Wow. This is a game changer for small retail shops that sell their products online.
We’ve spoken to several companies over the past several years about their frustrations with maintaining a single inventory across two platforms (physical and online). Many of these stores were stuck on some custom eCommerce tool that a freelance developer built them several years ago. They weren’t being updated (with security patches, newer Rails releases)… the original developer is long gone and are faced with the scenario of having to hire a team like us to upgrade and improve their site.
In many of these scenarios, we have highlighted that services like Shopify are likely to be a better investment going forward. Just because they’ve invested thousands and thousands into an existing custom platform doesn’t mean they should continue to. While we live and breath off of designing applications and writing code… we don’t want to see anyone waste their money. In many scenarios, the POS was completely disconnected… and we’ve met many shops that are dealing with a QuickBooks inventory and have all these duplicate steps in their process.
I’m really glad to see that Shopify stepped up and went straight down to the retail level. This should alleviate a lot of pain for the small retail shops.