Has anybody set up a retail / ecommerce website? POS machines and all that jazz?

[tommers]

I'm talking your Wix, your Square, your Shopify. I need to sort out a website with ecommerce, and a retail POS machine with a bar code scanner and possibly a cash drawer. I'm probably going to have a lot of inventory, so something that I can use to quickly and easily add stock and then the same in reverse when I sell it would be the absolute dream.

I think Shopify will do all of this, but I seem to remember them sending out really annoying codes when I've tried to buy from a shop that uses them. Square look good, but I don't think they will set up a website.

Anybody got any experience of this?

 

[existentialist]

<watches thread>

 

[spitfire]

Yes, we used Woocommerce but eventually went over to Shopify as Woo needed too much looking after.

Once you have your website choose a POS system that will integrate and you're away.

It may be a little more complicated than that but it has never been easier.

You can adjust your post sales emails so you don't send annoying emails but trust me, they send them for a reason. It can be fettled to what you feel comfortable with. At the end of the day if people don't want them anymore they unsubscribe, it's no big deal.

 

[danny la rouge]

<sees “jazz” in thread title. Gets excited. Reads OP. Slumps with despair. Leaves thread >

 

[tommers]

Yes, we used Woocommerce but eventually went over to Shopify as Woo needed too much looking after.

Once you have your website choose a POS system that will integrate and you're away.

It may be a little more complicated than that but it has never been easier.

You can adjust your post sales emails so you don't send annoying emails but trust me, they send them for a reason. It can be fettled to what you feel comfortable with. At the end of the day if people don't want them anymore they unsubscribe, it's no big deal.

I don't really mean post sales emails. I'm sure I've seen that when you buy something from Shopify it asks you to put in a code and you have to register your email or something. It was driving my wife mad one night but then we realised you can just ignore it and it still works. Ah it's this: What is Shop Pay? A guide for Shopify store owners | Instant. Seems optional.

Is it easy to set up the site? Can you then just show your inventory on it? Or do you need to manually add that to the site?

I guess I should just add an account and play around with it, but I want to make sure it will do what I want before wasting time and money.

 

[spitfire]

Will it do what you want? I would have to know what you’re doing to answer that for sure but the answer is most likely yes. If you’re going to have POS etc. then Etsy wouldn’t be up to the job.

Have a play with it. There are as many ways of tracking inventory as there are businesses, everyone will do it slightly differently.

Is shopify still free to sign up and then you pay for add ons? I forget, tbh it was a few years ago I did it.

 

[spitfire]

It does get tricky when you are trying to track inventory across different platforms. We had woo, Etsy and Amazon all going at once. Was a bit of a headache.

 

[spitfire]

So the trickiest bit may be keeping track of what you sell via Square/Sumup and what you sell online but I am very confident there will be many plugins to help you achieve it.

 

[tommers]

Is shopify still free to sign up and then you pay for add ons? I forget, tbh it was a few years ago I did it.

Yeah I think it is, so maybe I just have to take the plunge. I like the square POS and there's no monthly fee with them, just a txn fee. But I don't think they will do a website. Whereas Shopify do everything.

 

[Silas Loom]

I don’t have any idea about retail IT, although am always interested in startups and sector-specific enterprise tech, so will chime in unhelpfully anyway.

It sounds like the question might be whether your business is going to scale to the extent that you’d get pissed off either at Shopify’s fee structure (margin matters more and more, the bigger you get) or the difficulty of escaping the Shopify environment without quite a lot of professional support if you outgrew their offering.

If you don’t expect the business to grow by any more than say 20% yoy, the benefits of Shopify in simplicity, unified service range and easy third party app integration, will probably still apply in three years. And nobody can be expected to plan any further than that.