Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review For a small business like ours, it works very well, is very user friendly, but the cost to add more tablets so that we can keep one at the bar, one on the interior dining area and one on the outside dining area is difficult as they have to be iPads, and there is an additional cost to add another tablet for use on the floor
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review The best thing about Touch Bistro is how user friendly it is! Works just like an iPhone. My younger employees hardly need any training on it. Touch Bistro is very easy to set up and to maintain on a daily basis. Putting in my specific products and ingredients was simple. Adding modifiers, pricing and descriptions was simple enough. We have specials that change daily and updating the system in the morning is fast and easy. Employees can clock in and out with Touch Bistro. Inventory can be tracked and updated. Running reports is important in my business. Touch Bistro allows me to easily track my sales, for any period of time. I can easily find the numbers I need to pay my sales tax or do payroll. With just a few clicks I can compare my sales from month to month or year to year. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Online ordering can not be added on to once the customer arrives, can’t edit or change anything once placed Slow speed to place next order, and syncing with debit machines Frustrating that screen needs to be closed until payment goes through, hard in a very busy restaurant New updates always cause glitches in the system. The last update I now have drinks printing to my kitchen that never did before. Admin and servers not being able to do printouts Discounts not displaying on day printouts Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are very pleased with the service
Read full review Support Rating First of all, I hardly ever need support for Touch Bistro, that’s how well it works. In the very instances over the years where I did need to call, customer support was easily accessible and fast and accurate with their responses
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Harbortouch has a very robust POS system however it has issues that we do not seem to have with TouchBistro. One of the issues with Harbortouch is if the internet goes down, the credit card reader will not work and actually lock of the POS system causing extra customer wait times while their food is getting cold. TouchBistro's system will still capture the card info even when the internet is down and process it when the internet is working again
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The software is easy to understand and use We could not find a case for the iPads that would also fit the third party card reader so we went without. This resulted in card readers breaking off in the charging port rendering the iPad useless. Reports were available in real time, so it was extremely easy to see sales and make quick decisions. Read full review ScreenShots Rain Retail Software Screenshots