Is Shopify’s whole number inventory something that will likely not change within the near future (12 ish months)?
What alternatives would you suggest to Shopify Inventory?
We have used Square previously (and found that it not only allows decimals, but generally works better as a POS system overall). However, Square’s online site builder is much more limited than Shopify’s. I’ve thought about combining the two, using some sort of bridging software like Shopventory. However, that seems a complicated, expensive, and surely issue-prone solution.
It is unlikely to change. It’s very embedded in the APIs that a change to allow floating point decimals instead of integers would be a massive undertaking and is unlikely to happen. It might be a feature that they introduce that allows merchants to turn on store by store, but even then, app developers would have to support it and it would need to be something they announced way in advance. I would say fairly unlikely in the next 12 months, but only Shopify knows that.
I don’t have any specifics, but there are many ERPs out there that work with Shopify directly and already have tight integrations. Some are inexpensive, some are enterprise. Would need to be based on your specific needs and integration points needed.
I agree that bridging some external POS to Shopify Online is tough. I think that Shopify POS will get better over the next 12 months, I am not sure how this problem will be solved, but it is something we are thinking more about.
I guess I’m curious then what you are suggesting? It seemed like you
thought there might be a solution if we were willing to track inventory
outside of Shopify? Can you elaborate at all upon that line of thinking –
I’m just not sure how it allows us to sell by decimals in our POS
transactions.
To be able to simply type in the value of the sale on the pos, hit enter and let the customer touch their card to the pos, same as SumUp does. So much quicker, so much less hassle.