Today’s retailers don’t want just any point of sale solution—they want a great point of sale solution. Specifically, they want one that will provide a seamless shopping experience, manage complexity, adapt to change, and harness both data and support. Anything less leaves them struggling to manage ecommerce and physical retail on separate systems.
Still, even when retailers aren’t happy with their POS solution—or they don’t have one at all—they often don’t know where to start in finding the perfect one. With so many options, it’s difficult for your clients to make sense of what’s available.
That’s where you come in.
Shopify is unique in its adaptable, flexible platform architecture that’s perfect for growing businesses whose needs evolve over time. And with its extensibility and other solutioning capabilities, Shopify POS is well positioned to help partners pitch and win new clients.
We recently discussed what Shopify POS is and how partners can use it to increase their revenue. In part two of the webinar series, retail partners Jason Sidana from Maxburst and Peter Tivy from Teifi Digital shared how they position Shopify POS with new clients by taking a solutioning approach. Ahead, you’ll learn four expert strategies to help your own partner agency make successful pitches as well.
1. Use extensibility as a way in
Clients are looking for partners to help make point of sale work for them, no matter their business model or industry. And that’s the beauty of Shopify POS—it’s extensible enough to fit the unique needs of different retailers, but also gives partners the opportunity to turn that solutioning into an accelerator for their own business.
For example, Teifi Digital helped one client build a point of sale solution for their franchise business model. Once they built the intellectual property (IP) to make this possible with Shopify POS, Teifi productized it. That way, other franchise businesses could find the app within the Shopify app library and use it as an easy way to get onto the platform.
“What's really nice about the Shopify ecosystem is once you’ve started working with extensibility and … product development, you have an accelerator that you can apply to one or many merchants. As that accelerator, or that piece of IP, becomes more mature, you can actually pretty easily commercialize it and put it on the app store.”
— Peter Tivy, CEO and Founder at Teifi Digital
For Maxburst, it’s all about meeting clients wherever they need help. So whether that’s doing data migrations, implementations, or physically flying out to set up hardware at various shop locations, foundational services act as ways to create connections with new clients. From there, it’s all about customizations. You can use the extensibility of Shopify POS to build out custom apps and workflows to meet that retailer’s specific requirements, and build out the relationship from there.
2. Lean on solutioning foundations
When retailers are deciding whether to migrate to Shopify POS, they need to be able to envision how it’ll work. Often, that vision can feel clouded with questions of how they’ll get the tech running seamlessly. It’s the job of the partner to address both sides of solutioning—how they’ll migrate and the value that comes from doing so.
At a foundational level, most retailers’ challenges with point of sale aren’t that different. That’s why when Maxburst talks to a new client, they already have a playbook and a checklist prepped.
Prepare this checklist when migrating clients to Shopify:
- Clean the client’s data
- Map their data to Shopify standards
- Guide hardware selection for POS setups
- Set up the physical hardware
- Train and support the POS staff
- Offer post-launch support for troubleshooting
Once you have these areas covered, you can move onto solutioning any specific requirements. For example, Maxburst worked with a client that sells spray paint, which is classified as a hazardous material in most states in the US. The products needed to come with a warning label, so Maxburst built out a custom solution that now brings up all relevant product information, including its classification as hazardous, when a consumer goes to buy it.
You don’t always have to take an agency approach when it comes to solutioning conversations. Teifi Digital instead approaches these conversations from the perspective of a systems integrator (SI).
Consider an SI approach by looking at:
- What inventory system the client is coming from
- What accounting platform they’re working with
- What plans they may have to shift additional technology to Shopify
Once you know these criteria, you can create both current-state and future-state architectures. For example, businesses with 50 or even 200 locations need a phased architecture approach. For each of those revised architectures, it’s all about demonstrating the total cost of ownership throughout the transformation. If you can show how much they’ll save and how much lift they’ll see in revenue, it lays out a roadmap that you can fill in with plans for extensibility and iterative development.
3. Bring past experiences to your current expertise
Plenty of Shopify partners fell into the work that they do—they started by building a commerce website for one client, then saw a market for it and kept going. Many gained the skills that make them successful partners by starting out as entrepreneurs themselves.
Advice from Jason Sidana, Maxburst
For partners, starting as a firsthand business owner goes a long way. It helps you understand everything from staff and inventory management to dealing with vendors to doing purchase orders and wholesale. Knowing all of that makes conversations with clients feel more like entrepreneur to entrepreneur, and it builds that trust that your agency will be able to solve their challenges.
“Actually being firsthand business owners [and] understanding retail in and out [has helped us be successful.] When I talk to merchants, it's not like they're hiring a web design agency or something like that. It's entrepreneur to entrepreneur.”
— Jason Sidana, Director of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at Maxburst
Advice from Peter Tivy, Teifi Digital
Starting as a systems integrator can bring the expertise businesses need to flip and become partners. If you’ve done full ERP migrations and other technology transformation kinds of work, you’ll really understand the pain of being an SI partner that’s trying to shoehorn a client into a certain technology. With the extensibility of Shopify POS, you no longer had to shoehorn them in. If you can have the developer chops to work with that extensibility and can get a deep understanding of the platform—specifically with how all the APIs and the different sales channels work together—then you’ll be set up to take every opportunity that comes your way.
“As Shopify brought out that extensibility, you no longer had to shoehorn them in[to the technology] … That ultimately propelled us to where we are today.”
— Peter Tivy, CEO and Founder at Teifi Digital
4. Pick a niche and focus on it
There are plenty of businesses out there that need a partner’s help. They can be as typical as a clothing retailer or as niche as a bike repair shop, but each has unique problems they’re trying to solve. Partners that take the initiative to monetize Shopify POS will find that they can carve out a niche in those markets, and a lot of times, become the go-to agency in that space.
Advice from Jason Sidana, Maxburst
Typically, partners start off with D2C clients who are looking for help with an ecommerce site. In those cases, point of sale becomes an upsell opportunity. But if you can turn point of sale into a standalone service for your agency, there’s now also an opportunity to get POS leads and turn them into ecommerce upsell opportunities that migrate everything over to Shopify. No matter which way clients approach you, aim to solve those problems, then look to provide the additional services—whichever they may be.
Advice from Peter Tivy, Teifi Digital
It’s important to pick an area to focus on and build a brand around it within the Shopify ecosystem. There are all of these businesses—like jewelry shops, furniture stores, B2B businesses, and franchises—that have been striving for omnichannel for years with different legacy point of sale solutions and connectors into ecommerce. Look at what you do really well, and look for the work that nobody's doing. By putting your services out there, you’ll begin to carve out that niche for your business.
“Shopify ultimately wants to bring more and more merchants on and as a partner, if you're able to effectively help them bring those merchants on, then they'll just keep bringing you more.”
— Peter Tivy, CEO and Founder at Teifi Digital
Monetize Shopify POS to grow your partner business
At the core of any POS conversation, retailers are looking for a way to bridge the gap between their physical and online channels. Take the opportunity to show clients that you understand their unique challenges by offering Shopify POS as the solution that’ll grow with their business. At the same time, you’ll be able to monetize your services and grow your brand as a Shopify partner.
