can't seem to overcome is in-store credits. We have customers on our old accounts that have credit balances that need to be tracked.

It would be so much easier if their account could have a credit balance on it . Heck if we could even just FLAG their account so we know to check our paper copy for that balance that would be soooo helpful.

[Max_Sadlowski]

@sslair This is a really good point. The best option would be to grant them a gift card potentially, therefore that credit could be used online and in-store. Outside that though, you could tag a customer however that won't show up on the cart of the POS. This is a really good point though. 

One other option would be to look at using one of the loyalty apps that integrate with POS. This would allow you to add a bunch of points to their accounts and then those would show up right inside the cart when you added the customer. 

We will look for a way to include this in our app so that its more clear that customers are tagged a certain way or have gift cards available to be used.

[Rivertowninkery]

@Max_Sadlowski   YES! Please make something new to save us from the hell that is using shopify POS.

I echo most of the complaints here but the biggest miss on the new POS is the layout and clunkiness of the design.  If a store is using a POS, then all they really "need" to do is ring in products.  So the products should be the most important thing, front and center.  Why would they be hidden in tiles and hard to find.  I end up just doing a search for every single I item I ring in. Huge pain. 

Really the classic version of the POS is a great simple product.  I would start there as far as layout and design go, then add in some new functions that poeple think are missing. 

So I guess I am saying the biggest thing is a product grid, that takes up most of the screen.

[Max_Sadlowski]

@Rivertown From what I remember when I spoke to product designers and the product manager of POS, the reason for the transition to the new setup was two fold:

1. Most merchants were not using the product grid. They searched, scanned barcodes, or ended up adding things in different ways (I realize most is vague and in this case, does not refer to your situation).
2. A grid of tiles allowed for customization by all merchants however they wanted, the addition of often required pieces that were buried (like applying discount codes) and to ensure that apps were able to take a more prominent role.  

With the tile setup, you could recreate the systems previously had with products and collections. It is a lengthy process to do as it has to be done manually, but it can be done. My biggest suggestion is to organize things in collections that make sense for your store, make those collections only available on POS, and then add tiles for those collections. It will lead to fast adding of products, without search, and you can easily update those collections as needed (or even make them smart collections). Hope this helps!

[Will_Cervarich]

• New POS doesn't allow for Shipping to be added to an exchange. You can mark the new order as unfulfilled, but you can't enter a shipping address or select a shipping service on POS.
• Infinite exchanges - customers don't just exchange once. Buy, exchange, exchange is not uncommon. I'm waiting for our first buy, exchange, exchange, exchange... Current ability to process this is awful... requires being in Shopify Web Admin and workflow that makes for questionable bookkeeping.
• Ability to issue store credit in amounts that exceed the initial payment received. Often we'd like to give a customer back $ to account for a single-use coupon they used and should be able to reuse on a future purchase.  

[ReUp_Refills]

The ability to have a decimal quantity. We sell products by weight. Would be great to be able to charge 2.5 pounds instead of having to round down to 2 every time.

[Max_Sadlowski]

@ReUp_Refills Thanks for the input. Shopify has a system of whole number inventory, so this is essentially impossible to do unless you bump up your inventory. For example, instead of having 2.5 pounds, you end up selling in oz, so you sell 40 oz. The issue here is that you can only price each quantity down to a penny, so what might have been $0.99/lb before now needs to be $0.06/oz which doesn't round nicely. Would the reliance on Shopify Inventory be something that you would be ok to depart from? 

[ReUp_Refills]

Thanks for your reply, Max.

- Is Shopify's whole number inventory something that will likely not change within the near future (12 ish months)?

- What alternatives would you suggest to Shopify Inventory? 

We have used Square previously (and found that it not only allows decimals, but generally works better as a POS system overall). However, Square's online site builder is much more limited than Shopify's. I've thought about combining the two, using some sort of bridging software like Shopventory. However, that seems a complicated, expensive, and surely issue-prone solution.

[Max_Sadlowski]

@ReUp_Refills 

1. It is unlikely to change. It's very embedded in the APIs that a change to allow floating point decimals instead of integers would be a massive undertaking and is unlikely to happen. It might be a feature that they introduce that allows merchants to turn on store by store, but even then, app developers would have to support it and it would need to be something they announced way in advance. I would say fairly unlikely in the next 12 months, but only Shopify knows that.

2. I don't have any specifics, but there are many ERPs out there that work with Shopify directly and already have tight integrations. Some are inexpensive, some are enterprise. Would need to be based on your specific needs and integration points needed.

I agree that bridging some external POS to Shopify Online is tough. I think that Shopify POS will get better over the next 12 months, I am not sure how this problem will be solved, but it is something we are thinking more about.

[ReUp_Refills]

Thanks for your response.

I guess I'm curious then what you are suggesting? It seemed like you
thought there might be a solution if we were willing to track inventory
outside of Shopify? Can you elaborate at all upon that line of thinking –
I'm just not sure how it allows us to sell by decimals in our POS
transactions.

Thank you,
Peter

[fleshandblood]

To be able to simply type in the value of the sale on the pos, hit enter and let the customer touch their card to the pos, same as SumUp does. So much quicker, so much less hassle. 

[Wongg]

Any apps to support gift with purchase for POS?

E.g. Add gift B automatically into the cart when customers purchase 3 items from brand A.