This looks like the sort of product that makes me wonder why no one thought of this before. Or has any other online e-commerce platform did something like this before?
Shopify POS
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: Shopify POS
#72This looks like the sort of product that makes me wonder why no one thought of this before. Or has any other online e-commerce platform did something like this before?
Others have done this before. See Shopkeep POS, Breadcrumb by Groupon, Erply, Vend, Square, etc.
Re: Shopify POS
#73I 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.
"Fail" implies it's a priority. Maybe they think this is a bigger problem for their customers?
Re: Shopify POS
#74I 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.
A beta of Shopify Reports actually launched today as well. We're starting with point of sale customers, then bringing all merchants on shortly. http://docs.shopify.com/manual/your-store/8-reports
Super excited to see what these can do. Wish they were available for Pro plans as well, as I'm building similar reports for our store as we speak.
Re: Shopify POS
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The API documentation is here: http://docs.shopify.com/api There's no API order creation at present, but the API is consistently evolving as the platform does.
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...
Re: Shopify POS
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You find the Magento reporting much better? I've never tried reporting in Shopify, but Magento out of the box is very very limited.
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 multiple replicas) just to allow this type of reporting run by certain users.
For an environment like shopify (which I've never used, so speculating), their reports are much more likely optimized database queries or views, or even created from specially stored statistics data not from querying raw db tables, with caching or pre-generation at some point. This means there's a lot of thought behind every report, and what's possible with the current db/stats schema. Adding a column to a report might mean modifying the db schema.
The final issue is that user interface complexity goes up as reporting flexibility goes up. A super powerful interface that few people take the time to use is worth less than a limited interface that provides value to more people. The task is attempting to satisfy power users and more complex needs, while providing a very useful default functionality out of the box.
Re: Shopify POS
#77In the POS 2.0 space (referring to new, tablet/cloud services), how many players will survive 5 years down the road? Is this a "winner take all" or "winner + 2nd place take all" space? I feel bad for the local cafe that hitches their wagon to an eventual loser–especially if their data is locked in.
I think most of the newfangled POS vendors will help migrate data across. Maybe not historical sales data, but certainly inventory. I also think it's not long before everyone can search local inventories nearby. Unless one of them dominates from the beginning, I can see many POS + web front ends competing for a long time.
Re: Shopify POS
#78Two years ago (October 2011) I submitted this idea to the first Shopify Fund ( http://www.shopify.com/fund ): "The second idea is to create a POS system that integrates fully into Shopify. Thus one can use Shopify to manage sales for all the store's inventory both those that one sells through the web and also those that one sells from the physical store. The POS front end for Shopify will allow for Shopify to expand…
It's a pretty obvious idea. And this is why companies avoid doing these sorts of ideation exercises.
Re: Shopify POS
#79I 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 felt like that too. My country payment options are lacking, api has some old bugs and shortcomings like no SKU search, taxes system doesn't fit for many business that have products with different tax type, no multilang, and plenty of ugly liquid and js solutions.
Also, checkout has a small legal nitpick here in europe, where a check has to be somewhere and in shopify is not. That means plenty of EU stores might be in a grey zone. Same with cookies in the checkout, but that's another story. I guess they will fix it but i guessed that 7 months ago.
I like Shopify in many ways, but after two (small) stores with them i have two main issues:
- EU distant. I feel US market is the main thing for them and EU is left behind using weird solutions for complex tax cases or pricing, few payment gateways, and so on. The checkout issue ilustrates this.
- Pushin new features while not fixing old ones. Shopify 2, Shopify Payments US, and now the POS are the examples. Meanwhile my app has to do crazy stuff to sync my products ids with their native ids.
Said this i will probably keep using it but Prestabox is tempting me for the next project. Any experiences with it?
Also, Shopify guys, the 15 days in advance warning for an api change in mid august was nice!
Re: Shopify POS
#80In the POS 2.0 space (referring to new, tablet/cloud services), how many players will survive 5 years down the road? Is this a "winner take all" or "winner + 2nd place take all" space? I feel bad for the local cafe that hitches their wagon to an eventual loser–especially if their data is locked in.
Speaking of the space. Are there any card readers that lets you bring you own payment processing? Would love roll my own POS software but have yet to find a card reader that has an open API.