Why is the POS 'Save as Draft Order' feature not working properly?

[donnamac]

The replacement of the 'Save Cart' with 'Draft Order' is not working and is cumbersome and time-consuming.

It seems the POS 'Save to Draft Orders' tile was installed without it being well tested.

It is not intuitive and takes too much time which results in our in-store customers sitting there waiting for us

to be able to complete their sale.  Not a good reflection on us shop owners.

What the 'Save Cart' tile did:

   - you pressed the tile to 'save the cart'

  -  to retrieve the order:

        - you pressed the tile

       - you selected the cart you saved

       - you completed the sale

What the 'Save Draft Orders' does:

     - you press the tile

     - when you press the tile again to retrieve the order it doesn't.  Instead...

             -  you leave the Products screen

             -  you go to 'Orders'

            -   you select Draft Orders

            -   you find the saved cart - however it is included on a list with all your other 'draft' orders

            -   it brings it up for completion or removal (I'm not sure how well add/chging it works.  I've had mixed results)

            -  If you press the trash button (in the cart screen ) to delete it clears the screen and looks like it's deleted,

               but does not delete the draft order from the system

                       - when you go back into draft orders to delete it there...you can't.  You can only Edit or Check Out.

                       - Edit or Check Out takes you right back to the cart....

                      - if you delete all the line items from the order, the order is still in Draft Orders and the line items

                             are still on it.  This is major and affects available inventory.

                         - the only way I could delete the draft orders done from the POS is to go into Shopify ADMIN and do it.

This is in no way complete testing...but nothing us store owners should be doing. This module has serious issues.

[petgrocer]

I just can't even with how poorly run Shopify is. 

We had a save cart feature that worked. Now we have lost that feature, and the new feature does not work. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU AT SHOPIFY? I am frustrated every single day with how poor the decision making at this company is. 

Please bring back the small things that actually worked, such as the save cart, which is how a retail store works. 

[petgrocer]

This is a nightmare! Now our draft orders in the admin are being messed up with this. Our stock is being reserved in error, inventory counts can't be done right. Does nothing actually get tested by Shopify at all? I am so so so frustrated. 

[brockpw]

What I am confused it why one option had to be deprecated so the other could live. I see the value in the draft order, but there's no reason to remove the save cart functionality when it seamlessly offered a different solution that made employees lives easier. We have tiles we can manage. Let the end user decide which works best for their needs.

[donnamac]

Well said

[Don]

Hi there @donnamac!

Thanks for sharing your feedback on this with us here in the Community.

We can file a request internally based on this, if you can reach out via our Help Centre here. 

There we can gather more info and submit your feedback in the form of a feature request.

Thanks again for taking the time to let us know about this! 

[donnamac]

Was on with Shopify Support and did this last week.  They say they will send on to the support staff, but you never really know. 😞

[donnamac]

Don,

So what is going on with this, anything??  When you stated

   'We can file a request internally based on this, if you can reach out via our Help Centre here. 

    There we can gather more info and submit your feedback in the form of a feature request.'

This process you describe above to 'gather info for a feature request' has never happened or been offered in the 6

years we have been on this system and this community when uncommunicated changes have happened.

Please contact me and we can get this started.......

[petgrocer]

Give us back the save cart feature. These are retail stores. It's a basic function. Give us back the discounts option as well - since you've only rolled out the new discount feature to some stores...ours is not one of them.

[markphip]

This is just unreal.

Save as Cart was taken away from POS Lite, so I had to come to terms with needing to pay $89/month for this one feature and the feature that is actually there is a different P.O.S. and totally useless. This thread explains why so I will not repeat it here but given there seems little hope that Shopify cares enough to improve this we will need to start looking at the alternatives.

[IN_OSLO]

Well, Don, I have reached out, along with hundreds of others it looks like, and have asked for and demanded the return of the SAVE CART and PRICE OVERRIDE features.  You have seen that there is an enormous backlash and how deleterious the affect has been to our programs and operations.

What will management do in order to return the proper functionality of our their program back to our businesses?  Why are we being forced to pay for a system that does not meet our needs and ignores our faithful and genuine feedback?

What is your response, Don?  What is the response from the overlords at Shopify?

[donnamac]

Addendum to ALL

I cannot express enough for all who are pained over this change to go to support chat. Don't even waste time with them, immediately say you wish to

talk to a Support Advisor about this issue.   You will be asked to select your store then put you in queue.

Once you actually get to an Advisor...Insist to have your concern forwarded to the development team and added to the complaint.

Below is the link for help.

 https://help.shopify.com/en

What is installed is a mess.  We need to be vocal about it.

Fingers crossed

[IN_OSLO]

they have made it much more difficult to reach an Advisor.  You are now forced to dance with the chat bot for far greater lengths of time before it will forward your request to an Advisor.  It basically demands that you continue entering "problem prompts" in order to continue to issue you recommended solutions that are all the same.  It is truly frustrating.

[jules5822]

I totally agree, we have 15 stores and staff do not currently have access to shopify admin which means these draft orders remain visible. This is not an improvement on save cart and is very clunky

[jules5822]

also to add, when you retrieve a saved cart you cannot add a discount code to it, so you just have to start again anyway - useless

[petgrocer]

Giving POS staff access to something that is in the admin, that we don't want them to have access to, is proving painful. Additionally, even though this pos version gives you a delete option, it doesn't actually delete it! So now I spend each day going through and manually deleting draft orders from the admin. I use the draft orders for things not in store, so now all my orders are mixed up with the brick and mortar orders. This is unacceptable.

[petgrocer]

I'm wasting my time daily, to log in to support advisors, and pointing them to this thread. Telling them to pass this on the development team.

[CEJared]

The fact that this was implemented without warning, and clearly without testing, is mind blowing. The save cart function worked well, why bother changing/removing it? This change makes no sense and is not something that the customer base was looking to be altered. Our staff has been avoiding the feature entirely.

[teekay05]

shopify folks smoking some ominous fancy shite strains again.

hated the unwarranted update of saving POS orders as draft orders, and the butt load of steps to retrieve previously simple 'saved carts' workflow.

worse thing discovered today, once you pull up the saved order to edit, you can't save the order again. you have to either check it out or delete the order.

sometimes I believe shopify developers are solitarily confined in some dark dungeon beneath guantanamo bay, lonely, and in need of some attention by creating these horrific updates in the hopes of getting noticed and saved from their demise.

[IN_OSLO]

I have  figured out some work-arounds.  Since the shoddy engineers can't won't (same thing) fix this issue and the leadership won't listen to honest feedback, i've been forced to "h@ck" their sh!tty system. 

1. You CAN edit the order AND re-save it!!!  Once you go through numerous  steps to retrieve the order you want, make the edits you want, (add items, edit amounts etc.) tap the "garbage can" in the upper right corner.  When it asks you to save changes or cancel,  SAVE them.  it goes back into the draft folder for another time.  you can do this as many times as you want.  I know, it sucks, and there are so many steps involved that one can easily make a mistake, and you will.  We have made plenty.  But it is any option until the crapheads fix this issue.

2. I found it nearly impossible to delete one of these Drafts once it is started.  3 ways to get around this issue:

     a. Click on the draft order then go to the bottom of the page and touch delete order (this one is new)

     b. go to the admin page of your SHOPIFY acct and go to "orders" then drafts.  find the one you want and delete it, or

     c. delete all of the items in the cart and cash out a "ZERO BALANCE".  i know, it messes up your average bill and sales total numbers but it is an option.

Sorry you are in the same sh!tty boat as the rest of us.  Just remember to list as many things as possible to the Customer Service chat people as you can.  I am up to 4 items that I continuously harp on to hem every single time i log into the chat:

    1. PRICE OVERRIDE

    2. SAVE ORDER

    3. Customizable TILE SIZE on the iPAD app

    4. MULTIPLE CURRENCY (we finally just dropped the second currency and stopped selling to alternate countries rather than have to purchase yet another app to fill the gap)

We are probably going to look for an alternate POS carrier if these issues aren't corrected and SHOPIFY doesn't start responding positively to the thousands of unhappy customers.  It seems as though that is what they want. 

[donnamac]

#in_oslo  Thanks for this update.

Even thought it is a pretty lame update, it is better than having to go into Shopify Admin and then figure out which drafts are the ones
that we can delete.  That was a pure time waster. The edit/resave process is very cumbersome still.  I have a really bad feeling in my gut

that this is about all that we will get. 

[brockpw]

Remember when it was

1. Hit Save Cart
2. That's it.

[petgrocer]

Good old days. They also used to give us an alert, on the two huge tiles that take up a lot of real estate, that told you when you had a local delivery or pick up order. Miss those days.

[jules5822]

I think they may have listened to us, the latest update on shopify POS now allows you to delete the draft order without going into shopify admin. Click on the draft order then go to the bottom of the page and touch delete order 🙂

[IN_OSLO]

Noted.  This was actually pretty helpful.  It still doesn't fix all of the other problems with "Drafts" but, it is a VERY small victory.

[petgrocer]

I don't view this as a victory at all. Them fixing a poorly implemented change is what this is. A victory would be bringing back a fully functional feature that was originally sold to us as part of the standard operating system. One that worked fine. Not a single voice was raised in anger over the fully functional save cart feature.

I have since read the employment opportunities at Shopify - wondering  - can I help effect change from within? Once I read their highly unprofessional careers page I finally understood Shopify. They do not value happy customers. They value risk and chaos for the sake of chaos. They clearly state, while also swearing routinely on their pages, that they want this and exactly what is happening. This is their value set. Unfortunately it does not match my value set, or the value set of the people who are upset by these changes, because we value stability and accountability in a functioning tool.

[IN_OSLO]

Exactly.  This is what i was talking about in another post, there is a divergence of beliefs and values in our cultures and this new culture seems to thrive on uncertainty, instability and chaos.  It is not a good business model imo and also not sustainable. But, in a disposable society, it has become easier to discard and start over, including ones customer base, than to appease or placate them with genuine production retention.

I am going to seek another platform, asap, bc this is just not what i signed up for.

[petgrocer]

Shopify remains the best of a bad lot unfortunately. I read another post from someone who felt trapped and duped. I feel the same. In the beginning when I realized it - I called our 'sales rep' until she refused to answer our calls any longer. That's what this system is - duping with over promise, under deliver. Until a company steps up to fill this void from all the pain points users have, you will find this is still the highest featured product if you need to do both brick and mortar, and omni channel and work remote. Lightspeed has connectivity issues and doesn't offer a remote app. SmartVendor - easily the best POS system out there in our experience, uses a cobbled together three party system to use Shopify as the back end omni channel, but doesn't allow remote access. My genuine hope is either Shopify realizes the money there is to be made in making a useful, user friendly product (like SmartVendor - they have put together a rock solid system with the amazing customer service to match it) or Lightspeed will step up to the plate and fill the rest of those much needed gaps. I have hopes that SmartVendor will get there, but because they value extreme stability (basically the exact opposite of Shopify) they move much slower, so that one will be a long while coming. In my business, there is an industry specific one that is semi - solid, but they don't allow us to use custom payments and their credit card rates are too poor for us to switch. If you find another option that I haven't explored, please share it - people will jump ship for better functionality.

If I was a CEO or high stake holder in Shopify, I would be appalled that this is the user experience. This is so far from how we treat our customers - we value custom happiness and staff happiness above all.

[soulchild37]

Hi Donnamac,

I understand the frustration of Shopify removing the "Save cart" function without giving notice and forcing us to move to draft orders, which introduces inconvenience and issues as you mentioned.

To bring back the "Save cart" functionality,  I have developed an app for Shopify POS recently, which you can utilize back the "Save cart" and "View saved carts" tiles like previously. (I understand the app subscription is an added expense to your store, I try keep it as low as I can to maintain the app's server expenses)

The app name is Yagi POS Cart Helper (https://apps.shopify.com/yagi-pos-cart-helper ), the app comes with a 14 days free trial which you can give it a try. (I am happy to extend it if you need more time, or let me know if you are testing it on a development store)

After installing the app, you can then add the "Save Cart" and "View Saved Cart" tiles in your Shopify POS, and you can save cart and view cart easily as before. The saved cart is also viewable by another POS device, as long as they share the same location.

Here's a demo video on how it works:

Hope this can help!

Regards,

Axel Kee (developer of the Yagi POS Cart Helper app)

[markphip]

Does the app work if the POS is on the free/lite plan?

[soulchild37]

Yes, the app works on all POS plan.

[markphip]

Will this app work if the POS is on the free/lite plan?

[LaurenMcNicol]

(Sorry in advance for the spam if people have seen me post this on the other "save cart" threads, just cross-posting in the interest of maximal visibility for other frustrated vendors). I wanted to signal boost a third party app that brings back Save Cart! We've just downloaded the Yagi POS Cart Helper app today. It allows you to add "save cart" and "view cart" titles to the POS home screen, and they function just as we need (you don't need to add a customer name and info, and if you add discount codes, it'll retain them upon retrieval). It was very easy to install and set up the tiles on our POS home screen. When we had an issue with the carts saving across all locations instead of the location of that iPad, I emailed the developer Axel and he fixed it right away. It's been working exactly as we need! It's a 14-day free trial then $5 a month after that. Also has a check gift card balance function (haven't had opportunity to test that yet but am hopeful). Highly recommend!!