Vend

Great product for running a retail store! The product works very well and set up is quite easy.

Depending on merchant account, the software doesn't always allow refunds to be performed at the till (iPad).

absolutely love the ease of use of Vend. While I myself am rather technologically literate, some of my employees are not. However, because of how easy Vend is to use, they picked up on how to use it within an hour. I do also love the cloud services and their ability to keep running even through an internet outage. I did like that I had the ability to try out the product before purchasing. I realized within minutes that I preferred it so much more than my previous POS system. My favorite aspects are the value and price. You seem to get so much product at such a cheaper price than its competitors. I also liked that we could use our existing cash drawer and receipt printer with Vend. The loyalty dollars option is not something we currently use, but it is nice to know that we could always opt-in.

Even though I use Google Chrome as my daily web browser, I am not fond of the fact that this is the only browser that works with Vend. If an update breaks Chrome, then I am left without a POS system. I’m hoping that they fix this and allow other browsers to work with the system. I also do not like the fact that I have to pay an additional cost for Premium Phone Support. If I am paying for your product, I should have support that is available at the highest level and available when I need it. Sometimes, something is so important that it can’t wait for an email support response. This is something that definitely needs fixing.

Easy to use, has lots of functions that other software doesn't come with out of the box. A great start to get your business going. It looks clean and the UI is the nicest looking one so far we've seen. They have a free front display app for a second ipad so you can have a customer facing screen.

Lacking crucial functions to actually run a business. No real reporting, often system goes down. The system lacks any mass editing features unless you export the database into csv and re import it. Not efficient if you need to adjust tags in large batches because the exported CSV file, all the tags are in a single cell.

The system lacks stability, we have been using this system for more than a year and it's been going down on crucial moments. Right now the system is slow to sync to Vend server causing sales screen and transaction not to be processed. This has costed us many sales specially at crucial times.

Their customer service is great, nice and friendly but virtually useless. Not once has any of our issues been resolved. It was either an issue that resolved itself over time I guess they fixed it on their back end or we have learned to just live with it.

You have to pay for individual cashiers. So if we were to want to do an event and have an additional cashier it would cost a lot more than what it's worth to have an additional cashier.

Reporting is very basic. If you need numbers that for example compare data points of last week's sales vs this weeks sales by day vs by hour to know which day of the week is your strong day and which hour of the day is your peak you can't do it. Unless you do everyone stat as an individual data pull then you can get the stats but there is no clean visual display to arrange the data neatly so more work is to be done.

Very simple reporting such as what do we have in our inventory of type A vs Type B to know what we're lacking in inventory is a many step process to pull which results in more work.

I spent several months reviewing POS to replace our existing system---being cloud based and integrating with Shopify were absolute musts. I had narrowed it down to two, Vend being one. Since we are a non-profit they gave us a discount, which clinched the deal, but Vend also had acouple features we liked that the other one didn't. Once it was approved, I spent a month or so converting all of our products (about 3000), customers (over 3000) and vendors (a few hundred) into the new system, using CSV files, as well as changing the way departments and categories worked----much more closely to how we operate than our old system allowed. Five days after we went live, I went on a ten day vacation to Europe. All my employees said it was really easy to learn and navigate (and the few questions they had were quickly answered by their 24/7 help). They're are always making improvements and updates.

Their e-commerce platform comes as part of our package, but at the time we signed up (two years ago), it was still pretty plain, so we're still paying for a separate Shopify account (it integrates quite well with Shopify, so I haven't been in a hurry to switch over anyway). At some point I'll probably take a closer look and see if switching over makes sense.

The software is easy to use and incredibly user friendly, and is consistently being updated with new features and improvements to old ones. It offers a full-scope inventory management experience. It makes it easy for us to take our shop on the go, as we sell at numerous trade shows and conventions.

There are still some features missing, or which I would term incomplete, but as Vend is relatively new and the team is constantly working on releasing updates, I have every confidence that these are cases where it is just a matter of time. It is somewhat frustrating at times that there are some issues where internet connectivity issues can cause hiccups in the system that then need to be fixed on the back end by support, but these are few and far between.