Appreciate the post. I know it’s not ideal (and you mentioned it once) but most of these issues do seem to be resolved by apps. Shopify has been fairly explicit with their plans to be as foundational as possible and letting the ecosystem take care of specific needs. But I get that that can be financially prohibitive and cumbersome to manage.
Unfortunately the apps work only for the e-commerce/back-end portion of the store, and not the POS. I'd estimate 90% of our sales come through the point of sale, and there is no app or add-on to make it easier to apply multiple discounts at a time or track discount codes at the line-item level. I'd pay $9.99/month if there were! I finally found an inventory management and reporting app that I'm dropping $50/month on now.
I get the business reasons why it makes more sense to stay foundational, but some of my needs—like viewing inventory at two locations side-by-side—are hardly that specific or niche.
Shopify was built for e-commerce, I get that. For brick and mortar shops it's really missing out on a lot of key features, a lot of which can't be fixed by the larger ecosystem (because POS, which they don't build for).
Also if they're trying to be foundational, why are they building an influencer campaign management tool and pushing an audience-building tool for paid social ads? It's a lot of paid social/paid influencer fluff that I guess works for their favorite audience: the online sock brands that do $1.5 million in sales/year off 14 SKUs and do 97% of their acquisition through paid social. (I listen to the Shopify Masters podcast, I know who they're trying to reach. Hah.)
When I read that Shopify recently fired 10% of its workforce by sending each an individual email, I knew there was a real leadership issue. Shopify noted: “…we're also eliminating over-specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that were convenient to have but too far removed from building products.” Enough said.
Appreciate the post. I know it’s not ideal (and you mentioned it once) but most of these issues do seem to be resolved by apps. Shopify has been fairly explicit with their plans to be as foundational as possible and letting the ecosystem take care of specific needs. But I get that that can be financially prohibitive and cumbersome to manage.
Unfortunately the apps work only for the e-commerce/back-end portion of the store, and not the POS. I'd estimate 90% of our sales come through the point of sale, and there is no app or add-on to make it easier to apply multiple discounts at a time or track discount codes at the line-item level. I'd pay $9.99/month if there were! I finally found an inventory management and reporting app that I'm dropping $50/month on now.
I get the business reasons why it makes more sense to stay foundational, but some of my needs—like viewing inventory at two locations side-by-side—are hardly that specific or niche.
Shopify was built for e-commerce, I get that. For brick and mortar shops it's really missing out on a lot of key features, a lot of which can't be fixed by the larger ecosystem (because POS, which they don't build for).
Also if they're trying to be foundational, why are they building an influencer campaign management tool and pushing an audience-building tool for paid social ads? It's a lot of paid social/paid influencer fluff that I guess works for their favorite audience: the online sock brands that do $1.5 million in sales/year off 14 SKUs and do 97% of their acquisition through paid social. (I listen to the Shopify Masters podcast, I know who they're trying to reach. Hah.)
When I read that Shopify recently fired 10% of its workforce by sending each an individual email, I knew there was a real leadership issue. Shopify noted: “…we're also eliminating over-specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that were convenient to have but too far removed from building products.” Enough said.
"Are you serious right now?" after influencer crap made me maniac laugh... I feel like that sums up this whole year. *headdesk*