Integrating Shopify with a highly functional Restaurant/Bar POS system

Retail & Point of Sale
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Topic summary

A whisky shop and bar owner is seeking a POS system that integrates with Shopify while supporting full restaurant/bar functionality (tabs, tables, loyalty programs). The business sells bottles both online and in-store, plus drinks by the measure, requiring synchronized inventory management.

Key Challenge:
Shopify POS receives poor reviews for bar/restaurant use and struggles with:

  • Open tabs and table management
  • Tracking inventory depletion from bundled products (cocktails using multiple ingredients)
  • Keeping orders open while continuously adding items

Recommended Workaround:
Use a hybrid approach:

  • Shopify POS for bottle sales in the shop
  • Dedicated restaurant POS (like Square or Clover) for table/bar service
  • Manual inventory transfers by creating a dummy customer (“Mr. Bar”) and “selling” bottles at 100% discount to track stock movement from retail to bar use
  • Restrict discount permissions to managers only

Integration Options:

  • SKU IQ mentioned for Square-Shopify integration (though limited to Square/TikTok)
  • DataLily AI suggested for Clover-Shopify integration with added analytics
  • Saved cart function proposed as potential workaround for tabs

Status: Discussion remains open with no definitive solution confirmed by the original poster.

Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
3

Hi Iain

Many thanks for a great summary. I’m not so bothered about trying to get
Shopify to know how to automagically decrease bottle stock after 28 shots
of whisky, as we already manually move stock from bottles to drams for
Talech. I’m more concerned about tracking bottle sales from the shop to
the bar.

I’m guessing that one solution (which I think you were semi-implying) would
be to use Shopify POS for bottle sales in the shop (which should be
super-easy) then separate table service to a more suitable platform.
Bottles could be manually ‘Moved’ from Shopify to dram measures in the bar
platform by ‘selling’ them to Mr Bar. It wouldn’t strictly be necessary
to integrate Shopify with Square/Clover etc in that set up (my previous
life in IT has witnessed the problems of trying to mash two things together
that weren’t built to play well together :wink: ).
Any final thoughts would be much appreciated - many thanks for your time
and experience on this. I’ve found Shopify themselves to be worryingly
unhelpful and impossible to reach for support, in the UK at least.
Cheers, Paul