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 POS
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Square POS is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as accept credit cards with your iPhone, Android, and iPad along with the flexibility to accept credit card payments anywhere, from Square headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once set up, Square POS is very easy to use. I feel it is a little too easy. Many other solutions have some layer of complexity to them but Square POS is pretty straightforward and this makes it the ideal POS solution in my opinion. If a solution can remove the barriers to use and allow end users to get on with their tasks without being slowed down, then it is a winner. This is what we were able to achieve with Square POS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
