Helios Junks review for Point of Sale

Nov. 27, 2013

*This app had an update which fixed several of my major issues with it, so I've revived this review* This is a solid and much needed addition to the Shopify platform. Its very usable, it requires almost no training to figure it out, is easily integrated into the store. I think the layout could have a few tweaks to make it more seamless (refreshing the selected collection when you start a new order and perhaps making it easier to select collections for example) but overall its pretty fast to use, and wont cause much of a headache. There are a few reasons why I haven't given this a higher rating, firstly is that its expensive. We already pay a premium price for backend hosting of our store, really this is a $49 a month fee simply to process offline transactions. Really its a premium price for a basic product. The app has some limitations, reports on the app are non existent, other than a sales tally. That means you have no way of knowing how many of a particular product has been sold, how much you've made each hour, how much from different collections you've sold. Theres a lot of useful information that you should have access to on the fly, but you don't unless you use the computer interface. The use of printers/ scanners and till drawers is limited to only very specific models. This no doubt makes the installation of the physical POS assets easy and very reliable, however unless you live in North America the receipt printers and till drawers aren't really readily available, so you have to buy a more expensive version off eBay, which is disappointing. Even the inclusion of AirPrint would be very welcome. The ability to see product descriptions in the app would also be useful, often if you sell a large amount of products, someone might have a questions which you cant readily answer, but having that information available to you would be very useful. Ultimately its very useful. It is a real timesaver when it comes to updating quantities manually which is really its most redeeming feature. I don't think its quite equal to the $600 a year price you have to pay, its not really a complete system yet, but I suspect it might be after a few big updates.