How to Use Shopify POS (2024): The Complete Guide

Learning how to use Shopify POS to run and manage your retail store isn’t as complicated as it seems. Though the Shopify POS software is packed with features, Shopify’s team has endeavoured to make the interface as straightforward as possible for business users.

In fact, the user-friendliness of Shopify’s software is one of the main reasons why we recommend this point of sale solution to so many companies.

Still, whether you’re a complete beginner, or you have some experience with Shopify’s ecommerce platform, but not the POS tools, it helps to have some guidance. That’s why we created this guide.

We’ll be walking you through how to setup Shopify POS hardware and software for your store, and introducing you to some of the more advanced features you can take advantage of.

An Introduction to Shopify POS

Shopify POS is a point of sale app, brimming with features that allow you to sell products and services in person.

The solution integrates seamlessly with Shopify’s ecommerce platform, giving you access to everything from Shopify Payments, to staff and inventory management tools.

Shopify’s point of sale software can help retail store owners with everything from cultivating customer loyalty, to increasing sales and managing transactions.

It’s even a fantastic way to take advantage of the benefits offered by omnichannel selling.

To get started with Shopify POS, you’ll need three things:

• A Shopify ecommerce subscription plan
• Your Shopify POS account (and the Shopify POS app)
• Shopify hardware

For your Shopify plan, you can opt for a “Starter” plan for $5 per month, and get one Shopify POS Lite login, but you won’t have access to all of Shopify’s website building tools.

If you want a more comprehensive solution, there are three subscription options that include Shopify POS Lite:

• Basic Shopify: $39 per month (or $29 per month annually): A fully featured online store, unlimited POS logins, and a range of business management tools.
• Shopify: $105 per month (or $79 per month annually): All the features of Basic plus 5 additional staff accounts, more reporting tools, and higher shipping discounts.
• Advanced Shopify: $399 per month (or $299 per month annually): The features of Shopify, plus 15 staff accounts, and more advanced Shopify POS features, such as extra reports.

Alternatively, if you choose a Shopify Plus plan, you’ll get Shopify POS Pro built-in for free, which includes more advanced features, like daily sales reports, manager approvals and unlimited POS staff.

You can also choose to add Shopify POS Pro to any existing Shopify plan, for an extra price of $89 per month per location.

Once you have your Shopify plan, and your POS plan, you’ll need to download the Shopify POS app, and choose your hardware.

Shopify offers a range of retail kits, mobile solutions like the Shopify POS Go, card readers, and accessories.

You can connect all of your hardware to your Shopify POS system through the Shopify POS app, by simply scanning for the devices you want to use.

The Key Features and Benefits of Shopify POS

We consider Shopify POS to be one of the best retail POS system options on the market today. It’s an extremely feature-rich solution for business leaders, allowing companies to combine multiple sales channels, and streamline business management.

Key features and benefits on both the Shopify POS Lite and Shopify POS Pro plans include:

• Extensive inventory management: Comprehensive inventory management tools, including demand forecasting, inventory analysis, stock reports, and cross-channel syncing. You’ll also get sale item suggestions, low stock reports, and inventory counts.
• Customer management: End-to-end customer profiles that unify online and online purchases for a centralized order history. You can create customer loyalty programs, tag and categorize user profiles, and track crucial customer information.
• Staff management features: Staff profile creation with roles and permissions, manager approvals, dedicated staff PINs, time tracking, and payroll syncing capabilities. Unlimited accounts are included on most plans.
• Omnichannel sales: Comprehensive inventory syncing and analysis across all online and offline sales channels. You can also set up custom local delivery and pickup options, and create a custom checkout experience for all customers.
• Marketing and growth: Leverage product reviews, social media integrations, email marketing tools, access to the Google merchant center and more. You can even manage and track marketing campaigns throughout the POS system.
• Payment processing: Included Shopify Payments for secure payment processing, as well as the option to integrate other payment solutions and merchant accounts. You’ll also be able to integrate with tools like QuickBooks for accounting purposes.
• Product management: Comprehensive product management, with barcode creation, customizable product collections and variants. You can also manage products in multiple locations and sales channels from a single unified interface.

Plus, Shopify’s POS system, like the Shopify ecommerce platform, is highly flexible.

Companies can customize their experience according to their needs, and take advantage of integrations to tools like Katana, ShipBob, and the Stocky app from the Shopify app market.

Setting Up Your Shopify POS System

Once you’ve created your Shopify account, and purchased the Shopify hardware you need to run your retail POS system, the next step is to start configuring your solution.

While you can manage things like your hardware and sales reports from the Shopify POS app, you’ll need to begin your setup within the web-based Shopify ecommerce platform.

Here are the first three things you’ll need to focus on:

Setting up Inventory Settings

Once logged into your Shopify account, head to your sales channels, and select “Shopify POS” to ensure you’re connected to your point of sale account.

Next, visit the “Products” section on the sidebar menu, to begin adding products to your inventory list.

If you’re already running an online store, all of the products you sell through the ecommerce platform will already be listed here.

On the top right-hand corner of the list, you can see options to import products in bulk, export products, or add products individually.

If you’re just getting started, you might want to choose the “bulk” import option. Once you start importing products, you’ll need to fill out information about each item you sell, including:

• Product titles and descriptions
• Product images
• Pricing (and any tax or fees)
• SKU and barcode information
• Sales channels
• Shipping and custom information
• Product tags and variants

Importing Customers

With your inventory ready to go, you can start adding customers. Shopify allows companies to maintain a detailed customer database full of information about marketing preferences, previous order histories, and other details.

Head to the “Customers” section on your Shopify dashboard, and click the “import customers” button. If you need to add customers individually, just select the “Add Customer” button.

You’ll see a form where you can enter detailed information such as tax details, marketing material preferences, contact information, and notes.

Once you input your customer information, each client will have a profile where you can track transactions and learn more about returning, one-time, and at-risk customers.

Creating Staff Accounts

Next, you’ll need to create your staff profiles. To begin, select the “Point of Sale” option from your “Sales channels”, and you’ll see a drop-down menu. Click on “Staff”, and you’ll visit a screen which shows your complete employee list.

Clicking the “Add Staff” button will take you to a form where you can start inputting employee permissions and setting login PINs.

Shopify will give you three default roles with set permissions to get you started, but you can create custom permissions if needed.

Select “Create POS role”, and you’ll be able to create a role with specific settings covering things like manager approval requirements, checkout actions, and access to certain reports and features.

Leveraging Shopify Advanced POS Features

While you can access most of the features offered by Shopify POS on the “Lite” plan, there are a few crucial solutions that are only reserved for Shopify POS Pro users.

If you’re running a more comprehensive store, and you need more features from your point of sale software, we recommend upgrading to the POS Pro plan. Here, you’ll get features like:

• Omnichannel sales: Support for local pickup, buy in-store and ship to customer, buy online and exchange or return in store, local delivery, and send to cart to buy online, giving you more ways to convert and serve customers.
• Inventory management: Support for demand forecasting, purchasing orders, transfers between locations, low stock reports, and sale item suggestions. You’ll also get comprehensive inventory analysis and inventory counts, detailed inventory reports, stock adjustments, and inventory receiving tools.
• Staff management: Comprehensive manager approval settings, unlimited POS staff, and custom POS staff roles and permissions. You can also attribute specific sales to staff members, making it easier to track your most valuable team members.
• Checkout: Features to conduct exchanges at the point of sale checkout, save and retrieve cart information, and create custom printed receipts with more details about your store. You can also cancel and void orders easily if your customer changes their mind.
• Reporting: Shopify POS Pro comes with daily sales reports, so you can make informed decisions based on sales, products, and staff performance every day. You can also access more advanced reports by upgrading to Shopify Advanced with POS Lite.
• Payment methods: With Shopify POS Pro, you’ll be able to refund credit to an existing gift card if a customer returns an item, rather than giving them money back directly.

Outside of upgrading to Shopify POS Pro, you can also leverage more advanced point of sale features by integrating Shopify POS with various tools on the Shopify app marketplace.

There are tools for inventory management, shipping, and order fulfillment, buy now pay later options and more.

Marketing and Customer Engagement

One of the things that sets Shopify apart from other point of sale software solutions, is how easy the company makes it to set up and manage marketing and customer engagement campaigns within your POS.

During your Shopify POS setup process, you’ll be able to create a range of campaigns.

You can create a customer loyalty program complete with custom rewards when customers make a purchase in store.

You can also connect to external loyalty program apps if you want to offer customers more options, like the ability to earn points for purchases.

You can also track customer marketing preferences and other information from your customer profiles, and use that information to engage buyers through discounts and gift cards.

Plus, Shopify allows you to create comprehensive advertising campaigns on a range of channels.

From the “Marketing” section in your Shopify account home screen, you can simple click “create campaign” to design a marketing strategy for SMS, email, online ads, or social media marketing.

Shopify will automatically track the results of your campaign for you, so you can monitor which strategies are driving the most online and offline sales.

Simple select the campaign you want to run, and Shopify will take you to a form where you can make customizations to various templates.

You can even decide exactly which customers you want to target with specific campaigns, based on the “marketing material preferences” you’ve noted in your customer profiles.

We definitely recommend experimenting with a range of different channels and opportunities, to ensure you’re aware of which marketing strategies work best for your intended audience.

Reporting and Analytics for Shopify POS

When you’re learning how to use Shopify POS, it’s important to think about how you’re going to optimize your store’s performance over time.

Fortunately, Shopify gives companies access to a range of reports and analytics tools on both the Shopify POS Lite and Pro plans.

To access your reports, you only need to go to the “Analytics” page on your Shopify dashboard. Shopify unifies your ecommerce and retail data in the same place, so you can get a holistic view of your entire sales strategy. The features available include:

• Dashboard overview: From the admin analytics page on Shopify, you’ll get an overview of your entire company’s performance on every channel where you’re making sales. You’ll see everything from total sales and orders, to your conversion rates, sales by store location, and even your top selling products.
• Retail sales reports: For deeper insights into your in-person sales, you can leverage the retail sales reporting features. You’ll be able to choose whether you want to analyze sales by product, staff member, time period or vendor.
• Product reports: Shopify’s product reports shows you which products are and aren’t selling, as well as which are most and least profitable to your business. This makes it easy to decide which products you should be investing in going forward.
• Discount reports: With discount reports, you can see the number of orders, as well as gross and net sales are attributed to different discounts and promotions. This is a great way to determine which of your offers are driving increased revenue.
• Inventory reports: Monthly inventory reports on the Shopify analytics page help you keep track of inventory quantities (so you can avoid stockouts), costs, retail value, and even the percentage of inventory you sell each day.
• Finance reports: With financial reports, your POS system can show you your gross and net profits and sales, liabilities, and costs of goods sales. These analytics make it simpler to file your income taxes and remain compliant.
• Staff reports: With staff reports, you can monitor the average order value for each staff member, their average basket size, and other crucial information. This can help you to identify your top-performing team members.

If you’re using Shopify POS Pro, you’ll also have access to daily sales reports, which show you all of the key details you need to know about your store’s performance at a glance.

You can track net sales, items per order, sales per staff, average order value, total returns, and more.

Setting up and Using Shopify POS

Overall, learning how to use Shopify POS is reasonably straightforward. Although there are a few steps involved in configuring your system to suit your business, Shopify makes the process as streamlined as possible.

Once you have your system set up, you’ll be able to constantly experiment with different strategies to increase your sales and revenue.

You can create reports, track crucial data, and create sales and marketing campaigns based on the insights you receive.

You might even eventually decide to upgrade your POS experience, by switching to Shopify POS Pro, or adding integrations to your ecosystem.

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