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Shopify’s summer editions 2024 brought with it an update to Shopify’s POS Software. Whilst these changes had little impact on how you will manage the payments - it gave us a chance to give the system a refreshed look.
For many ecommerce businesses, managing both online and in-store sales can be challenging, especially when streamlining processes across various channels, locations, staff, and customers. In this blog we want to look at how you can manage Shopify POS as a growing ecommerce business. As it can introduce some complexities when it comes to managing your payments.
Shopify POS, or Point of Sale, is Shopify’s system designed to help retail businesses manage in-person transactions and integrate them with their online sales. For ecommerce businesses that have brick and mortar retail stores or do pop ups, Shopify POS is a great system for seamlessly integrating your ecommerce store with your in person sales.
Shopify offers two different POS systems, POS Lite and POS Pro. Both let you handle transactions in store, give you brand management and analytics capabilities, and allow for individual staff logins. POS Pro, as the name suggests, offers a range of additional features too. These include smart inventory management, in store analytics, and the ability to set staff permissions and manager approval settings.
As mentioned before, Shopify’s POS has two levels - Shopify POS Lite and Shopify POS Pro. As you can likely infer, you’ll be charged different amounts depending on which system you prefer to use.
POS Lite comes with no additional subscription costs to your Shopify plan, but is not available on the Starter Plan. Pos Lite is therefore free to use outside of the costs of the terminal’s hardware.
Getting access to the features of POS Pro however will cost you an additional £69 per month per location. But it does not need to be used at every location, meaning you can actually use POS lite and POS pro at the same time, if you decide that some locations don’t need the additional features.
Shopify POS terminals come in many different shapes and sizes. You can actually install POS functionality onto an Android or iOS device, be it a phone or tablet. So assuming you already have one of those at your disposal, you can start selling in person with no additional cost.
Shopify itself does sell POS hardware too. These range from £49 for a basic terminal to £279 for a full countertop kit, however these are only one off payments and therefore won’t affect your cashflow in the long term.
Shopify themselves recommend that Shopify POS Lite be used for selling at markets and pop ups, and that POS pro be used if you have a brick and mortar store, which is a stance that we generally agree with too.
We’ve helped businesses make the move from Shopify to Shopify Plus, and helped them take their ecommerce offering into the Brick and mortar environment too.
If you need any guidance when it comes to managing your Shopify POS system, contact us.
