Vend Review

Cristina By: Cristina | Last updated April 12, 2017

smartphone and credit card reader, pos, vend

9.8 / 10

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Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.

PROS:

  • User-friendly, intuitive interface
  • Affordable
  • Free plan available
  • 95% customer satisfaction rate

CONS:

  • The e-commerce feature is only available with their Advanced and Multi-Outlet plans
  • The 24/7 phone and email support is not free
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SUMMARY:

Vend is a cloud-based POS and e-commerce solution developed in 2010 by Vaughan Rowsell. It is suitable for businesses of all types and sizes and supported almost anywhere in the world: US, UK, Europe, Australia, Canada.

Vend can easily be used on a Mac, iPad, Android device or a Windows PC. The system helps you with your inventory and product management, it has useful marketing tools, real-time reporting and a lot of third-party integrations.

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COMPLETE REVIEW

Vend offers a 30-day trial with no credit card required. If you are satisfied with their services you can further choose from one of their 3 available plans: Starter, Advanced or Multi-outlet. A cool thing about Vend is that they also have a Free plan (even after the trial period expires) which offers some useful, although  limited features: up to 1,000 customers, one user account, 10 products and one store. However, there is no email, phone or chat support included, just access to their forums. The paid packages all come with at least one free register and you can choose to be billed monthly or annually.

Vend is designed to work with whatever equipment you have, which is a pretty useful thing. That includes cash drawers, credit card readers, barecode scanners, receipt printers, etc.

The software has a user-friendly and intuitive interface. When you first sign up there is a guided tour available and every section on the dashboard lets you access help resources and tutorials.

Your data (product lists, price books, customer info) can be uploaded using CSV lists or manually, with a USB or Bluetooth barecode scanner.

When it comes to hardware and system requirements, Vend specifically requires you to use Google Chrome. Other than that, you can run it on anything from a Windows 7 or Mac OS X 10.5 up.

Vend also has its own recommendations when it comes to hardware equipment.

For cash drawers: Star SMD2 -124 or 1317

For receipt printers: Star TSP 100 (143) LAN, Star TSP 100 USB or Epson Tm-T88V

For barecode scanners: Honeywell 1400G-USB, Socket Mobile 7Ci or 7Qi, Motorola CS3000.

Another useful feature is the e-commerce functionality, but it is only available with their Advanced and Multi-Outlet plans. Vend comes with an integrated site builder, with plenty of responsive themes, a cool content management system that lets you easily add and edit products and pages. It integrates with Shopify and it lets you choose your preferred payment processor, so this should be a good news for users who already have a Shopify store.

The Loyalty Program is also a nice feature. You have to specify how much a customer has to spend in order to earn a dollar in Loyalty rewards (the default is $1 for each $50 spent, but you are free to change that). The loyalty dollars can be used at the next buy.

There is also an iPad App, also known as Vend registered, which is optimized for iPads. The app lets you quickly process sales, has payment integration, on-account sales, quick keys that can be customized and other useful features.

Employee tracking is another useful feature that reduces human errors by tracking your staff and their cash management.

Another one is Price Books, which allows you to set up separate prices for your books.  If you have a holiday or weekend sale, you can create a copy of your regular prices, then apply your desired discounts and specify a timeframe during which these discounts are available. When the period expires, your default prices will be restored.

Real-time reporting is also a key feature that helps you analyze the way your business is going. You can create reports with your best customers, best selling items, sales trends, etc.

Vend integrates with a lot of 3rd party software such as: Shopify (as already mentioned), Xero (an online accounting system), Stitch Labs (for inventory management), Deputy (for employee management) and many more.

When it comes to payment gateway options Vend integrates with almost any processor: Paypal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, Payment Express. Vend can accept NFC payments and it is EMV enabled.

Pricing

The Starter plan starts from $69/month and includes one store and free register, unlimited products and customers, up to 3 users and 24/7 email and chat support.

The Advanced plan starts from $79 (billed annually) and $99 (billed monthly). The package includes unlimited products, customers and users accounts, retail dashboard, small business and advanced reporting, Vend Ecommerce, integrated card payments and others.

The Multi-Outlet plan starts from $199, respectively $249/month and has all the features you might need: unlimited stores, 2 registers, multi-outlet timezone support, 24/7 priority phone support, advanced user permissions, etc.

For more details on their pricing, please access https://www.vendhq.com/pricing.

Help/Support

Phone: 1-844-814-5409

Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Vend.POS/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vendhq

Vend offers 24/7 support with all its PAID packages. So, although they do provide a solid customer service, it doesn’t come for free, which is a major drawback, because its competitors don’t usually charge for this service. Having mentioned that, you have a lot of resources at your disposal. You can choose between phone, email, live chat and there is also an extensive knowledge base, one click away. You have a FAQ section, video tutorials, a YouTube channel with more than 60 videos, a forum and Vend U (Vend University), which is a website with everything you need to know about growing a thriving business (blogs, articles, community forums, events, webinars, reports).

The customer support reps are very warm and friendly and Vend has a 95% customer satisfaction rate.

They also launched a funny website, http://www.welovepos.com/, where users share their POS stories, pictures, funny anecdotes and videos. Moreover, if you decide to share your POS story on this site, you get a free month of Vend services, even if you weren’t a client before.

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Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.

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