POS stands for point-of-sales. It is defined as hardware or software that enables a business to make sales. It allows you to accept payments from customers and maintain a record of sales made. In today’s era, POS has completely revolutionized. It has become digital, you can accept payments sitting anywhere. Shopify POS also provides a lot more services than just accepting payments. It unifies your virtual and physical store, manages inventory and staff, allocates resources, provides an easy checkout process, and whatnot. Shopify POS is quite easy to set up and has made operations easier for big and small businesses. Just like Shopify, there is a Vend POS. Business owners often get confused between Shopify and Vend POS, so we will do a detailed overview of Shopify and Vend POS, to help you make a better choice for your business.
Let’s start with a brief overview of Shopify and Vend POS.
Vend POS
Vend POS is focused on in-person sales for medium-sized businesses. It does not have online transaction capabilities and built-in marketing tools. However, It offers inventory, customers, sales, and more. Vend POS helps you provide a smooth checkout experience to your customers. It builds a database and improves customer loyalty. You can never oversell with Vend’s POS because it syncs your inventory across all channels. There are many other Vend POS features such as.
- Keep a record of payment history and past purchases.
- Maintains customer portal for targeted marketing campaigns.
- Points-based loyalty programs.
- Manages order holds and layaways.
Vend POS is of great help when it comes to inventory management. It provides product bundling, transfers item across locations, forecasts sales to predict inventory ordering time, creates, import, and print barcode, creates a purchase order and monitors progress, automatically generate orders inventory when it falls below desired levels, and receives and returns inventory.
Business owners can easily manage cash, monitor employee sales, integrate accounting software, and get weekly and daily reports of products, brands, and suppliers. Moreover, vend POS is quite user-friendly, and everything is self-explanatory. Vend offers a 10-minute demo video that gives a brief overview of its offerings. From adding inventory to creating tags to sorting products is done quite effortlessly. Despite the simplicity and ease, there is excellent and 27/7 customer support too. A phone call, live chat, e-mail, and social media are all options to seek support.
Where there are advantages, there are disadvantages too. Vend POS isn’t the cheapest or it does not provide value for the money paid. There are some glitches, missing features, and a lack of payment processing features.
Shopify POS
The POS system helps you sell products in person, backed by everything you need to sell online. Shopify POS is a point-of-sale app that merchants can use to sell products in person. Merchants can create a cart for each customer, customize that cart in several ways, and then accept payment with a wide range of payment methods. Shopify POS unifies online and in-person sales to easily manage inventory, orders, and customer data across your entire business. It has all the essential features you need to make sales, track performance, and manage customers, orders, and inventory. Shopify POS app offers local pickup and delivery and the ability to sell inventory from other locations. You can reach more customers this way and provide them with a smooth shopping experience. To add fuel to the fire, let me tell you Shopify POS app is free for its subscribers.
Shopify POS offers:
- Omnichannel selling
- Smart inventory and staff management
- Easy checkout process.
- Get actionable reports.
- Easy payment procedure.
- Integrated marketing option.
- Multistore management within the same software.
Shopify POS is an all-in-one package but it has some downsides too such as it’s expensive and needs a very stable and reliable internet connection to operate properly.
By now, you must have had some basic understanding of Shopify and Vend POS, now let’s compare their attributes to see which one is the winner.
Shopify Or Vend POS?
Shopify is e-commerce friendly
Shopify is an established e-commerce platform. It supports drop shipping and has all the other e-commerce platform features but vend is lagging in this aspect. Vend does not support drop shipping and integration with distribution centers. Moreover, Vend is specifically a point-of-sale but Shopify is a complete sales platform.
Shopify Or Vend Pricing?
It is difficult to rank any one of them as no 1 when it comes to pricing. Both of them offer their prices. Vend’s basic plan starts at $69, while Shopify’s Basic plan starts at $29. With vend, you can update to the pro plan for just $10 but it’s much more costly in Shopify i.e. $79. Vend dost does not charge any additional transaction fee, the only monthly subscription fee is charged but Shopify charges an extra 2% transaction fee for its basic plan, 1% for its normal plan, and 5% for its advanced plan. Shopify also charges fees for credit card transactions.
Both platforms are costly and cheap in their ways. It’s you who needs to decide which one suits best for your business.
Shopify Or Vend: Which One Is Easy To Work With?
Shopify works best with iOS 12.5.1. It does offer an android app but its POS is packaged with Apple iPads and has most of its resources into Apple products. Apple products are not cheap at all. While Vend can operate on a variety of operating systems. Windows, Apple, and Android are all supported.
Customer Support
Shopify and Vend both offer 24/7 customer support through phone and email. Shopify’s Canada-based support is more efficient than the rest while Vend has a London-based support team that understands the British market more. There is extra support in Shopify Plus’s custom plans and Enterprise Vend.
There is a tie between both POS when it comes to customer support.
Integrations
Shopify integrates with the following business systems and applications:
- Active Campaign
- Bitium
- Bookeo Appointments
- Campaign Monitor
- LiveAgent
- LiveChat
- MailChimp
- Post Affiliate Pro
- Constant Contact
While Vend POS integrates with the following business systems and applications:
- Xero
- Shopify
- QuickBooks
- Timely
- MailSync
- PayPal
- StitchLabs
- Etsy
- Deputy
- Unleashed
In-Built Marketing Campaigns
Shopify provides an in-built marketing campaign option, you can add or select the desired type of marketing such as e-mail, online ad, SMS, and others. While Vend does not provide any such option. You cannot integrate marketing campaigns on Vend.
Ordering Automation
Business owners are always looking out for POS that automates routine tasks for them such as inventory ordering. A POS system automatically generates an order when inventory falls below the safety levels, it saves the business from running out of inventory and in return losing customers. A Vend POS does not offer an order automation option but Shopify does.
A business owner will prefer Shopify over Vend POS because it improves operations.
Inventory Forecast Based On Sales
Determining the preorder time of inventory is a task. Shopify POS does the job for business owners by tracking sales and customers’ buying behavior. It forecast when inventory would be needed to be stocked up and automatically generates a purchase order for it. Vend POS does not forecast inventory based on sales.
Self Ordering
When customers place and pay for their orders at a kiosk it is known as self-ordering. Customers enjoy the opportunity to buy with no waiting and delay. It cut down the cost of wages for businesses. Shopify POS has the self-ordering feature. Vend POS does not have any such feature.
Languages Supported
Both Shopify and Vend POS support “The English” language.
Conclusion
Shopify and Vend POS both have their pros and cons but Shopify has more pros than cons. Shopify POS is surely the winner. Quebec’s Technology Evaluation Centre analyzed Vend POS vs Shopify POS and found that Shopify POS ratings are higher:
- Shopify POS -4.5 stars (965 reviews)
- Vend- 4.0 stars (33 reviews)
Furthermore, TEC found that Shopify has more features than Vend does. TEC did note that often features are available through plug-ins. Shopify is especially well-known for having an incredible number of integrations.
FAQs
Can you use Shopify POS on your desktop?
No, You have to use an android or IOS app for it. You can use it manually on the Shopify website but can’t able to swipe the credit card. Thanks
Which Shopify POS app?
Both, Andriod and IOS apps are best.
Shopify POS locations?
You can set the Shopify POS location like
Steps:
- From the Shopify POS app, tap ≡ > Settings > All locations.
- Tap the name of the POS location.
- Tap Switch to confirm the change or Cancel and go back.
Shopify POS on Computer?
We can use the Shopify POS on Ipad with android and IOS apps thanks
VEND VS LIGHT SPEED
This article is all about Shopify vs Vend, In the next article, we will discuss the other platforms.
