Overall Rating

Vend: Everything You Need to Know

Vend is one of our top picks for EPOS software for shops. 

Why? Vend is one of the most successful of the new (cloud) EPOS players, as they’ve seized a big chunk of market share by being excellent. We’d happily recommend Vend to any mid-sized or large store, of up to around 10 locations. The ideal customer would be someone on the verge of opening their second store, whose inventory needs mean that they just can’t use the free epos software available anymore. 

Vend comes with all the features you’re likely to need. This includes an intuitive front-end, multi-store management, formidable support, and an inventory capable of handling really complex stock. It also integrates with a wide array of e-commerce software. 

Vend is also popular with its customers – check below to see their up-to-date rating by real users. Our customers think it’s easy to use and have praised the support available. Some customers have reported that they find some reporting selection tools a tad inflexible; or a really specific thing they were hoping to do was unavailable. That’s because Vend has built software which is usable and templated; it’s designed to be rapid and intuitive – sometimes at the expense of special requirements. 

Competitors to Vend on the more expensive side would be Lightspeed Retail or Revel Systems; on the cheaper side, they include Airpos, or Hike.

Book a call and we can talk you through the differences!

 

How to get Vend 

You may wish to book a demo for Vend point-of-sale. To do that, book a free call through StoreKit – this will also help us make sure you’re the right kind of customer for Vend, and they’re the right kind of software for you. (Don’t worry – we partner with all the market-leading software, and we make a similar amount whomever we refer you to. Our advice is free, and a referral from us won’t affect your price, and may qualify you for a hardware discount.)

As is often standard, Vend offers a 30-day free trial so you can park the purchase if you hate it. (Remember, everything we sell here is generic hardware meaning you can always change software if you like.) During that, if you like Vend, you can book your payments and hardware through StoreKit and you’re all set to sell. The good news is that Vend integrates with lots of different payment options! iZettle, Square, Sum Up, or traditional processors with Verifone or Ingenico terminals, can all work through Vend.

Vend comes with five hour-long training sessions for your staff, which should leave them fully trained. Additionally, you’ll probably need to spend half a day as the owner setting the system up, coming to terms with it, and loading the unique formats and principles of your store into the way the system works. 

We’d say, considering its capability, Vend is one of the easier softwares to find your way around. 

 

Vend: an Overview

Pricing

Vend is a subscription-based EPOS system that charges monthly. The packages are tiered between Lite (£49 per month per till) and Pro (£69 per month per outlet). This puts it mid-range. The features described below are for the more popular Pro package. As with all StoreKit packages, Vend is bought discretely from its hardware (we can bundle it together for you!) and there’s a range of payment processing options and rates available depending on your circumstances. The hardware, in turn, is agnostic – and can be used with any software! You can use any iPad as the main part of the till.

Why People Choose Vend

1) Vend has great inventory management. If you’re looking to upgrade from software without inventory, this will help you out.

2) Vend works with agnostic hardware. If you’re looking for software which works with iPads you already have; Vend should do the trick.

3) Vend is intuitive. Not a technology person? Not a problem. For a larger system, Vend is very easy to set-up and learn.

4) Vend has lots of support. Vend has one of the best libraries out there and 24/7 customer support, which is a UK team. Some training is included within the software package.

5) The Scanner App. A unique feature created for iPhones, this means there’s no need to buy a barcode scanner!

Why People Leave Vend

1) It doesn’t have as complex an inventory management system as competitors aimed at larger companies. If you want EPOS capable of really complex inventories on its own, Brightpearl could be one place to look. But if you have *really* complex inventory needs, you might want to look at inventory or warehousing softwares – and integrate with your EPOS. The good news is that Vend does integrate with some good software in this area.

2) It doesn’t have offline mode. For peace of mind, some retailers prefer systems which have offline mode, should the internet cut out. If that’s a must for you, check out Revel or Kounta systems.

3) It’s too expensive. Unfortunately, there’s a limited market for really cheap retail systems for people who have outgrown the “free pos” brands. If that’s you, but you want something cheaper, take a look at airpos – our opinion is that Vend is worth the extra money. 

4) You can’t sell items by weight. This is a toughie and most softwares don’t support this! Call us and ask what’s best if weighed item sales are important to your business.

Who chooses Vend?

The person who would benefit the most from Vend would be a one-to-ten store retailer interested in making their life a lot easier. The customer would need better inventory management than the cheaper systems could give them, but they’d also be keen to choose something more usable than the really complex systems out on the market. 

Only around a fifth of Vend’s customers are first-timers, but the first-timers are disproportionately likely to choose Vend Lite. Most Vend Lite customers eventually opt for Vend’s Pro offer. 

Vend Front-of-House Features

Payments

Vend integrates with a large number of payment processors. Remember, if you have a lower average transaction size (people spend less than £9 or so),you’re likely to be better off with a payment facilitator like iZettle, Square, or Sum Up. Other businesses could be better off with a traditional contract processor. (Understand which payment processing is best for you.) We recommend choosing payments after your software unless you already have a payment arrangement. Therefore, the takeaway, for now, is that Vend is well set up to let you take payments!

Selling Products

From a register point of view, a product awaiting sale can either be scanned via a barcode or selected manually from a folder system. Vend has a quick keys function designed to enable rapid sales of bestselling products. It’s also possible to add images to each category of item so that the staff member finds the product in your library intuitively and without mistakes. 

Because of a wide range of available integrated payments (explained further below), the price of the item should cue automatically on your card reader when you press “pay by card.” It’s possible to split payments via two-or-more different tenders. Or, it’s possible to park a sale with Vend – if a customer wishes to return to complete the purchase after a sudden interruption. 

Discounts & Returns

Discounts and returns are possible, as we’d expect from any EPOS. 

For returns, Vend can handle both exchanges and returns; including exchanges where the value of the newly chosen item is different from the value of the original item. Vend can also handle returns via “store credit”. It can also handle partial returns. Vend will also let you set up time-bound discounts which have a start and end date; these promotions can also be set to apply to certain customer sections and stores. 

If you go for Vend’s Pro plan, you can set up discounts such as buy-one-get-one-free or buy-one-get-one-half price. In Vend’s cheaper plans this isn’t available; but where all else fails, there are manual overrides to grant discounts available, and you can set staff permissions to ensure this isn’t abused. You can also easily set percentage discounts for individual items. 

However, it’s not possible to automatically set multibuy discounts through Vend; to operate a buy-one-get-one-free, or to set time-bound discounts such as sales. It’s also not subsequently possible to analyze the effects of those sales through your reporting features. Vend cannot handle buy-one-get-one-free discounts.

Fancy Stuff

It’s easy to build new products in Vend, including via the front-end. (You can also bulk import products – see “inventory management”). This can be controlled via your staff permissions. During this process, you can set things like tax levels on the products you’re selling. 

Because Vend is set-up with multi-store inventory management, it’s possible to identify that a product which is not in store X is available in store Y, and even to request a transfer.

What’s Missing? 

It’s not possible to sell items by weight, and there are some limitations around discounting – it’s not possible to plan a sale on a range and then monitor the effects of that sale, or to automate a “buy X get Y free” style of discounting. (It’s possible to work around this with a “composite products” feature). 

Also, there’s no offline mode with Vend, so you need to ensure you have a constant internet connection.

Vend Back Office: Inventory Management

 

Building Products 

If you have a .csv file, you can simply and intuitively upload that into Vend as your inventory. You can also export to .csv files at any time. Alternatively, it’s easy to build new products within Vend, and you can set images per product in your library to ensure your staff tap the right one quickly at check-out. 

Vend can handle complex products with dense levels of categorisations and attributes; for example, one of our printers, categorised by type / series / product and then tagged by OS requirement / connection type / colour could be handled by Vend; and the information about outgoing products would be logged, tracked, and searchable within inventory. Any item can support up to 20 tags/attributes.

Although Vend cannot generate SKUs, SKUs will be automatically tracked for every product. 

Inventory Homework Help

Vend also helps you do some of your homework; e.g. for an inventory count, you can download the scanner app to a smartphone and have the whole team adding items one-by-one (although you do have to use a single “device” – by which we mean tablet or laptop; and does require additional care to ensure you have not counted items multiple times). Vend will show you the level of stock shrinkage, although it is not possible to produce a report on the causes of stock shrinkage. 

Dealing with Suppliers

You can create a purchase order through Vend. 

Vend also enables you to set-up automatic ordering. For individual products, you can set reorder volumes and/or reorder amounts which will dictate the level of stock per product which triggers a reordering, and the amount of stock which you would then reorder. 

What it’s missing?

As you begin to get into the territory of logistics, we’d recommend looking at separate logistics and distribution software. These can track what product is going where, when. Vend does not denote exactly where each type of product is, sometimes known as inventory mapping. However, they do integrate with solutions which do – so it would be possible to get this set up with a Vend system. 

Read about what’s available in Inventory Management

 

Vend Back Office: Reporting

Vend’s reporting is set up for ease-of-use. It’s available via mobile as well as desktop and it can stream “real-time” data if you want to know what’s happening in your store right now. 

There’s a number of lenses which you can view your store’s data through with Vend. They include viewing performance by categories, collections, suppliers, throughput, staff performance, and comparisons between stores and tills. It’s not possible to draw comparisons by store geography or to view how sales have performed. With Vend, the timeframes are custom – you can set them any way you like. 

You can also create comparison tables to view your sales month-on-month in each area. 

Read about what’s available in Reporting

Vend Back-Office: Marketing & E-Commerce

Vend integrates with a range of e-commerce providers. That includes both open-source, such as WooCommerce, and hosted choices such as Shopify. (see “integrations” below). 

There’s a native CRM in Vend, which stands for “customer relationship management” – which essentially means it remembers your customers. That, in turn, enables features such as loyalty points, store credit, and memories of your customers’ favourite items, which you can use to give smart rewards to customers. It’s also possible to customise receipts to display discounts.

Read about marketing and e-commerce

 

Integrations with Vend

Integrations are when two softwares talk to each other.

In the above image ((which is a metaphor – those are the wrong plug fittings, for starters)) Vend is integrated with the accounting software Xero, the e-commerce platform Shopify, and Allied Irish Bank payments. What would this mean?

Well, the payment integration would mean that the details of a purchase being entered on the Vend display would cue on the card reader ready for the customer to pay. The accounting software integration would mean that every time a payment went through, the accounting software figures would adjust reflecting each new payment that had come through. The e-commerce platform integration would mean that when you sell online and in-store at the same time, your inventory figures go down at the same rate – because they’re pulling from the same inventory. There’s also complexer ways they might talk to each other across reporting functions – so you can compare your online store to your offline store.

The most important integration is probably payments,

Payment Integrations

A) iZettle, Square, Sum Up

B) Most contract payment processors via a payment application. 

C) What’s the difference?

An integration with your payment processor means that the item’s price will cue automatically on the card reader and that the correct size of purchase will be logged into your EPOS automatically when the purchase goes through. The alternative would be manually entering the purchase amount into the card reader each time; and manually entering the order into the EPOS separately. 

You don’t need to make a decision about between contract and pay-as-you-go until after you select your software. If you’d like an integration, there’s a comfortable amount of choice for payments when you choose Vend POS. They don’t foist “preferred providers” onto you, and their partners offer market-rate prices. 

Accounting Integrations

Quickbooks & Xero

Xero and Quickbooks are the two big accounting softwares that dominate the market. If you’re using one of these, then purchases that come through Vend will log automatically onto your accounting software. That means that your books will always be up-to-date! 

E-Commerce Integrations

• Airsquare
• BigCommerce
• Ecomdash
• Ecwid
• Rocketspark
• Shopify
• Stitch Labs
• Storbie
• Vortex
• WooCommerce

An integration between an e-commerce platform and your Vend EPOS system means a number of things. 

The first is your inventory management. If you’re trying to simultaneously sell the same stock online and in-store, it’s vital that these are kept up-to-date to prevent a situation where you’re trying to sell the final item twice. An integration means that your e-comm and your tills pull from the same data pool. 

The second is your reporting. It’s sensible to want to make meaningful comparisons between online and in-store. You can view which items are selling well in either category. 

E-commerce is a whole world with lots of different softwares and functions, so there may be other ways in which an integration could work. 

These integrations have all been built by Vend’s engineers themselves, which means we wouldn’t worry too much about third-party integrations having done a poor job; everything should work smoothly.

Delivery & Logistics

• Unleashed

When you have multiple stores, you may want to consider using delivery and logistics software. Whereas Vend’s native inventory management is focused solely on retail, Unleashed is designed to handle the complex supply chain problems we’d associate with distribution, wholesale, warehouses, and those kinds of questions. If you’d like to chat about this, ask us about inventory software.  

Scheduling 

• Reserva
• Timely

If you’re the kind of retailer where you need to schedule staff time slots; for example, a bicycle repair shop, you might want to consider Reserva or Timely, which both enable customers to book time slots. 

Staff Management

• Deputy

Deputy is designed for stores with large numbers of staff, and enables things like “shift swapping”, where your staff can trade their shifts without management having to keep track of everything. 

Complex Ecosystems

If you’re looking for a mature software ecosystem, StoreKit can advise on that too. Software hard-wires processes into your business. As you begin to grow and to introduce complexity into your business, you need more software to fit together properly. Talk to StoreKit today and we can talk you through your different options when it comes to retail software of all shapes and sizes.

Set-Up & Hardware

Vend is an internet (cloud) software, which requires constant internet access in order to work. It doesn’t come with offline mode; so we’d recommend choosing an iPad which can store a SIM, because that will enable to use a secondary internet via a “data” connection (like you would with a normal mobile phone contract) 

Vend is an iOS app – which means, unfortunately, you can’t use it on an Android or Windows tablet you may have. That means that the front-of-house features will work on any Apple device to which you can download an app. The back-end features are available via a web login. We have a dedicated microsite for all things Vend hardware: 

Or, to build a whole kit, use our kit builder. Alternatively, give us a call to see whether Vend is right for you.