Hi Alex and Andrew,
I also appreciate the detailed reply. We're in Tarek's camp: we produce half of our product in-house and work with small companies for the other products we sell. None of it comes with a barcode attached. We have to create them, print them out, stick them on, so we've gotta be able to say "I need 30 of these, 2 of these, 14 of these..." etc. and have a bunch of barcodes print at once.
Re: the returns, I hear you about the dependency with the current Shopify structure. I'll be eager to see what you guys come up with. That said, I want to make sure I've been clear: this isn't about gift certificates for me, it's about in-store returns/exchanges. I'd LOVE it if you guys could handle the admin end of the gift certificates, but we're also plugging along just fine with our paper system. I see those as two separate features.
Returns are an essential piece of a brick and mortar operation. Keep in mind that one big difference with online v. in-store purchases is that sometimes, we don't know anything about the customer - name, email, phone, etc... it can all be unknown for an in-store purchase. We don't require a receipt for all returns. Add that they can pay with cash, and you can have a completely anonymous sale... no way to find the original. For a return/exchange, I either want my TIL to be adjusted (ie: we gave money to the customer) or I want to "sell" the customer a gift card (a product I have set up) to zero the transaction out. Leave the admin of the Gift Certificate to me for the time being, but give me the ability to ring up something at -1. Any store who's already issuing store credit or Gift Certificates will have already figured out their system for keeping track of that, so that piece of your Shopify solution could come way down the road. But everybody needs to be able to do a quick return/exchange.
RE: register closure, I am talking about an external terminal. Not a deal breaker, but sometimes people push the wrong buttons and it's nice to be able to reconcile that at the end of a day instead of when we do our monthly bookkeeping.
Thanks for considering all my thoughts! Looking forward to being able to switch over sometime soon!
-Will