Shopify is pretty cool

Hare and Home

My girlfriend has recently embarked on joint venture with her sister – a shop selling gifts, cards, homewares, etc.

Check out their store and follow them on social media – Hare and Home – Gifts and Lifestyle.

They are a brick and mortar store, but also wanted to have an online store to maximise their potential audience.

They needed some system for their POS and online store…Of course being a software developer, I thought to myself “I can write that”, but the reality is that I don’t have the 100s of hours required to create a quality product with anywhere near the features that they are looking for.

Requirements

They had some requirements that the needed to fulfil:

• A professional POS system, including printed barcodes
• The ability to take card payments
• An online store front
• Stock managed and tracked by system

I was surprised by how many different offerings there were to choose from, but it was surprisingly difficult to actually find details and see the POS apps, save for promotional videos that didn’t really show the POS usage.

Options

Shopify

Pros – A mature system with choice of free and paid themes. It offers POS app, online store, and lots of different integrations and extensions.

Cons – It costs a little more than some of the competitors.

IZettle

Pros – We have used the card reader before and had a good experience. The monthly cost for online store is a little lower, but has slightly higher card fees.

Cons – Seems to be less mature and less integrations. We were unable to work out if they support assigning barcodes. Support was poor, it took ~a month to respond to my questions, and was sent a link to their website (where I had already looked and couldn’t find the answer).

Square Up

Pros – They seem fairly mature, and well thought eco system.

Cons – Struggled to find examples of POS, couldn’t find an example with easily integrating barcodes and barcode scanner.

Conclusion

In the end we chose to use Shopify. In the end it was a clear winner thanks to it’s mature setup, extensive app store (including an app to assign/print barcodes), integration with online store and POS, integration with Facebook/Instagram.

We found it easy to use and there is a lot of support and documentation available.