We sell cheese which needs to be sold by weight in the POS. Shopify does not offer an option to sell by variable price in POS or online. The only solution I have found is an app called Sell Products by Weight in POS, but it is unsatisfactory for a couple of reasons. 1. It is extremely slow and frustrates staff and customers. 2. It does not let you manage inventory. (We use Stocky for this but it is not possible to enter that we received a 3kg piece of cheese and then see it diminish as we sell varying weights).
Another way round this issue would be if Shopify allowed pricing to 3 decimal places. Then we could sell cheese by unit of grams. (A 145g piece of Stilton would just be 145 items - this would also allow stock control) Say a gram of Stilton costs 0.046p. Shopify rounds this up to 0.05 which is a big difference and again not workable.
Does anyone have a solution to this issue? There must be lots of businesses which sell products this way.
Hi @SalusburyWine shopify wasn’t built for sell by weight so everything is a workaround.
If your weighting goes to three decimal places you’ve pretty much hit a dead end of admin based workarounds.
currently shopify is basically cent based for money so not clear if they’d ever bite the bullet and go to more decimal places.
The most common workaround is similar to what you describe by using the quantity as a price/weight totaler from the smallest unit-cost possible.
So every product/variant is based on the smallest unit possible.
10 qty for $0.10 = gram~$0.01 x 10 , or 1 qty for $0.10 = decigram $0.10 x 1 , 8qty for $0.08 = 1/2 lb = oz $0.01 * 8 , etc.
Beyond that is build a custom system, similar to the Sell Products by Weight app, wherein you roughly generate custom items in draft orders then reconcile inventory in a sync process; with the deep issue there being reporting based on values in orders is no longer really a source of truth.
So you get the speed benefit of being the only user IF the tradeoff in paying for development is worth that.
Thanks for the reply. Cheese is priced by the kilo. For example £41.55. I have changed all the prices so everything is priced in whole pounds so I can set a price per 10g on the till. Then every piece we sell we just have to divide by 10 and round down. Most whole pieces are hundred gram size so this amounts to just removing the last digit. A 345g piece of Stilton is sold as 34 Stiltons. The drawback here is that we lose a little bit of money on each transaction, but you can’t round up without angering customers.
Even with the lack of inventory management the Sell By Weight app was so slow it was embarrassing to use in the shop. Staff would be standing there with a queue of customers growing while they waited for the calculations to complete.
This is the best of a bad situtation which I find it hard to believe a company as big as Shopify won’t rectify. Our last POS system could sell by weight, had a table plan and bar service function, none of which Shopify supply. I would have continued using them if their website API worked.
I have reached out to other devs to see if anyone can help us with something custom but no-one has replied.
Will be checking out Squarespace and simillar in the new year to see if it is worth moving over.
Yup it literally can come down to using a better tool to fit the business need.
If you do move that’s typically a good time to review the business IA and try to make things as platform agnostic so migration is always a negotiable option.
make it clear to shopify-support what the reason is for leaving, it may not amount to much short-term but it can’t be even counted as a wallet-vote if they don’t know.
Or even better making a post here about the migration process and tradeoffs
I have reached out to other devs to see if anyone can help us with something custom but no-one has replied.
If hesitant to migrate to squarespace make a form letter and hit the partner directory for retail experts but that can create quite the chore of discussions. POS setup and migration , or custom apps and integrations .
Integrating INTO the POS itself is a cost multiplier with a lot of test burdens on top of developing the process and and it’s logic.
Which can be why some devs my not even bother with inquires if there is not a suitable budget declared from the jump.
There’s always trying to script an automation app like mechanic to modify draft orders, or maybe generate them but I don’t think the POS cart api can be reached without a UI-extension app.
MASSIVE cliché of merchant self interest, there’s ~2-4 million stores|merchants on shopify to weight needs against.
And hundreds+ of payment integrations that would be affected by such a change in turn massively impacting other merchants with even the slightest bug.
The forums are filled with merchants that think their specific feature needs are the priority.
For any specific thread the amount of participants is always waaay less than 0.01% of the userbase.
Always with little to no awareness of that fact or just resentment of that math shooting the messenger; combined with fragmented posting, lack of championing the cause, consolidation , petitioning or rallying … all the deep work that’s actually needed in place of an expectant hope someone else will maybe perhaps possibly someday sometime fix it.
A SaSS at this scale can’t move with 0.01% clientele trying to steer the ship.
That is why there is an api , and off the shelf apps to try and shore up what a big platform may never fix change.
This applies any such software with a large user base.
Such as moving to squarespace for sell-by-weight may mean losing some must-have feature shopify has unless a squarespace-extension is found IF the platform even has underlying apis that can gap-fill a specific need.
And that yak-shaving can be incredibly frustrating for merchants just trying to run a store.
So yeah drastically more productive to boil it down to the math problem & shortlist: pliers A with $5 screws OR wrench B with $1 nails .
Have you looked at the FillJoy app? Sounds like it will do exactly what you want? Designed to work with selling by weight, and is able to remove the tare, etc.!
@SalusburyWine I’m sorry to hear you had that experience previously with our app. The version of our app that you were using was built using an older Shopify POS API and load times were certainly slower than we’d liked.
We invite you to reinstall and try our app again as we’ve since migrated all apps to Shopify’s newest POS UI Extensions which feature faster load times and a more user friendly interface: https://apps.shopify.com/sell-products-by-weight
shopify wasn’t built for sell by weight so everything is a workaround.
.