Rain Retail, headquartered in Springville, offers their omnichannel retail management and Point of Sale software that allows you to track rentals, manage inventory, use text message marketing, and use social media to market your business.
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Square for Retail
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Square for Retail bundles payment process and point of sale (PoS), as well as vendor and inventory management features, for small retailers. A free trial is available.
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.
Square for Retail is simple, easy to account for, and serves most purposes that a business like ours needs. There are very few drawbacks once it's up and running. For a company like ours who wants to emphasize experience from the time the customer walks in the door to the time they walk out, and where cost is important, Square for Retail provides an awesome interface for the customer, with attractive, easy to use terminals, and a very accessible price point where we can get set up with a clean, attractive, and functional point of sale system while starting up. We have no intentions of moving away from Square for Retail as long as it maintains its quality and support.
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.
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.
This may just be me, but I want some additional customizations for our biggest annual fundraiser, so that we can differentiate between donations, chance drawings, etc.
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.
Stripe is more suited for internet or online order forms and businesses for which it integrates. It works well and same as Square with similar fees. Stripe however does not send a physical card reader by default and is not as large of a company. We chose Square due to the integrations it offers, ease of use, and familiarity clients have with existing card readers to make them more comfortable.
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.
