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Shopify POS

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Re: Shopify POS

#101

Post by AYBABTME »

erichurkman wrote: post #84
smickie wrote: post #12

I have repeatedly had clients on a budget choose Magento over Shopify due to a lack of fine grain control. It's very frustrating that they can release a POS system, however fail at, for example, complex sales reports. I wish they'd get it together because they would blow everyone out the water.

Their shipping options completely suck for anything but trivial sales, too, unless it has changed in the last month or two. (Example: most products are free shipping but a few large products are not free; there was no control to exempt products from free shipping, nor any control to say products were not eligible for certain shipping methods. Not all merchants can overnight a 50kg box, for example.)

Have you ever thought of using FBA?

  http://services.amazon.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm
You can opt-in their Prime program and offer free 2-days shipping to your customers.

I think there was FBA integration in Shopify but they're dropping it, but an app still let you integrate with FBA.

Re: Shopify POS

#102

Post by jacques_chester »

jmccree wrote: post #76
smickie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magento does everything if you wade through the data. Like if you wanted stats on... off the top of my head, abandoned shopping carts by region and product, you could. I think in Shopify you can view how many abandoned carts there are in the orders section, and it's not filterable. I mean how difficult would be for Shopify devs to add a reports section on stuff like this. Just tabulated data would do, I don't need an…

Reporting can be surprisingly complicated. You can allow users to run raw SQL queries, or have a reporting interface that is basically is an SQL query builder behind the scenes, and have extremely powerful reporting abilities. The problem is you might have a user create a query that takes 5 minutes to run, and then refresh the page 15 times killing your db server/s. Many places have a separate DB read replica (or mul…

This sounds like a case where providing users with a dimensionally-modelled reporting schema would be a big win. It would help both with the slow query problem and the super-complicated interface problem.

Re: Shopify POS

#103

Post by jacques_chester »

ruswick wrote: post #98

The iPad POS market is saturated, and Square already has a tremendous foothold. I have serious doubts about the whether this system can succeed so late in the game. Moreover, I can't really be brought to care about these types of POS systems, primarily because they're all categorically atrocious. Many of my favorite coffee shops have been replacing their registers with iPads, and the universal result has been longer…

> The iPad POS market is saturated, and Square already has a tremendous foothold. I have serious doubts about the whether this system can succeed so late in the game.

The search engine market is saturated, and Yahoo! already has a tremendous foothold. I have serious doubts about the whether Google can succeed so late in the game.

Re: Shopify POS

#104

Post by jacques_chester »

orenmazor wrote: post #22
smickie wrote: post #12

I have repeatedly had clients on a budget choose Magento over Shopify due to a lack of fine grain control. It's very frustrating that they can release a POS system, however fail at, for example, complex sales reports. I wish they'd get it together because they would blow everyone out the water.

I work on the new Shopify Reports product and we would love to hear more about what kind of complex sales reports you're looking for. hit me up here, on twitter (@orenmazor), or email: oren.mazor@shopify.com

Suggestion: provide a dimensionally-modelled reporting schema, it will be much easier to query.

Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit is the definitive tutorial on the subject.

Re: Shopify POS

#105

Post by dlf »

FWIW, as a non e-commerce person, I always read POS as "piece of shit," so this did make me chuckle at first read ...carry on.

Re: Shopify POS

#106

Post by brockf »

HyprMusic wrote: post #39
smickie wrote: post #12

I have repeatedly had clients on a budget choose Magento over Shopify due to a lack of fine grain control. It's very frustrating that they can release a POS system, however fail at, for example, complex sales reports. I wish they'd get it together because they would blow everyone out the water.

Agreed. The control they give their theme developers is shamefully woeful. You're actively encouraged to use Javascript as a work-around for their very limited templating sytem. If they were to add querying, or even just a few more options for selecting products (e.g. by type, brand, etc.) then Shopify would be a great contender to other e-commerce stores. Currently it feels they're only focused on things that can br…

>> Currently it feels they're only focused on things that can bring them more revenue.

That makes a whole lot of sense to me, and would be the only acceptable path to take in the eyes of their shareholders.

Re: Shopify POS

#107

Post by erichurkman »

AYBABTME wrote: post #101
erichurkman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their shipping options completely suck for anything but trivial sales, too, unless it has changed in the last month or two. (Example: most products are free shipping but a few large products are not free; there was no control to exempt products from free shipping, nor any control to say products were not eligible for certain shipping methods. Not all merchants can overnight a 50kg box, for example.)

Have you ever thought of using FBA? http://services.amazon.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm You can opt-in their Prime program and offer free 2-days shipping to your customers. I think there was FBA integration in Shopify but they're dropping it, but an app still let you integrate with FBA.

Yeah, I tried to push for that. The margin on the products was too small. Due to some nasty wording in franchise agreements, the actual markup was 25% at most, terrible rates for retail. There just wasn't enough room to play with discounts/promotions as well as external servicing. At least not at their low volumes. I've seen other FBA projects go quite well though.

Re: Shopify POS

#108

Post by markgarity »

adammcnamara wrote: post #29
arbuge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you guys have an API by any chance? Can I push orders to a Shopify store via an API call of some kind?

http://docs.shopify.com/api Order creation will be open soon.

We're beta testing the order create api endpoint on our enterprise Shopify plan right now, enabling us to hackily import manual phone/wholesale orders via an internal app we developed. It's definitely a step in the right direction, but Shopify really needs to prioritize a backend order creation tool.

Every e-commerce product across-the-board has this feature, and it's disappointing to see a platform as well-crafted and mature as Shopify still without many of the essentials.

We can now officially create orders via a POS system, but still can't create an order on our own website without registering as a customer or jumping through 3rd party shipping/tax/payment APIs.

Re: Shopify POS

#109

Post by browsermostly »

fourspace wrote: post #75
browsermostly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about discount codes? I had to write a screen-scraping python script to get student discount codes working and then I then had to write it again to deal with Shopify 2's new interface!

Shopify themselves wrote an app to do this: http://www.shopify.com/blog/6668676-new-free-shopify-app-bul...

I've used that app before and it isn't what I needed. I want to be able to add them myself...through the API.

Re: Shopify POS

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Sam_Odio wrote: post #15
bhouston wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said what I said, I didn't accuse them of stealing the idea in my post. But there is a murkiness with these types of contests though where one asks for ideas from a community with the promise of rewards for the best ideas. Obviously in hindsight, my idea was a really good one (which was the point of the contest no?) but I didn't get funding, not even a response.

Perhaps you didn't hear back because they were building (or had plans to build) a POS system that they weren't ready to talk about.

[deleted]
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