Oracle Hospitality is the successor to MICROS eCommerce software, modular software dedicated to the needs of airlines, hotels and resports, sport venues, restaurants and bars, and others.
The MICROS Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems are available and now offered by Oracle since the acquisition of MICROS Systems in 2014, and are now part of the Oracle Hospitality Suite.
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ShopKeep
Score 7.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ShopKeep is an iPad point of sale system; The vendor says it is intuitive, secure, affordable software that helps merchants run smarter businesses. The product optimizes staffing and inventory, while offering sales reports and customer information on a cloud-based platform. The product includes low-cost, integrated payment processing, as well as point of sale hardware. According to the vendor, ShopKeep has 23,000 customers, and a customer…
$69
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.
In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.
ShopKeep can maintain up to 10,000 individual stock items. This is perfect for a cafe, coffee shop, wine bar, small retail store, etc. If you're inventory exceeds the 10,000 items then it may not be a fit for you. Also, ShopKeep works with Apple tablets only (iPad 2 or later). If you prefer Android or PC based tablets then this won't work for you.
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.
ShopKeep provides solid pre-sales support. They did a pre-sales screen-share demo that helped us ensure that their system would handle the needs of the business, and they assisted us in making decisions around which hardware would be appropriate.
ShopKeep's hardware seems well thought out and well integrated. One exception is issues with the connection between their recommended iCMP credit card scanner and the register. Other than that, the hardware works well together.
The register has excellent configurability and customization capabilities, and handles a large variety of products easily. High-volume products can have their own buttons on the register. Products can be added to a purchase by using these buttons, by scanning a bar code with an integrated bar code scanner, or by doing a live text search.
The register is also easily configurable to handle product options - either multiple options like pizza toppings, or exclusive options like regular or decaf coffee.
The ShopKeep system can handle hybrid retail/quick serve/restaurant scenarios with grace. This was a factor that eliminated many other systems that are optimized for one or the other, or where the products for handling retail are completely separate from the products for handling quick serve/restaurant operations. Since this customer has a location where there is a quick serve counter, a restaurant, and a retail gift shop all in the same location, ShopKeep's ability to handle all of these kinds of transactions from the same platform is a powerful advantage. ShopKeep also recently added functionality to transfer open tickets between registers, so that if a customer starts out with a cup of coffee at the quick serve counter, their ticket can be picked up and added to at the gift shop if they wander in there to purchase items.
ShopKeep has a Back Office system that can be accessed through any Web browser, or through their mobile app. The Back Office system is used to import and export data, manage inventory, configure the iPad registers, set up product options, manage employees, and report transactions, sales, product costs & margins, and other data.
Discounts, returns and credits are relatively easy to handle from the register, and the system can be configured to require a manager to approve these kinds of transactions, or not.
Bulk imports and exports are handled well by ShopKeep's Back Office. When setting up initial inventory, products can be added through Excel, then imported as comma-separated values (CSV) files by uploading them through the Web browser. Once inventory is established, adding or modifying items can be done directly through the Web interface.
ShopKeep has a mobile app that can be used by owners or managers to remotely access real-time snapshots of sales and other important data whenever they wish.
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.
Support is awful. Oracle does not directly support end-users and depends on resellers to offer support. So if there is a bug or breaking change, we have to jump through hoops to get something fixed.
Does not play well with other software or interfaces. There are interfaces but they lack a serious amount of features that are crucial to our business.
The guest facing hardware does not hold up to constant use very well.
The backend hardware is lacking in PCI compliance and is not meant for enterprise use.
The software itself looks as if it is stuck in the early 2000s and there has been no sign of an update in many years.
Reporting is difficult to set up and use and you have to rely on third-party reporting to get decent usable reports.
Because we expect the current issue with the credit card reader disconnecting from the register to be solved with an upcoming software update, and we like many of the features of Shopkeep.
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.
The register functionality is excellent, both from a learning standpoint and an operations standpoint. Cashiers learn how to use the register quickly, and the registers can be configured with hot buttons for fast-moving products. Setting up product variations and additions is straightforward. The web-accessible Back Office has good features, but lacks enough granularity to provide a store manager with the ability to modify inventory settings without giving them access to all of the financial reports as well.
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
Occasional long waits [5 minutes or more] or call-backs needed for telephone support. Email support replies usually take several hours. Support personnel are generally friendly and knowledgable.
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.
If moving from a "dumb" cash register system, spend all the time needed to get starting inventory and product costing and pricing correct. Shopkeep has good tools for reporting inventory, margins, and other critical business info, but the information is only useful if the starting figures are accurate.
We've stayed with MICROS mainly due to that's how we've always operated and to switch operating POS systems would be a HUGE learning curve for everyone involved.
ShopKeep is an inexpensive choice iPad POS system that comes with all of the tools needed to do business without any long-term contracts or expensive fees. It also offers free 24/7 phone and email support along with online live chat during business hours. Coffee Shop Manager offered some of these items, but they also tied you into a long-term contract and you were charged fee after fee for support, etc. Also, the CSM system was big and took up a lot of space compared to ShopKeep's integration with an Apple iPad tablet.
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.
Micros has allowed us to leverage our margin by using our own credit processor and loyalty program. We've seen success from both of these platforms (not Micros) and have been able to save money on the extra costs of using Micros.
ShopKeep didn't integrate with my accounting software. I had to double enter all financial data.
Without inventory controls, all of my financial information was inaccurate. It is impossible to grow a business without accurate financial information.
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.
