Is There a Plan to Actually Compete in POS? (Rant)

Retail & Point of Sale
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I’ve been using Shopify for about 7 years now.

The POS software is great and absolutely on par with other POS systems out there in terms of functionality.

However…

I’ve been trying to get into the brick and mortar POS side of things, but Shopify Hardware is making things incredibly difficult. I understand that hardware delays are a thing, and I would normally except that argument, however Square has literally EVERY ONE OF THEIR registers available ready to ship. So either Shopify closed down their entire hardware department, or Square is just so far ahead of the curve here. We can order ONLY 1 type of card reader, and that’s IF we want to lock ourselves down to iOS. Oh, and the dock for that card reader is out of stock as well, so that’s really fun and feels super professional asking someone checking out to plug their card into the tiny black square that’s adhesive taped to the counter.

Please, for the love of POS, start approving OTHER AVAILABLE card readers that work with ALL mobile operating systems. The limitations are absurd. We can use 1 barcode scanner that breaks if you look at it funny and is so small it gets lost quicker than a squirrel in the ocean. If we want any screen larger than 12" we have to purchase iPad Pros (thanks to the only available card reader working with ONLY iOS), which are a pretty terrible value ($1k+) for a system that’s going to do nothing except run Shopify POS (you can buy a Galaxy S7 FE 12.4" for around $320 used BUT NO SHOPIFY CHIP READERS ARE AVAILABLE). Clover Station Solo is $1349 for a 14" screen. Square Register is $800 for BOTH a 13" AND a 7" screen.

Square’s new retail stand puts the Shopify stand to absolute shame, and its actually available. Is Shopify even working on new hardware at the moment? Can someone just give us a glimpse of ANYTHING that’s possibly coming out with regards to Hardware? Is there going to be a Desktop OS version of POS coming?? The last POS Blog post was May 4th 2020, so its been about 2 years, and it seems like Shopify has “checked out” of POS.

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I have asked Shopify support repeatedly to press their developers for an improved selection of card readers and also for improvements to the customer display. Other than removing support for card readers, there hasn’t been any major updates to the Shopify POS in nearly two years.

I am not even really sure what the 10,000+ employees do at Shopify. They don’t release new features or hardware for the POS, and despite having half the features, they charge more than both Square and Clover for the service. They don’t release new features for the eCommerce service and instead push you to use broken and dysfunctional apps for basic functionality. The customer support team provides an identical copied and pasted message to every single email. I now regret choosing Shopify POS for my business at this point.

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Most brands use Shopify POS because they want one system with their eCommerce. But unlike the state-of-the-art Shopify plus the POS part is a decade behind. Super basic features like changing the name of a rep on a completed transaction are missing.
Hopefully, someone at Shopify will work more closely with the D2C retailers that also have brick-and-mortar stores to improve the POS. I suggest at the minimum creating feature requests, with voting like Lightspeed, SalesForce, and others are doing.
At the same time, I must admit I saw things improving as well.