Integrating a Retail POS System to Shopify is Easy with MyPOS Connect
When it comes to Shopify, you can run, but you can’t hide. The ubiquitous ecommerce platform is pretty much everywhere these days. The Coronavirus pandemic accelerated this trend, and we’re pleased to say we’ve helped many of our customers with this journey with our Shopify Integration plugin for MyPOS Connect, which is easy to install and may help further enhance the growth of your company.
Are you already on Shopify? Then you know why it’s great. Have you heard of Shopify but you’re still on the fence? Don’t be – consider the following reasons why putting Shopify and MyPOS Connect together may be the greatest relationship since jam met peanut butter.
Why You Should Integrate Shopify With MyPOS Connect
- In 2020, there were 457 Million users on Shopify – up from 218 million just two years earlier
- In June 2019, total sales from Shopify platforms were estimated at $135+ Billion – and growing fast
- Shopify Plus merchants with annual sales of $1 Million to $500 Million have seen average year-over-year growth of 126%
- Shopify powered 20% of all e-commerce platforms in 2020
- Customers are twice as likely to buy a product with a 3D image than one that is flat – which is easy to create with Shopify
- Shopify is easy to use and highly customizable and easily integrates with a variety of apps and plugins
Our point? Shopify is a very useful e-commerce platform and continues to take a bigger slice of the e-commerce pie. It’s a great way to boost conversions and highlight your products.
And when you consider how easily it integrates with MyPOS Connect, there is no reason not to put these powerful tools together!
How to Integrate Shopify with MyPOS Connect
The following is a step-by-step outline of the process we generally lead our retail point of sale customers through to ensure a smooth implementation of the Shopify Integration plug-in.
Step 1 – Prepare Your MyPOS Connect Product Database For Online Sales
In this first step, you’ll prepare the products in your MyPOS Connect database for online sales. This means:
- Improve (or add) detailed “Full Descriptions” for all products you intend to sell online. For example, you might have a product called “T-Shirt” and the full description in MyPOS Connect also says “T-Shirt” but on the web, you will typically want to provide details such as “Men’s V-neck T-Shirt with short sleeves. 60% cotton, 40% polyester. Machine wash.”
- If you’re selling products that come in multiple sizes, they will need to be put into “Styles” in MyPOS Connect. Check with our Support Team or refer to the screencast on using the Style Builder in the Customer Resources section of our website at https://tricityretail.com/customer-resources/ (Note: you must be a customer to access this resource. If you are a customer and you are not yet registered, go to the Customer Resources page and click on “Join Us”, then fill out the form to request your login credentials.)
- Images can either be linked in MyPOS Connect or directly on Shopify, but regardless of your method of choice, you’ll need images for the products you plan to put online. Make sure that all your image files are compressed. Your Shopify consultant will be able to provide a specification for the optimal size and resolution for your product images.
- Optionally, a web “holdback” can be defined for each product. If you set a holdback value of, say, 2 and the store has a quantity of 10, only 8 would be available online. This is set to prevent selling the last product in the store to someone who walks in before your staff has a chance to grab it for an online order.
Step 2 – Integrate and Begin Training
Once the above steps are done for at least some products, we can install the integration and begin training. The integration will link to a single store and in most cases, will use that store’s inventory for online availability. However, multiple stores can be combined for inventory values if required.
In addition to actually linking your Shopify store (which shouldn’t have products yet), we also review the import setup for Shopify as well as the Sync process from the MyPOS Connect side.
Normally, users continue to work on adding products; and when that task is finished, we typically run a few “test” sales through a test payment gateway to ensure that the sales are flowing to MyPOS Connect. These sales will need to be returned on Shopify.
Step 3 – Do a Test Order
This is an optional step but we highly recommend it. Do a test order for several products once we’ve connected MyPOS Connect with your Shopify platform. This helps to weed out any technical hiccups, if there are any, and familiarizes you with the checkout process your customers will experience.
Step 4 – Go Live
The last tasks are to “go live” with your payment gateway and then finally “go live” with the site. The “go live” requires the final test with the real payment gateway, and then activation of the ongoing sync to keep online inventory quantities synced as well as automatically downloading “picked-packed and shipped” orders.
We’re a Phone Call Away…
Generally, assistance from your Tri-City Retail Support Team is about 4 to 6 hours. However, some users have used less time, while others have used more. We have seen some retailers get online in days, while other retailers take months. The number of products you sell online and the complexity of the site will impact this timing.
If you have questions about any of this, or you are thinking of integrating your MyPOS Connect to an eCommerce website, feel free to call our Support team at (877) 877-4767; or email them at support@tricityretail.com.
We’re here to help you on every step of your journey with MyPOS Connect – and to seamlessly integrate its full potential with the Shopify platform.
