4 Best Touch Screen POS for 2019
From retail stores to restaurants and beyond, hardwired cash registers are giving way to flexible, mobile point of sale (POS) systems designed to make it as easy as possible for customers to pay and for employees and management to go about daily tasks like inventory management, stock ordering, reporting, and more. LightSpeed Retail, ShopKeep, TouchBistro, and Vend represent four of the best mobile touch screen POS solutions available in 2019, and below we’ll take a look at what makes each special and how much merchants can expect to pay to put each to work.
LightSpeed Retail
LightSpeed Retail offers everything you’d expect from a touch screen POS, including the ability to manage products, pricing, taxes, discounts, purchase orders, and much more. It also offers an extremely well-designed inventory management suite that includes taggable products for each search reference and the ability to upload entire vendor catalogs to make reordering low stock as easy as it’s ever been. The POS includes a robust reporting platform covering 40 areas of business through a user-friendly dashboard, and for companies looking to expand the capabilities of the software, Lightspeed Retail easily integrates with Lightspeed’s eCommerce and loyalty program add-ons.
Pricing starts at $99/month for up to five users and a single register and increases to $169/month for two registers and ten users, and $289/month for four registers and 20 users.
ShopKeep
ShopKeep is a mobile POS that runs on iOS and Clover-based tablets. The POS rivals the others on this list in terms of standard POS areas like inventory management, sales, tracking, and reporting. One unique feature that ShopKeep offers is the ShopKeep Spotlight tool – an automated marketing tool included in the Advanced plan that helps manage and maintain business listings on sites like Google and Facebook. Where LightSpeed Retail offers employee management and limited customer resource management features in the stock product, ShopKeep only includes them in the Advanced plan, making it a potentially expensive option for merchants looking to make use of loyalty programs and other customer-centric features.
ShopKeep’s pricing starts at $69/month for the basic package and goes up to $99/month and $199/month respectively for the Essential and Advanced packages.
TouchBistro
TouchBistro is a mobile POS solution geared towards restaurants and bars. It is an iPad-only system and offers a limited local installation enabling certain actions to be taken even when disconnected from WiFi. One standout feature of TouchBistro is the number of restaurant-specific integrations that it offers users looking for expanded features, including online ordering, kitchen displays, digital menus, and much more. Loyalty programs can be added to TouchBistro packages for an extra $49/month, but aside from that, the system comes with all of the standard front and back-of-house features that restauranteurs expect from a mobile POS.
TouchBistro offers four package levels; Solo, Dual, Team, and Unlimited. The Solo package is for single users and costs $69/month. The Dual package comes with two users and runs $129/month. The Team package is for restaurants and bars requiring up to five users and comes in at $249/month, and the unlimited package is exactly as the name suggests and costs $300/month. While charges are listed by TouchBistro as monthly, billing is done on an annual basis.
Vend
Vend is a retail-specific cloud-based touch screen POS that runs on iOS hardware only. It is notable for its full-featured built-in loyalty, gift card, and customer relationship management features – features that most competitors only include in limited ways or as expensive add-ons. Vend’s inventory management suite offers similar features to the other POS systems previously listed, with the addition of a handy barcode scanning app that makes it quick and easy to perform accurate inventory counts.
Vend offers two service levels: Vend Pro and Vend Lite. Vend Pro is $129/month billed annually and comes with loyalty programs, eCommerce, and advanced reporting built-in. It also allows up to six outlets to be integrated into a single license. Vend Lite is only $99/month, but lacks loyalty and eCommerce functionality and allows only a single outlet per license.
These four POS systems represent feature-rich solutions for merchants looking for the ability to process transactions, manage inventory, and run reports from mobile devices. But to unlock the true power of these POS systems, merchants also need a payment processing partner to handle the electronic payments these systems enable. BAMS merchant services are an ideal solution to pair with any of the above mobile point-of-sale systems, offering some of the industry lowest rates, the most transparent pricing model available, and unparalleled customer service and support.