Recommendations from any bricks & mortar business using Shopify

Shopify Discussion
1

Hi there. My wife and I own a small bricks and mortar retail business with no online selling prescence. I’ve been looking at Shopify for a while to replace our current epos system to be able to showcase our products with a view to local people being able to see our stock and place orders for collection, with some products that we may ship.

My main issue is that we already have a card payment processor that we get excellent rates and some finance with so we will in effect be charged twice for any sales either in person or online.

Are there any other similar businesses out there who took the plunge and and feel it has been a benefit using the system?

TIA,

Andrew

2

Shopify is overkill for the given description.
Make sure you existing POS provider does not have existing features or service recommendations.
And or discuss in your business network, industry about what people are using for static VIEW sites(no ecomm functionality required to pay for)

Don’t.
None of this indicates Shopify as a requirement , only that you’ve heard about it and are looking to use it as a hammer for some nail.
“with a view” I can only assume means you do not intend to have any online ecommerce functionality because you value in-person business and already have a solution that works.

Double Don’t.
Have an actual hard feature reason to switch POS, or even hosting or ecomm software.
A requirement that can’t just be solved by using wordpress or some other online CMS, or CSV based process.

Alternates for beginners,

I’m not recommending anything like Webflow or Wix because every time I see such a site they are always slow and bloated even though it should be dead simple and fast. It isn’t clear if that’s the merchants fault or those companies because they don’t put in rail guards to prevent such things to protect it’s customers from themselves.
Note: shopify themes can be kinda bloated too

Bare minimum something like a google-sites page, optionally with a custom domain, and some google-sheets addon to connect the two so the spreadsheet acts as the CMS(content management system) .

Or CSV to website services ,spreadsimple[[example product site].
(Showcase | SpreadSimple)].
Your options can change if your are able to convert the CSV to a format like JSON,YAML, or Markdown for different services.
A bit advanced on this route is static site generator services.

Or even bigger more bloated lowcode tools like softr, retool, airtable with features like sharedviews to embed the content on some page somewhere; or pay for secondary services like table2site.
Though if embedding could just do it with google-sheets anyway

Or , advanced, IF your code savvy using something like github pages, using a static site generator, possibly from datafiles, or with some CMS or database e.g. https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/& https://jekyllrb.com/tutorials/csv-to-table/

Shopify is a big piece of software that can take weeks to go through all it’s features for evaluation.
But that also makes it major overkill, not a silver bullet , just to have a webpage that could be based on a CSV file.

3

Thank you for taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply.

Our current POS system does have a Woocommerce plugin which we tried some years ago. It was very clunky and in the end we abandoned it.

Our social media works quite well for and our original goal was to get more people into the shop. That was working well until COVID happened and since then we have seen a marked drop in turnover.

We may have to update our POS sooner rather than later and I’ve spent hours looking at all sorts of different software but Shopify seemed the best option for syncing inventory.

We currently have a Google Sites page that our domain name points to so I may look into how I can do more with that. I tried Ecwid with it as you can paste the code into but if you want to track inventory, you’re looking at the same price for Shopify.

Your reply has given me more to think about.

Thank you again,

Andrew