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Vend
What Is Vend?
Vend is cloud-based point of sale software designed for retailers to sell, measure, manage and grow their business. Retailers in over 20,000 stores use Vend to accept payments, track customers, manage inventory and run business analytics for real-time insights into business performance. Vend gives retailers access to tools more powerful and intuitive than enterprise systems, at a fraction of the cost.
Who Uses Vend?
Fashion & Accessories, Home Furnishings & Furniture, Gift Stores, Sports, Hobbies & Music, Specialty Food & Beverage Retail, Health & Beauty Retail and Electronic & Computer.
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Reviews of Vend
After 2 Years Working with Vend, We are extremely satisfied. It has added value to our business.
Comments: Vend is a POS Platform that has helped us run our business smoothly. We love the ease of configuration and customization that is available. Looking forward to our growth expansion, we have concluded that we have made a right selection for a POS platform. It is a basically a Plug & Play installation for a new site with minor issues for a start up new store once you have your business running under Vend.
Pros:
Pros: Intuitive interface. Most of our users are able to adapt in a few days. Reporting Structure is Good. We can replicate a site basically in few minutes. Only Online Software that actually complied with Regulatory Fiscal requirements with no additional customization. Cons: Which it could have more apps available for integration(Mobile Apps) and hospitality configurations. . Lack of Business Intelligence Interfaces.
Cons:
Lack of application Integration with third parties. Even though I find Vend very functional, I would like to see vend have payments gateways integrated in our region or country (Honduras, Central America).
Lightspeed Response
5 years ago
Hey Daniel, appreciate you taking the time to leave a review of Vend. Great to hear that you are extremely satisfied with using Vend and that it's added value to your business. That is the type of feedback we love to hear from retailers! If you have any integration suggestions that you'd like to see please reach out to our team and let us know - your feedback is valuable to us. Best, Lucia (Vend's Community Manager)
Alternatives Considered:
Perfect App
Comments: Amazing Experience with more than 2 years with a lot of updates and perfect customer service.
Pros:
The software easy to use, anyone can use it even a person not educated, I had 2 salesman in my shop the was using it for 2 years and more. The monthly report very accurate and helpful for our company to easy calculate our monthly income statement. Tracking our COGS anytime so we can control our purchases. the inventory stock tracking perfect. Option with no tax good for our country because we don't have a taxes. Tracking my sales anywhere online by my phone a good features.
Cons:
The monthly subscription fees little expensive specially for the small businesses/Home Businesses. So I recommend to have a plan customized for a small business with a low price kind of support them. Adding Arabic Language maybe will be a good idea and catching new users.
What a P. O. S.!
Comments: Horrible, we have had nothing but trouble. Yes it's better for us in some ways than our prior POS, but at such a great cost of effort that we would never recommend it to anyone and constantly are on the look out for a better POS! We are implementing scanners to help fix inventory issues, as it is though I do not trust their inventory correction system and we use spreadsheets and the purchasing/returning system instead of the inventory count system. Often if the product is the same price I will use a sale entry to swap the two, but we have noticed items we knowingly sold (with sku'd tags) that still show up as on hand, so I'm not sure there isn't more wrong with this system. In other words, it can't all be from 3 people making mistakes in one system when we all discuss and get frustrated by it on a daily basis!
Pros:
Ecwid integrates seamlessly with vend. I wish we could use Ecwid as our main POS instead of Vend, but it is only a website shopping cart plugin or tablet app, and we need something that runs on a PC. We don't like Apple products, and wanted a PC interface instead of a tablet, due to our volume of products.
Cons:
1. The cloud sync isn't accurate. Their database will overwrite changes a users makes if your internet isn't "fast" enough AND you have to clear site settings daily or hourly (depends on volume). 2. The reporting and ordering functionality is limited to your Excel skills. Advanced Excel knowledge is a must: Pivot tables, vlookup formulas, concatenate, lots of files to save and track. You cannot do this through the system easily UNLESS you order the same product from the same vendor every time, lucky you! 3.The product export actually can come in handy when the system goes down on Vend's end, because when it goes offline, the only way to find a product in the sell screen is by SKU (so know your SKUS!) 4. This is one of the only POS's that doesn't have both a UPS and SKU field! Duh guys, this is a POS 101 feature! 5. You can't do a mass upload to change products like they say you can. I've tried it multiple times. It has never worked. 6. When you create a product, it creates a "handle" based on the name you created, so don't make any mistakes when you create a product or it will permanently impact the handle of that product. 7. Their search feature is a 3rd party provided feature, which fails to provide any results unless it is an exact match. For example, a product named TFV16 will not populate when you search V16, or vice versa. It's an exact match (word order, spelling, exact!) 8. My staff can't use the program, our inventory is a mess due to difficult contrast, laging!
Alternatives Considered:
The most atrocious app support I have ever faced
Comments: Bad.
Pros:
Vend has one of the most easy to use cloud point of sale that I have tried and tested over the years. As a business owner, Vend has been useful for my day to day work.
Cons:
The customer support team is atrocious. I have been trying to speak to someone from the Vend support team since 24th April due to some billing issues that could have been easily resolved in 1 or 2 days. Up until now, the issue is not solved and no one has responded to me on this issue. Speaking to the live chat guy and he kept me waiting for over 3 hours with no reply when he told me that he will be transferring me over to the billing time for assistance. Emails went unanswered and the support team even closed the ticket without giving me a reply or resolution to the problem. I'm not so sure that Vend is a system that caters to the small and medium business owners because we business owners and managers, we don't have all the time in the world to be waiting for your reply and chasing you for answers. I will definitely not recommend that anyone takes up this system unless you think you are ready to work with a support team that does not attend to you when help is needed.
Great cloud based software. Very friendly for businesses looking to grow.
Comments: Better overall control of my entire retail business and its 5 locations. Vend should consider adding time clock functions for users to clock in and out, and to create new sales information from those users like sales per hour, etc.
Pros:
Inventory tracking features. Being able to see all outlets inventory at the same time. Inventory transfers are very intuitive and easy to perform, same with stock orders.
Cons:
Pricing and sale discount features aren't easy to apply for a membership type of system. Updating Price Books is a hassle as its current layout for each price book is not easy to navigate if one product's price needs to be changed inside of a price book with hundreds of products.
Lightspeed Response
5 years ago
Hey there, thanks for your review of Vend POS. We agree Vend's the best point of sale for businesses looking to grow! If you're wanting to add extra staff management functionality, check out the Vend + Deputy integration. Deputy is a cloud based all-in-one employee scheduling, time & attendance, tasking and communication platform that you can connect to Vend for greater insight on sales trends and labor metrics. You can also use Deputy to schedule staff based on Vend sales data, report on staff wage vs sales percentage to optimize team performance, and the Deputy iPad kiosk for clock in/out is the perfect companion for Vend iPad app. You can find out more about that here www.vendhq.com/product-add-ons. For running discounts we suggest using Vend's new Promotion features, which will save you time, let you easily customize your offers, and help you move inventory. You can find out more here:www.vendhq.com/whats-new-in-vend/vend-promotions. Best, Lucia (Vend's Community Manager
