How can we improve customer experience with Shopify POS?

Retail & Point of Sale
1

Hi there, customers forget things or change their minds but Shopify POS isn’t able to keep pace.

It’s a fail to ask for customer info more than once because of a POS system and in a busy pop-up sale with lots of impatient customers, those waiting just walk off. Here are some daily frustrations…

1. ‘Ship to customer’ doesn’t allow cart editing

  1. Add items to cart in POS
  2. Use ‘Ship to customer’
  3. Enter email and address details

But now the customer changes their mind, can you edit the cart? Nope. If you go back, a pop-up eventually states ‘Discard changes?’. So now you’re stuck, you either…

a) Discard the customer address, edit the cart and ask for their details all over again (asking for customer info twice is a POS fail).
b) Or if they’re adding to the cart and not changing it, you process two transactions (another POS fail).

If you’re a Shopify POS developer reading this, neither is acceptable. We need the ability to edit anything we can see on-screen, any time, and for any reason.

Try running a successful pop-up sale or selling at a busy home expo with a queue of impatient customers, you’ll instantly see how frustrated customers get, costing you sales.

2. Auto-recognise existing customers

  1. Add items to cart in POS
  2. Use ‘Ship to customer’
  3. Enter email and address details
  4. Process the order

This all seems great - right? Well, if the customer had previously signed-up to the newsletter online, their address isn’t saved with the order. You discover later that you can’t ship their items!

Instead, Shopify POS should auto-recognise any email and offer two options: 1) Use/update existing account. 2) Create new account using a different email.

Searching for customers using ‘Add customer’ first doesn’t work because if their email doesn’t exist, you have to ask for it again for ‘Ship to customer’ (asking for customer info twice is a fail).

And if you ask customers if they’ve previously signed-up to the newsletter, it sours the transaction. This depends on age but in our experience, older people paying lots hate this and they’re the ones with the money.

3. Merge, swap, edit anything

  • Do we ever need to merge customer accounts? Yes.
  • Do we ever need to swap customer accounts on an order? Yes.
  • Do we ever see something on-screen that needs changing but we can’t edit it? Yes.

If we can see it on-screen, then we need the ability to edit it, any time, for any reason. Period. That’s the standard you guys should be shooting for.

I’m really sorry if the above comes-off as harsh but I’ve requested this stuff several times over the years. There seems to be a huge disconnect between developers, merchants, and customer expectations.

We know a merchant who sells at Home Expos and after switching to Shopify POS, went back to a pen and paper for customer interactions because it’s way faster which impacts sales per hour (even the young tech-savvy sellers). But each night, they have to re-enter everything back into POS.

We’ve been thinking about doing the same thing which is ridiculous - right?

Surely Shopify POS could be fast AND flexible?

Someone at Shopify please, give us visibility on feature requests so we can stop banging our heads against the wall with this stuff!

11 Likes
2

HI Ben

These and other reasons particularly how Shopify POS treats partially paid items (and the limits it imposes) are why we will not use Shopify POS. I love their ecomm but hate their POS. I’m exploring QuickB**** POS and ACE POS, both have functions of a real robust POS (both are ugly :slightly_smiling_face: - but I’m studying/researching how they integrate with Shopify ecomm. Good luck with getting Shopify POS to listen.

2 Likes
3

The disconnect is incredibly frustrating, as is the lack of visibility on feature requests. You talk to someone who’s polite but nothing ever happens.

I’d happily spend time beta testing and helping but there’s never an opportunity. And unfortunately, it’s the same for Ecom, something that’s literally a 5min fix (like a bug on a drop-down menu) still isn’t fixed after 8 months.

5 Likes
4

Preach Ben31 PREACH!!!

I agree with all these.

2 Likes
5

Daily Frustrations.

  1. The error message when you are entering a customer’s information, “This email / phone number is taken.”. Why not add “would you like to use that customer?” (because it’s obviously the same person."

  2. How about Local Pick up option as well as local delivery as options.

  3. Edit the transaction after adding shipping. I know it might shock you but sometimes people change their minds!

  4. The ability to Add Tags on transactions from the POS. Tags are a great concept. sure would be nice if we could use them on the POS.

  5. What happened to Adjust Price?!?!? You added it, and it was great. now it’s Discount code. Also useful for some people, I’m sure, but why remove the Adjust price?!??!

  6. I like the address validation. Can you not prefill our local state? We ship items all over the country and the validation doesn’t work because the state and city are prefilled.

Thank you. I will return my time to the chair.

4 Likes
6

Great points, couldn’t agree more!

Re Adjust price, I think that was replaced with ‘Price override’ which we prefer. For example “…I’ll do that for $80”.

Now we just enter $80 in adjust price instead of having to calculate a discount amount to reach $80 (great for those of us who are useless at math!).

And couldn’t agree more re address validation. We’re not 100% sure why it doesn’t work reliably because it’s worked when the city was pre-filled but more often than not, it doesn’t work for us.

1 Like
7

I started a list of daily frustrations, then realized it is pointless. Every call, every ask for help to make this a more functional POS is just rote answers of ‘we hear you, we will pass it on’ but it goes into a queue that we don’t get to see or vote on and it is based on how many people call in to complain. I don’t have that time of time. I can’t call in on the vast number of things that this system doesn’t do or fails to do. It’s ripe with accounting errors, inventory control is nearly non-existent for a brick and mortar with anything that is sold in case lots, forget about the lack of real functionality like pos systems normally have (store credit, merging clients, seeing purchase history as a big list, refunds with a different refund payment type, the list is long).

I’ve been holding out hope that I don’t have to switch, yet again, to another pos so we can function like a normal store again. My accountant is going to have a fit at year end when I try to figure out any numbers for him. My tech husband says to jump ship, but I’m tired of the amount of work it took to set this up, and having to switch again makes me literally cry in frustration. If only dev would hear - would work with us. I think they make too much money on all the apps, and they have no monetary motivation to improve the system. Wish I knew before we switched, what I know now.

4 Likes
8

Many users are complaining about the changes from Shopify POS and I think that they are gradually improving the performance of the app. However, if you’re looking for an alternative to Shopify POS, ConnectPOS can be the right choice for you.

As a real-time synced POS system, ConnectPOS ensures all data including products, customers, orders and inventory will be updated instantly between the POS and Shopify store. More than that, ConnectPOS supports:

  • Create and edit customers’ info in-app
  • Edit shipping orders after completing transactions
  • Refund and exchange
  • Offline mode
  • Quotes management

For more information, visit our app or book a demo with ConnectPOS. I hope you can find the best POS system for your retail business.

1 Like
9

@ConnectPOS I have sent a message using your website contact form, asking if we can speak to retailers that are already using your system live (preferably with large inventories to manage in retail stores). We’ve tried lightspeed and square and they can’t function as needed either. We aren’t going through the extreme pain and time commitment of changing again until we can see it in a live environment and how it functions, so we can determine what areas it doesn’t cover that we need. None of these systems can compare to SmartVendor, but the price points make it worth our effort to try to find a better solution than paying what SmartVendor wants to get us online.

If you can facilitate getting us some retailers who use both Shopify and ConnectPOS live in a retail store with high inventory (at least 1000 skus) that would be appreciated.

1 Like
10

Hi @petgrocer ,

My Sales team has sent you an email to introduce ConnectPOS. Looking forward to discussing more with you!

If you need any information, contact us at sales@connectpos.com and we will ring you back right away!

11

Another disappointed customer that will be completely ignored. Not a day goes by that I regret having gotten sucked into Shopify when I was online only.

1 Like
12

I am in the same boat. Spend too much on website development to just jump ship. Shopify greedy, know we are stick and don’t care about anything but increasing their stock price. I will make sure anyone who asks knows how bad Shopify is but I have completely given up on trying to talk to support or expecting any sort of change. Shameful.