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I'd love to hear from folks who are selling bottles as well as cocktails on what POS system they are using. We are searching and would like to find one that didn't cost thousands of dollars, works well, and we could use with an iPad.

Right now we are leaning towards pepperkorn http://www.pepperkorn.com/us/index.php

Thanks!

Roy

Camp 1805 distillery

Hood River, OR

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I went with Square for our POS and online sales. We don't have a bar, just a tasting room. Hadn't heard of Pepperkorn, but my local coffee shop uses Square and they and others had good things to say about it. I got the whole stand, printer and cash drawer setup. Their dashboard is easy to use, and entering items is easy enough. I notice that Pepperkorn has a $49 monthly software fee. It also looks like it has some special features to do table assignments and stuff. Square doesn't do that, but also doesn't have a monthly fee. I like that it reports to quickbooks online, has fairly low card processing fees, and does do detailed sales reports.

https://squareup.com/market/fair-game-beverage-company

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 year later...
  • 2 months later...
  • 2 years later...

We have been using Square since we opened for bottles sales and cocktail service and have been very happy with it.  I think its an excellent solution for both our tasting room and some off site sales at festivals and such. 

I am curious if anyone out there is running a full restaurant with kitchen and bar service, and if so what POS systems you have experience with?

 

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  • 3 months later...

Anyone have experience with a tasting room pos system that allows for shipping the products for the customer?

i.e. guy buys 3 bottles o' booze and wants them shipped to his home address because he is on vacation.

Currently I have to enter the order on my tablet computer where I have my website open (I sell online).  This is less than ideal because it bypasses my clover pos system.  Also it's time consuming.  So I'm operating two ordering systems at once.  Currently have occasional requests for the shipping, but I can see it increasing.

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21 hours ago, daveflintstone said:

Anyone have experience with a tasting room pos system that allows for shipping the products for the customer?

i.e. guy buys 3 bottles o' booze and wants them shipped to his home address because he is on vacation.

Currently I have to enter the order on my tablet computer where I have my website open (I sell online).  This is less than ideal because it bypasses my clover pos system.  Also it's time consuming.  So I'm operating two ordering systems at once.  Currently have occasional requests for the shipping, but I can see it increasing.

No, but in most states that is illegal. Currently, I don't know of any shipper that will do it (even though there are a couple states where it is legal to do so). Does anyone else? FedEx used to, but of late they said the will not deliver to consumer for spirits at all. Now sometimes that is due to the originating state rules as well. Don't know how Hawaii handles that.

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Let me be clear, I'm not asking for advice on how to ship my products.  I already do that and have for years.

I'm asking for any recommendations for a pos system that can handle both in store sales and in store sales with a shipping option.

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I use shipstation.  It connects online shopping cart and fedex to print labels for orders.  It is only shipping software I believe, not point of sale.

I'm looking for an all-in-one solution that will be my pos in tasting room, and let me ship any tasting room transaction.

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  • 1 month later...
On 1/4/2018 at 9:35 AM, HedgeBird said:

We have been using Square since we opened for bottles sales and cocktail service and have been very happy with it.  I think its an excellent solution for both our tasting room and some off site sales at festivals and such. 

I am curious if anyone out there is running a full restaurant with kitchen and bar service, and if so what POS systems you have experience with?

 

What did you end up going with? We are looking to upgrade ours. 

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We use PointOS - which is a pretty robust POS software solution.  One of the most important points to me is that it is a local system, not cloud based.  One thing that always confused me about the iPad options out there is the monthly fees - PointOS is $500 once.  Even the cheaper options cost that every year?!?  We use this for drinks and merchandise only, but it can be used for a full kitchen or server/bartender stations with a second printer.  Also handles our timeclock which is convenient.  It also can be installed onto any PC hardware.  We have large POS style computers at one location, but a cheap touchscreen laptop at the other.  PointOS integrates directly with vantiv/mercury for payment processing, but you can use any payment processor you want which is nice.  The only other system we considered was square because it didn't have monthly fees, but we found the reporting to be severely lacking and the use of tabs to clumsy (but we still keep a square reader around for backup, not to mention festivals).  Not to hijack, but I still wonder what is the attraction to the monthly fee based systems?

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13 hours ago, CountySeat said:

What did you end up going with? We are looking to upgrade ours. 

For our new location we went with Square for Restaurants; a new version/service offered by Square.  We got signed up as a beta tester back in March and have been up and running with it since mid May.

https://squareup.com/townsquare/introducing-square-for-restaurants
https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/square-launches-restaurant-point-of-sale-platform/

Monthly cost is:
$60 per location (includes one point of sale)
$40 per additional point of sale

Fees are:
2.6% + 10¢
Per tap, dip, or swipe   (discounted rate available if your over $250,000 annually with an average ticket cost over $15)

There have certainly been some issues, but over-all the experience has been positive and the support has been very good.  Perhaps not the cheapest option, but the servers/bar-tenders really seem to like it compared to other legacy POSs they have used in the past.  I feel confident that Square will continue to build out features and fix issues as they come up.

I have not heard of PointOS - Seems like an interesting option and certainly sounds cheaper.  Did some searching online and the overall feedback is pretty mixed:
read the reviews here:  https://www.capterra.com/p/81291/PointOS-Professional/
Their website says the cost is $499 for one station but I cant find any info on what other costs may be?

 

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  • 2 months later...

At an ADI conference, in my notes, someone said that Square will not support the sales of some products including some alcohol products.  Breadcrumb POS was suggested instead.  Anyone know anything about this?  It seems that a lot of distilleries are using Square without issues.

 

I am always skeptical of these "best of" sites, but what about Shopkeep?  Any experience with it?  https://www.top10bestpossystems.com

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That's not true - Square dosen't care what you sell as long as they are collecting fees. We have Square and it works great - but, won't accept all debit cards. Square is a good place to start but if you are eventually moving a lot of product, you'll probably want a real system of some kind.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

I own a bar and we use Toast. The backend is sort of mickey mouse if you like to do a lot of year end analysis but they do sell an API for integration with Quickbooks. Terminals work great and you can edit almost all parameters on terminal (without a computer). They are about half the cost per terminal of Aloha etc but they make it back in the credit card processing end. I will say they develop features very quick and customer service is instantaneous. I've ever really been satisfied with backend systems for accounting and deep analysis. I guess that POS folk figure that's what Quickbooks is for. 

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