Introducing Shopify Mobile | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Shopify Mobile

shopify.com

42 pointsninthfrank0721 comments

I just bought a Shopify subscription for my stepfather for Christmas. He's been wanting to start an online store to sell the fly-fishing flies he makes and asked me how he could go about building that website. Thankfully the Shopify starter pack does everything he wants and he's happy as can be. He was actually asking about integration with his ipad and I didn't quite know what to tell him (until now). It's really nice to see the new innovations like this coming out of that company. That - along with the stellar reviews at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894121 - is the reason I went with them over something like Bigcommerce.

Shopify is an awesome company and it's great to see them connecting online and offline commerce. However, I hope they'll explore alternatives to the "race to the bottom" of relying on putting fees on top of already outrageous Credit Card fees, find a way to help customers make payments on ACH, and take smaller and more reasonable fees on top of that.

This post made me realize that Shopify had a POS system as well, which is great for online+IRL stores, but it's also iOS only. That's completely frustrating, because not only do I not want to buy an iPad for a single application, but the store I need a POS for already has a perfectly good PC at the counter, and if we upgrade we'd strongly prefer a ChromeBook.

I'm still surprised and saddened that even companies who completely rely on the web, like Shopify, reach for native mobile apps (and often leaving out Android) so quickly. I suppose there's still a ton of work to do to make HTML a better option.

Looks like the primary new thing here is the ability to create orders on the phone, including the option to accept a credit card swipe. (Which is awesome.) Most everything else was part of previous versions of the mobile app.

Very cool, indeed. Great for sellers that would like to take orders on a tradeshow floor, etc. without having the product stock on hand.

Swipe? Why are these companies (Square included) so backwards in this area? Take a look at iZettle to see how it should be done.

Shopify is not American.

Nitpick here, but Shopify is a Canadian company.

I do agree they should support chip payments as most payment processors in Canada use them.

It's something we intend to do, but no firm ETA as of yet.

Because the EMV regulations surrounding taking chip-and-pin payments are a real headache. Taking swipe payments is much more straight forward.

You actually don't need to swipe with Square. It can scan your card too IIRC.

iZettle? Really? Square is much better than that as it is more versatile. You can accept card payment with square at road side, with in cab by just plugging in the reader into your mobile device. And, iZettle expects you to be fully settled inside your shop :-)

No, iZettle is completely mobile and my point was that Square is swipe based while iZettle is chip based.

Here's a picture of the device I've tried: http://blog.bookingbug.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/izettl...

Got you. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, most of world is using chip based CC

Yeah awesome, but if they don't introduce Shopify multilingual - with no additional cost or a very small additional cost - can be used only by English websites effectively.

What do you mean? Looking at their feature page they have multiple language support. Or do you mean different languages for the mobile/POS apps?

He mean a single shop supporting multiple languages. We unfortunately do not support that (yet).

Ah, ok. What I'd really love would be a no-fixed-cost high-transaction-fee plan. It would be fine to pay 5% or more in fees to test out a store idea before committing to a more expensive plan.

The closest we have to that is our Starter plan. If you factor in the two-week trial, you get 6 weeks to find market validation for your idea at a cost of only $14. It's a pretty reasonable expense.

That's more than generous for someone who's launching a store as a full-time job. My use case is more "we produce some hobby stuff and would like to start selling a few products online as a side-side-project and see if it can grow". My market validation will take months or years, not weeks. This isn't a startup... :) I can see where that market isn't really attractive though.

This is my #1 feature request for Shopify. I'm still a VERY VERY VERY happy customer, but fully realized multi-language support would be a life changing feature.

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