Big business style Integration for the small retail business
Updated June 21, 2018

Big business style Integration for the small retail business

Miles Stewart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Rain Point of Sale

We use Rain Point of Sale as a modern web-based solution to integrate virtually all of the computing needs we have as a music retail store. Lesson payments (lesson scheduling and billing with auto pay is in development as of now, June 2018), Rent-to-Own with auto pay, Automated purchasing lists, Receiving with serial number tracking, Location transfers with serial tracking, Web Site with Web-store, Automated marketing features, and very helpful is the Repairs section. Add the work and the price to the repair entry and one click sends the repair customer a text message that the instrument is ready to pick up!

The only activities we do outside of Rain Point of Sale are certain back-office tasks like using QB online as a general ledger for paying vendors and utilities and using QB online to produce estimates and invoices for school deals needing a PO paperwork trail. Everything at the front counter is very smoothly run through Rain. The level of integration and the cross-linking of screens combined with no limitation on how many users or any need for special networking requirements are huge advantages over the industry standard AIMsi software we migrated from. Eliminating the customer query "I should be in there" when you are running several databases that aren't integrated makes a much better impression on your customers and raises the likelihood of creating loyal repeat customers. We love having pre-shoppers show up to our stores with an item listed on our website pulled up on their device to show us what they are interested in!
  • 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.
  • 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.
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.
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.

Using Rain Point of Sale

8 - Customer Service, Purchasing and Receiving, Website Editing, and Repair Technician
1 - Most support is on the RAIN end since all you need is the internet and your favorite web browser. But one tech minded employee in your company to train everyone and make deployment decisions is needed.
  • Website platform
  • Inventory Tracking
  • Repair Tracking
  • Rent to Own Administration
  • Purchasing aid
  • Special orders
  • Layaways
  • Private Lesson administration is in development and we will be using it soon
We are very pleased with the service

Evaluating Rain Point of Sale and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability