Shopify POS Review

40 Comments

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john April 22, 2022 at 4:44 am

We have used Shopify for our two retail storefronts and our ecommerce site for a year now (POS Pro). The POS is nicely designed, easy to use and learn, and largely functional across the spectrum of activities we perform on a daily basis. We had some peripheral connection stability issues early on, primarily with their credit card readers, but those seem to have settled down of late. Our biggest issues are on the back-end and the level of manual effort to keep our data current. We are a kitchen and home goods store, with thousands of SKUs, many of which are with us for only a season. Main issues are:- When items reach zero inventory there is no way to automatically hide them from the online store. It’s a manual review. There is a flag to stop selling when an item is out of stock, but it still appears on your store unless you manually remove it from that channel.- With so many items, image sizes become critically important for the speed of your online store. There is currently no way to adjust product image sizes in bulk, nor is there a flag to set a maximum image size. It is a manual item-by-item click, resize, save. Exhausting.- Inventory cycle counting tools are non-existent. They have a clunky integration with a tool called Stocky, a former add-on app that Shopify absorbed at some point in the past. They’ve done nothing to enhance it or integrate it with the app. Even a basic download of items with their last count date is not available. Although the data is there, Shopify does not expose it in any exports and seems to have no interest in doing so per my requests for enhancement.- Month-end accounting requires going to multiple places in the back office to find what you require. There is a Finances Summary that gets you 75% of the way there, but the rest you have to go other places. For instance, the fees Shopify deducts from every order are not summarized on your month-end reports. As well, your cash deposits removed from the drawer are not summarized over a time period, one must manually look up each day’s cash tracking session for each store individually. We reconcile our undeposited funds regularly and this is a major time suck for us.- Shopify maintains a hard firewall between POS and the back-office. This is largely ok, but a little cross-over would be helpful. For example, bar codes may only be added in the back office. It would be nice when scanning an item at the POS, if it comes up “bar code not found” for the system to allow you to search and link it to an item. As a small operator, It is not always possible to update all information when receiving new inventory…sometime things just need to get out on the floor. This feature, which we had in our system prior to Shopify, is valuable.Overall, Shopify is OK, but some continued focus on the efficiency of their retailer’s operations would make us raving fans.

3

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Nelson June 22, 2021 at 10:58 am

Organization Name: Nelson's phone shop

please I want to know if you can still shop with your clouded visa card on shopify.

• Organization Name: Nelson's phone shop

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Jessica Dinsmore July 14, 2021 at 1:26 pm

Hi Nelson,

I’m not sure I understand your question. Are you able to clarify?

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Mick Goossens December 4, 2020 at 10:44 pm

Who ever wrote the review on the POS system is obviously NOT a retailer. The new Shopify POS is a superficially tricked up version of the original free app. It is harder to navigate, costs $90 more for no discernible improvement. This writer does not know what he is talking about or is employed by Shopify.

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Jessica Dinsmore December 11, 2020 at 3:10 pm

Hi Mick,

Our writers are never paid by the providers we review, but we do appreciate your candid feedback. Shopify currently has a $29 and $79 tier, and they have really boosted their features in the past 18 months or so, which may have made it seemingly harder to navigate. That said, we still do recommend them often. I’m sorry you haven’t had a good experience with them recently! Perhaps reaching out to their support team, as a longtime valued customer, would help. Best of luck.

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Eric Brown September 7, 2019 at 1:59 pm

Organization Name: Amthyst

Our women’s clothing boutique recently switched to using Shopify POS in our brick & mortar location. Prior to switching we were using Shopify for the online store & Square in-store, the makings of an inventory nightmare. We were able to use the same Ipad & stand we used for square plus Shopify sent us a free credit card reader (yay!). The switch was pretty seamless & Shopify POS is super user-friendly. Glad we made the switch. Our only con would be the pricing for app ad-ons, but other than that we love Shopify.

5

• Organization Name: Amthyst

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Butch Ponoroff December 7, 2018 at 12:29 am

Do not go with Shopify POS if you accept returns at POS. If you track customers at the time of purchase and they give the purchase as a gift, if it gets returned and you issue a gift card guess what? The original purchaser not only is notified of the return (by email or text) but they also get a copy of the gift card issued and can use that. Hey that makes a lot of sense. So we are now reduced to not inputting customer info when purchases are made, NICE!

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Darrell Smith July 27, 2018 at 3:51 pm

Organization Name: Rocky Smith Productions

We signed up for a Shopify account so that we could accept credit cards while touring with our business in Canada. After signing up and accepting almost $1000, we got an email saying our business was “too risky”. If that is their belief, that is their right. But they leave open no recourse, no comment, and no explanation. This sucks. But what really pisses me off, is that they are going to hold our money for 120 days! Why?!? If this is the kind of company you want to do business with, I wish you luck. Me, I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get back to the states and Square.

1

• Organization Name: Rocky Smith Productions

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Shari January 3, 2018 at 12:52 pm

Hey Everyone,
I will be opening up my shoe store and I am looking for a good POS system , did a lot of research and got different reviews on some of the POS, I heard that lightspeed is not so bad, but can anyone in the shoe business refer me to a good company? I really do not like the ipad as for one it is too small. so please someone give me some advise? I would appreciate that.
Thank you all.
Shari

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Tracy Hof September 2, 2018 at 9:18 pm

I had 2 retail stores for 6 and 10 years respectively. We had light speed – it was decent but EXPENSIVE.

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Elizabeth Howell August 7, 2017 at 2:14 pm

No review – just a thank you for this well-written and helpful article!

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Denis Lee January 12, 2017 at 11:01 pm

Very disappointed with this product. The POS works fine but the hardware you need any shop – card reader, receipt printer and scanner purchased from them do not work. Have spent four days in contact with their support just trying to link the Bluetooth printer they supplied to the IPad. The printer can be seen by the IPAD but the Shopify PIS refuses to see any hardware. This is useless and we have wasted over £2000 setting it up – don’t waste your hard earned money.

1

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Damian Bradley December 2, 2016 at 7:18 pm

Our new retail shop (an independant bicycle dealer) started out using Shopify for both brick-and-mortar and online selling. On the surface, shopify seems to tick most of the boxes for functionality, but there are major issues with the platform which demonstrate Shopify’s lack of basic understanding of how business, accounting and book-keeping function. The web site design and user POS / ecommerce interfaces are superb, the customer support is very good. Unfortunately the core business functionality of the platform is so far lacking that I absolutely cannot recommend the software. Brick-and-mortar shops or anyone with even remotely complex inventory management or bookkeeping requirements should steer well clear. The issues we experienced are as follows: 1) Lack of tracking of cost of goods sold. It’s mentioned in a few comments around the web, but in my opinion reviewers should be screaming from the rooftops about this missing functionality. I can’t think of any case where a business should not be tracking cost of goods sold. Unless you tracking costs outside of Shopify (and in that case you’re duplicating efforts and maintaining two systems) you’re in for a very rough ride with the Shopify platform. There are 3rd party plugins/apps which attempt to address the lack of cost-of-goods-sold (COGS), but using them is a problematic workaround for many reasons. In addition to being difficult to input cost data for larger inventories, the app we used generated raw data which needed a great deal of manipulation in order to be even remotely helpful for cost tracking. We explored the option of accounting software synchronization offered by Shopify, but since costs aren’t tracked on the sales end there really isn’t anything to sync with our accounting software. The end result of lacking COGS tracking was countless hours spent daily, weekly and monthly manipulating spreadsheets to track and summarize our cost of goods sold and manually calculating margins. 2) Improper accounting for returned goods and refunded transactions. This is a real issue for Shopify: Instead of generating a new (negative value) transaction for a returned product or refunded transaction, Shopify modifies the original transaction record to remove / “refund” line item(s) returned from the sale. This method is massively problematic because there is no new transaction taking place on the refund date, so you are unable query or summarize returns for a given time period. Consequently, it becomes all but impossible to accurately calculate your profit margins for a given time period since returns actually alter past transactions, thereby altering historical profit and loss statements not current ones. Due to exported data formatting issues (see the next point), it’s also extremely difficult to track down refunds since the information is actually nested within the original sale data on the original sale date. 3) Data exports do not follow data formatting best practices. The CSV files that Shopify generates for sales, transaction histories and inventory require significant manipulation and cleanup before you can query or manipulate your data. 4) Transaction data losses between the POS and the cloud. This was perhaps the most troubling of all Shopify’s issues. Near the end of our subscription we were having dozens of instances where transaction data from our POS ipad could not be synchronized to the cloud data repository. The information was simply lost or corrupted, and it was impossible for us or Shopify tech support to recover the data. As a retailer who warranties our products and accepts returns, each transaction record is vitally important. In order to “save” what information we could, staff were forced to manually input all available details of the missing transactions into an exported spreadsheet of shopify transactions. Consequently, although the spreadsheet we generated were a reasonable record of our transactions, any reports we generated from Shopify were incorrect since they didn’t include the missing records and transactions. What I describe here are some of the major pitfalls of the platform. We had other issues that taxed our business workflow (inventory management, user management/discounting, store credit/gift certificates and so on) but these were overshadowed by the challenges brought on by issues above. In summary, Shopify POS lacks the basic tools, best practices, reporting, data quality and stability required to effectively run a business. The areas where the platform excels are made redundant by this fact. We did work with Shopify and third party app developers to attempt to rectify some of the shortcomings and resolve the issues we had with the software, and to their credit Shopify are receptive to feedback. It should however not be up to end-users to guide developers in the fundamentals of business and data management. Any changes or additions they have made since our subscription could not come quickly enough to mitigate the negative impact the platform was having on our business, so we were forced to migrate to a different product/platform. We have since switched to Lightspeed which has proven more robust and appropriate for our purposes, and our business sector as an independent bicycle dealer.

1

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

amanda January 2, 2017 at 6:06 pm

cost of goods – good point!

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

catherine February 7, 2017 at 10:08 am

I agree 100%. I am looking for a system that address all of the above for small business. I just got off the phone with Square and they are rolling out a retail POS system tomorrow. It will have COGS on it. Are there any other suggestions? Help is appreciated

2

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Hank April 3, 2017 at 9:13 am

Hey Damian,I realize you switched to Lightspeed but to help out others, did you check out our COGS solution for Shopify? http://www.ordermetrics.ioIt addresses a lot of the issues you were having and allows you to override costs for returned/restocked orders.-Hank

5

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Jenny July 20, 2017 at 9:13 am

Damien,

Have you continued to use Shopify for your web or have you switched over to Lightspeed eCom as well?
I’m interested in learning about your experience as I currently have Lightspeed POS (I run a kitchenware shop) and have been considering web options.

Thanks
Jenny

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Michael April 10, 2018 at 11:35 am

Hi David

How has your experience with Lightspeed been since your original review?

I am interested to hear from anyone with similar issues to David but in more recent days.

Has Spoify since addressed any of the issues raised by David?

David do you use Lightspeed for e-Commerce also?

If not what do you use? And how has that worked out for you?

Thanks

Michael

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
David November 2, 2016 at 6:30 am

I like Shopify for my internet businesses. I would rate it a five for many features but one that kills my business is the one why I rate them 3 stars. The Shopify POS processing is far slower than square and in high volume sales it’s a discouragement to my clients as well as the potential sales in the busiest time of a business. No body like to wait on a line once they shopped for the items they spent time selecting. I don’t either so I make it a goal to creat the most memorable and efficient experience for my clients. I cannot support an app that requires me to spen more time monitoring it than interacting with my clients. It literally takes up to 16 seconds to actually process a card unlike square which takes under a second on the same network. Hope you can fix that otherwise I use square but would love to keep sales on one report.

3

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Brian Robinson March 11, 2016 at 5:29 am

How does discounting/price levels work on Shopify? I have a wine and spirits shop. We offer 5% off 6+ btls of wine or spirits (mix and match), 10% off 12+ btls and 15% off 24+ btls. We also have a loyalty rewards program that gives customers a $7 credit every time they hit $200 cumulatively. We also give VIP’s an additional 5% off the quantity discounts. Could we accomplish this via Shopify?

What about purchasing? Does it give you replenishment reports and the ability to re-order products easily?

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

Chloe Bahal March 14, 2016 at 5:14 pm

Hi Brian,

Yes, you will be able to accomplish percentage discounts on Shopify. Here is some more information. It also tracks inventory and you will be able to reorder products. I hope this helps!

This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.