PIING
Reading Hardware and NFCWhat staff see at POS
Hardware and NFC
- Tap Box overview
- Install a Tap Box
- NFC readers and cards
- While you wait for Apple's tap entitlement
- Troubleshooting taps
- Scan-in points
- What staff see at POS
In this guide
- Set it up
- What is on the card
- Their recent orders
- Entry and checkout mode
- Settings only reports it
- If a field does not show at the till
- Next steps
Search or browse documentation
Hardware and NFC 7 / 7
What staff see at POS
Every field on the Piing tile in Shopify POS is chosen in one place, from check-in fields and VIP tier to your own customer metafields and Intelligence insights.
When a customer taps in, the Piing tile in Shopify POS shows the person serving them who has just walked up. Everything on that tile is chosen in one place: Hardware & check-ins then POS, in the card headed What staff see at POS. One list, one Save button.
If you configured this before, nothing you set has changed. The controls moved together; your choices came with them.
Set it up
- Open Piing in your Shopify admin.
- Go to Hardware & check-ins then POS. Some screens label this section Tap-ins & Hardware.
- Scroll to What staff see at POS.
- Switch fields on or off, reorder them with the arrows, and Save.
- Reopen the Piing tile on the till so it picks up the change. On a device that has been open a while, force-quit Shopify POS and reopen it while signed in as staff.
What is on the card
Check-in and profile fields. Use the checkboxes to show useful information and the arrows to set its order. Start from Retail starter, or select Choose your fields to make your own list. The preview shows the result.
Loyalty and VIP tier. Switch the VIP tier field on to show a tier badge, then say where Piing should read the tier from, either a customer tag prefix (for example the tag vip-tier:Gold) or a customer metafield (for example loyalty.vip_tier). This is set next to the field it controls, and it is the only place to set it. The same source feeds wallet passes and the staff view, so it only needs setting once.
Piing check-in data. Fields Piing builds from tap and check-in activity. Switching one on here also starts syncing it to that customer's Shopify profile, so it simply appears at the till. There is no second switch to find.
Your store's customer metafields. Show your own Shopify customer metafields on the tile, such as gender, size preference, preferred category or birthday. Use Browse store metafields to pick from what your store already defines, or add a namespace, key and display label by hand. These are read live from Shopify each time a customer taps in, so staff see the current value. The namespace and key must match what is defined under Shopify Settings then Custom data then Customers.
Piing: Intelligence insights. If you run Piing: Intelligence, choose which inferred attributes the in-store team sees, grouped by demographics, preferences, value and behaviour. Each option shows how many of your most recent customers have that field populated, so you can enable only the fields with real data. This section only appears once Intelligence has written insights to your store; until then a short note explains why it is empty.
Also synced to Shopify customer profiles. Which Piing fields are written to each customer's Shopify profile, ready for segments, email tools and reports. Anything you show on the tile stays switched on here automatically, so most merchants never need to open it. Turning a field off here stops future updates for it.
Their recent orders
Add to this sale attaches the customer to the sale open on the register. Returns remain available when the customer has recent orders. Piing does not offer a separate draft-order action here. Use Shopify's own order tools to prepare an order for later.
Additional Shopify information appears under Customer details. Piing displays readable values such as preferences, dates and amounts, and hides unrecognised structured records rather than showing raw JSON to staff.
Under the profile fields, the tile carries a Recent orders section. It loads with the profile rather than behind a second tap, and each row shows the order number, what it came to, how many items were on it, how long ago it was placed, and whether it has been fulfilled. Open a row and you get the line items on that order, with the sizes and variants.
Five orders load at a time, and Show more orders brings the next five.
Two limits worth knowing:
- Sixty days. Shopify only lets apps read the last sixty days of orders without a special grant, so that is the window. Anything older is in Shopify admin, and the tile says so rather than implying the customer has not bought before.
- Permissions. If Shopify has not granted Piing permission to read orders on your store, the section says exactly that and asks you to reopen Piing in your Shopify admin to approve it. It never shows an empty list for what is actually a permissions problem, because at a till that is the worst possible thing to tell someone.
Entry and checkout mode
Each POS location is set to one of two modes, on the same page under POS Location Assignment:
- Entry is for a front-of-store position: arrivals and check-ins only.
- Checkout is the payment till: the full customer panel with the fields you chose above.
Fields you switch on show in checkout mode. Entry mode always shows tap activity only. You can also give each location a custom label so staff know which position they are on. The tile itself shows which till and which Piing store it is running on, and warns if that POS location is not mapped to a store yet.
Settings only reports it
Settings shows a read-only summary of what staff currently see, with a single Configure what staff see at POS button that opens the page above. There is no second set of pickers, and no way for a field to be switched on in one place and quietly blocked in another.
Note
The same tier source, field list and synced fields apply everywhere Piing shows a customer, including the browser-based staff view. You are configuring the data, not one screen.
If a field does not show at the till
- Confirm the field is ticked in What staff see at POS, and that you saved.
- Reopen the Piing tile, or force-quit and reopen Shopify POS on that device.
- Check the till is in checkout mode, not entry mode.
- Check the POS location is mapped to a store. See Taps not registering.
- For one of your own metafields, confirm the namespace and key match Shopify exactly, and that the customer has a value saved.
- For an Intelligence field, confirm Intelligence has written that field for that customer. See Run and schedule analyses.
Next steps
Related guides
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