Clover Networks, a First Data company (merged with Fiserv July 2019) offers a modular suite of Point of Sale systems (PoS) for restaurant and retail. This modular suite features fixed PoS stations, a customer loyalty program and gift card, an analytics module, as well as a mobile point of sale that Iplugs into the users smartphone and tablet to accept secure credit card swipes, as well as dips and taps like Apple Pay®, Samsung Pay™ and Android Pay™.
$9.95
per month
Shopify
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Shopify is a commerce platform designed for both online stores and retail locations. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
Clover is well suited for high-volume environments where quality and dependability are paramount. The hardware can scale easily and always looks good on the counter. I have even seen Clover hardware used in small mom-and-pop type stores. The ability to swing the monitor around for signature is really nice. Customers appreciate the ease of use. The stations we have to use nice large bright screens. Not familiar enough with the Clover product line to know if the smaller screen sizes are available for applications where space is a concern.
Shopify has low barriers to entry so it's a great store for new businesses and small to medium size businesses who have a limited product amount and are interested in building a site from scratch that is centered around the buying experience. However, if you're a larger to enterprise company and want to incorporate an e-commerce element to your site, then they are still a possible solution but be prepared to hire a firm to help you implement and connect to your site in a seamless way because without a developer, it's near impossible.
BluePay has been very responsive when we've had questions and gone out their way to make sure that users understand the answers that are given.
During our cut over to BluePay we found that there were reports that our users were used to having that didn't have an equivalent on BluePay's site. Our account rep went above and beyond to make sure that our users had the information that they needed by having custom reports sent on the schedule that we determined.
Overall our interchange rates are much lower with BluePay than they were with our previous gateway provider.
The main drawback that I am facing in Shopify for a long time is that their sales analytics system is not up to mark. As I am using Shopify to run different stores for my organization it does not get updated after-sales and does not provide the right analytics about the product strength and number of sales.
Secondly, Shopify has different apps which are best to run the store on max strength but they are very much costly like inventory management, generating multiple discount codes, and more robust customizable editing.
Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!
There are numerous aspects to Clover's usability: the usability of their point of sale systems, the usability of their CRM and web dashboards, and the technical side of integrating with other third-party services. All are top tier. Clover's usability is excellent and I have never had a problem figuring out how to use their services at any level. The POS system has a very low barrier to entry and an easy learning curve for newcomers.
I think most people are able to suer Shopify that have used a computer. There are some features that take a bit longer to learn. If you are not a creative person it may be a bit more difficult to learn the website customization, but with a help guide or tutorial it will only take a few tries to understand how to work the interface
We rarely have problems, but when we do, they are major and the system becomes unusable. While Customer Support does eventually respond and fix the issue, they can take a long time. If a major problem occurs on a weekend during the dinner rush, it can be catastrophic to sales and customer returns.
In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward
None are available on the list. Clover competes with HotSauce, Paradise, Poynt, and many more POS systems. We easily sell Clover more than anything else and everyone loves it. It's easily one of the best products I've seen since I have been in integrations. The sales managers love it, our sales reps love it, and most importantly our merchants love it.
The old platform that I used could not help us to meet our requirements. It was not helping us properly, then I got to know about Shopify and started using it. After 1 month [of] usage of Shopify we could understand that this is the best platform [for E-commerce] to make better sales and goodwill. Shopify helped us to get a proper idea of the analytics of the website. Shopify [supports] most of the [applications] and helps us to make better results.
Definitely makes us look more professional, and we are able to handle products much smoother and faster
The reporting allows us to see what is really selling and how much money we have actually made, which is also great, especially when you are selling things you have made or grown because you may not always have an inventory, but you can tell how much you've sold.
We can't pause the fees for the "off-season," so it definitely is wasted money during those times.
It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.
