Vend is a cloud-based point-of-sale and retail management platform. The vendor says it’s used by retailers of all types and sizes to create the ultimate customer experience and manage sales, inventory, customers and more. Vend also works offline and it automatically resyncs the user’s sales once they are back up online. The vendor offers a free 30-day trial and no credit card is required.
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Verifone Point
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Verifone Point is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as payment simplicity and flexible service.
Vend was great fit for this dry cleaner/laundry that had high traffic volume with customers stopping in before and after work. Things need to be done quickly.
VeriFone Point definitely knows the VeriFone payment hardware and support tools. They work with many businesses using this hardware, so their remote management tools are thoroughly capable of handling this hardware. This allows them to meet the needs of a small deployment, maybe 20 terminals or fewer. We quickly found out that we would have been better off setting up our own tools and staff to support our deployment of VeriFone hardware. Based on the number of terminals we have in use, our geographical span, and hours of operation, we need to address issues more quickly and personally than VeriFone Point is able to. While they are responsive, their tier I support is pretty generic and mostly assists with power cycling.
Knowledge and experience: Point supports many businesses with many VeriFone terminals throughout the country. Therefore, they have much experience with the hardware.
Availability: When calling for support, it is rare to not get a response from a human. Some calls are answered after only minutes of hold time, others can take much longer, but a human is almost always available.
Bureaucracy: Since this is the payment industry and a very large company, they move slower than an iceberg with most projects, including ordering new terminals or adding new features.
Availability of project support: Aside hardware troubleshooting, it often feels very difficult to get help from Point support for things like opening a new location, adding a feature, or making other changes requiring any level of planning.
Inconsistent support staff: One issue may be handled very differently by different support staff. We often work with somebody for hours on one issue only to call back later and have the same issue solved in minutes by a different person.
Vend is much more capable than Square POS for product management and inventory control. ShopKeep is fairly similar to Vend but is a more closed ecosystem with fewer third-party integrations and less frequent updates.
We started using VeriFone Point when we switched from software-based credit card processing to VeriFone payment software. With our previous software system, we had a similar experience with support to what we have experienced with VeriFone Point. Support for payment industry tools tends to be excessively pragmatic, to the point where they ignore symptom clues while having us power cycle hardware for the fifth time.
