Vend

Avantages

The system is very easy to learn, the report capability is what we like the most, having the ability to run report to analyze the sales and patterns, is very helpful in planning , buying inventory, since it is capable to also hold inventory, to send emails to alert when inventory is low, is amazing, we love the system for our small store.

Inconvénients

Not much, we had some issues in the beginning with credit card connectivity, but not for any of the system fault, it was the way our store is set up with our internet, once all that got squared away, the system worked perfect.

Avantages

Vend has one of the most easy to use cloud point of sale that I have tried and tested over the years. As a business owner, Vend has been useful for my day to day work.

Inconvénients

The customer support team is atrocious. I have been trying to speak to someone from the Vend support team since 24th April due to some billing issues that could have been easily resolved in 1 or 2 days. Up until now, the issue is not solved and no one has responded to me on this issue. Speaking to the live chat guy and he kept me waiting for over 3 hours with no reply when he told me that he will be transferring me over to the billing time for assistance. Emails went unanswered and the support team even closed the ticket without giving me a reply or resolution to the problem. I'm not so sure that Vend is a system that caters to the small and medium business owners because we business owners and managers, we don't have all the time in the world to be waiting for your reply and chasing you for answers. I will definitely not recommend that anyone takes up this system unless you think you are ready to work with a support team that does not attend to you when help is needed.

Alternatives envisagées 

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Inventory tracking features. Being able to see all outlets inventory at the same time. Inventory transfers are very intuitive and easy to perform, same with stock orders.

Inconvénients

Pricing and sale discount features aren't easy to apply for a membership type of system. Updating Price Books is a hassle as its current layout for each price book is not easy to navigate if one product's price needs to be changed inside of a price book with hundreds of products.

Avantages

It's simple to setup and if you have any questions, you can usually call customer supports who pick up pretty quickly. This product will help you conduct transactions, manage inventory, and set promotions. I'm sure there are more features, but those were the ones I mostly use, and so far I have not encountered any major issues.

Inconvénients

I wish there were more options on payment services than just Vantiv. Also, since this is cloud base, it will take a while for all your products to sync. For instance, if you're uploading new product and plan to do a count, I'd suggest waiting about 5 minutes for the upload to be completed before setting up the inventory counts to be safe.