Olo in New York provides an on-demand interface for the restaurant industry, designed to drive digital ordering and delivery for restaurant brands.
N/A
Shopify
Score 8.6 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.
$39
per month
Square POS
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Square POS is a point-of-sale software solution for restaurants, retail, or appointment-based businesses. It features numerous inventory (or menu) management and control features, and options that allow customers to pay in any way they want or can.
$10
per each additional reader; first reader free
Pricing
Olo
Shopify
Square POS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic Shopify
$39
per month
Grow
$105
per month
Advanced
$399
per month
Shopify Plus
2,000
per month
Shopify Plus
2,300
per month
Each Transaction
2.6% + $0.10
per transaction
Square Reader for magstripe
$10
per each additional reader; first reader free
Square Stand for contactless and chip
$16
per month
Square Terminal
$27
per month
Square Register
$39
per 24 months
Square Reader for contactless and chip
$49
per reader
Square Point of Sale
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Olo
Shopify
Square POS
Free Trial
No
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
A 25% discount is offered for annual billing.
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Olo
Shopify
Square POS
Considered Multiple Products
Olo
No answer on this topic
Shopify
No answer on this topic
Square POS
Verified User
Director
Chose Square POS
Having used a manual cash register and a very expensive and robotic card payments processor (Global Payments which was partnered to our business bank, HSBC), we knew we wanted something that would cover both cash and card transactions, and integrate with our website.
After using a previous integrator, I can safely say I would recommend Olo above the competition. Olo successfully consolidates all platforms for order ingestion thus simplifying the entire process of digital ordering. Trying to do it any other way would simply be foolish. The technology works and there is a great support structure behind the scenes to make sure that if there are any questions, feature requests, or advancements that they get added to the development queue.
Shopify allowed us to handle matrix items and combined listings. Both of which we could not do on our previous platform. There was some customization involved but overall, it did what we needed it to. The one downside was that if we want to change anything we would have to reload the entire set of matrix items manually.
Square POS is by far the easiest POS software to use at events and train additional team members on - even with temporary or first-time employees. It's easy to see how each event is doing in live time. It gives the event manager a real-time view of revenue earned. Its really easy to create/manage/delete users to keep the platform secure.
Olo makes the guest experience easy and understandable while placing their orders. They can easily customize their order, modifying each item to their liking using the guidelines we at our restaurant have given.
If there are issues with our equipment, Olo is quick to respond and get us back online.
It's base security and integration with trusted security partners (such as NoFraud) is a game-changer when it comes to reliability and a "hands off approach" for our IT department. The up-time is also very good.
It offers a wide range of verified plugins that are (for the most part) easy to install and use for any specific scenario you're looking for.
It's Analytics area in the admin is actually nice and offers a wide variety of reports that you can run.
Mobile transactions (not like from a phone, but in terms of the ability to physically relocate rapidly).
Simple setup.
Generally uncomplicated pricing.
Widespread customer familiarity: because it's so regularly in use in our industry (musicians/entertainment professionals), people know and trust it in a way that you might not with a different provider.
I would love it if Shopify built an in house app which helped us post UGCs and social proof from platforms such as Instagram, Youtube etc. more seamlessly on our website. Right now, we are able to do it through third party apps but the look and feel is just okay.
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!
I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.
Olo's usability is great. The only area that keeps them from being a 10 is menu management. Menu management is absolutely workable, but it could be better. The rest of the system works well and is very usable and user-friendly. To the extent that their menu management has opportunities, the Olo Expo product helps this out with the people that need it the most, and thus why they score a 9 overall. Without Olo Expo, I'd score it an 8.
It is fairly easy to use Shopify regardless of what task you are attempting to perform. Most things are customizable to a degree without requiring coding ability. I have very limited coding experience and have still been able to navigate my way around changing features of the website that require edits to the code with the use of AI and trial-and-error. This previously wasn't possible with the WooCommerce platform.
We find Square POS is very user friendly. Its interface is customizable to our needs and very easy to use. Before we adopted Square POS, we used a combination of solutions from different manufacturer to try and achieve a portion of the functionality that Square POS provides under only 1 login
No product is ever perfect and support is there to help when that is the case. The vast majority of time the Olo support team is quick, transparent, and resolves the issues. However, I can't say that they are absolutely perfect (but few support teams are). The only thing keeping them from a 10 is the LVL1 support teams will often not read a ticket fully and see that the troubleshooting steps they are about to give have already taken place.
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
An admission - I have NEVER had to use Square POS support. The system is seamless, it just works! I have never had any queries about how the system worked as everything is so clearly laid out. I have never had any problems with payments. If their support systems are anywhere near as good as their software, I think we'll be in good hands.
Shopify offered us several trainings to setup a Shopify store, how to build a brand, SEO, product photography etc. All this content have been super helpful in our journey.
Revel is my POS provider and they want to charge way to much for online integration so I have not tried it. What I have tried is each companies own apps on their tablets. I would rather have 3 or 4 different tablets that are good at what they do for their respective company then use your "all-in-one" solution that honestly is much worse.
Big Commerce and SAP Hybris are two other platforms we've investigated and Shopify is by far easiest to use and customize. While it doesn't do everything out of the box, the apps do fill in many gaps. The cost however, is probably the biggest selling point against these other two options.
We only used Square POS while we were getting set up with Authorize.Net. It isn't as flashy or recognized by the general public, but in our industry, that isn't a priority. We do very large transactions so the higher rates and fees from Square add up insanely quickly making the lower rates and fees from Authorize.Net the nail in Square's coffin for us.
Time savings for employees has been a positive impact.
Our takeout business has increased from less than 10% to over 30% in the last 2 years, we could not have been as successful with this increase without the help of Olo.
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.
The opportunity cost of waiting for payments and manually bringing them to a bank means that we don't have to visit our bank branch. That alone saves us several hours each month.
We can use ordinary computers and mobile devices with Square instead of paying for expensive software or terminals.
Our clients appreciate not having to process payments to us, and anything that helps our clients and makes them happy carries more import than I can explain in this space.
