Spruce vs. Rain Retail Software

I think my single most surprising and satisfying experience with ECI and its RockSolid Maxx and then Spruce products was the ease of implementation and rollout -- both on the hardware and software side. ECI seems to have mastered the idea of using an integrated team along with robust tutorials to make that process easy.

Incentivized

If you are doing all the different streams of business music stores or similar small businesses would have Rain Point of Sale is a great solution. If your store is more similar to a gift shop or cafe it may be too much for your needs.

Incentivized

• lumber management.
• purchasing and receiving.
• Cloud based.

Incentivized

• Integration. One customer list. One product item list. One inventory count. POS and website store that function in real time with each other.
• Responsiveness. New features and tweaks to the user interface are actually constantly being developed based on our feedback and requests.
• Multiple location support. We have two stores and many of the other platforms we shopped didn't have good solutions for that. Rain lets us have a combined product database with different reorder preferences. Also, a new update to the system made transferring serial numbered products even easier.

Incentivized

• Point of sales
• P&L usability

Incentivized

• Reorder amount preset options could more sophisticated. I'd like to see the option to automatically "round up" the preset reorder qty up to 10 or 12 or 6, etc. This was possible previously but they added other options that changed the automated reorder suggestion to the difference between your current count the ideal count you have set for each product. This is good for some items, but not for others. Guitar strings come in a box of 12, but sheet music can be any number. And then some items we purchase in a box and then sell individually. Rain does allow for that in the purchase order automated reorder quantity. Mostly, I change each reorder quantity as I am copying and pasting the product codes into the vendor's website. Not huge deal breaker. And I believe they will eventually add more options like I want to see.
• You do need the internet to do business. So in case of a localized broadband outage you can use your mobile device as a hot spot.

Incentivized

We are very pleased with the service

Incentivized

For the most part when there is internet, we are able to log in and proceed to do our daily tasks which is very helpful, but we have also encountered a glitch on our laptop that we use to do inventory that switches to the last branch that was used. This, in combination with Spruce logging out of the remote connection daily, can cause issues if the person accessing Spruce does not have the remote connection password.

Incentivized

Spruce is possibly just above average. Not super impressed with usability and especially not impressed with tech support who is rarely able to answer questions on the first call.

Incentivized

We migrated from a less integrated situation of running ShopKeep for a POS system and the AIMsi as a billing solution. This created a lot of extra steps for a large percentage of tasks. AIMsi is just to hard to work with and it is very difficult to use it efficiently across multiple locations since tri-tech wants to license how many computers you can use it on and so on. ShopKeep works well but we wanted ti move on to something a tiny bit more sophisticated for tracking repairs and replacing some of the billing functions of AIMsi, and we wanted to have a web store finally. ShopKeep doesn't go past being an easy to train on POS system with inventory tracking.

Incentivized

• With $13 million in gross and 40 employees I'm able to run a full back office with a staff of two. In today's tight labor market that is invaluable.
• Being able to implement Spruce with almost no upgrading or replacement of existing computer hardware represented a huge cost savings to us. I'm not even sure what dollar amount I could attach to that.
• Dealing with both a wholesale and retail customers requires that we provide different levels and kinds of reporting and documentation. Spruce has made it easy to respond to the different demands that those customers place upon us.

Incentivized

• We did not have any type of web-store before starting up with Rain Point of Sale so adding that online presence has helped us bring first-time customers into the store
• We have had one or two bad deals happen because of the site - so watch out for scammers using temporary office space with a fake business as the ship to address. Not Rain's fault, just part of doing business online.

Incentivized