Vend Reviews

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).

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Vend

Pros

Easy to use, has lots of functions that other software doesn't come with out of the box. A great start to get your business going. It looks clean and the UI is the nicest looking one so far we've seen. They have a free front display app for a second ipad so you can have a customer facing screen.

Cons

Lacking crucial functions to actually run a business. No real reporting, often system goes down. The system lacks any mass editing features unless you export the database into csv and re import it. Not efficient if you need to adjust tags in large batches because the exported CSV file, all the tags are in a single cell.

The system lacks stability, we have been using this system for more than a year and it's been going down on crucial moments. Right now the system is slow to sync to Vend server causing sales screen and transaction not to be processed. This has costed us many sales specially at crucial times.

Their customer service is great, nice and friendly but virtually useless. Not once has any of our issues been resolved. It was either an issue that resolved itself over time I guess they fixed it on their back end or we have learned to just live with it.

You have to pay for individual cashiers. So if we were to want to do an event and have an additional cashier it would cost a lot more than what it's worth to have an additional cashier.

Reporting is very basic. If you need numbers that for example compare data points of last week's sales vs this weeks sales by day vs by hour to know which day of the week is your strong day and which hour of the day is your peak you can't do it. Unless you do everyone stat as an individual data pull then you can get the stats but there is no clean visual display to arrange the data neatly so more work is to be done.

Very simple reporting such as what do we have in our inventory of type A vs Type B to know what we're lacking in inventory is a many step process to pull which results in more work.

Pros

Vend/X-Series has some really great features, though they are very generic. This poses some complications for a specialty store such as ours, but we've developed lots of workaround in place of actual support. Vend is a great platform if you have some experience with inventory management, and a great tool to learn how to do that effectively.

Cons

Even before they were bought by Lightspeed, Vend seemed to lack comprehension of what kinds of stores there are out there. It is very obviously a platform developed by a tech company, not retail experts. They are always working on new, innovative features that are 100% useless, but the core product they've developed and continue to maintain speaks for itself and is delightfully robust.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Vend

Pros

It's simple to setup and if you have any questions, you can usually call customer supports who pick up pretty quickly. This product will help you conduct transactions, manage inventory, and set promotions. I'm sure there are more features, but those were the ones I mostly use, and so far I have not encountered any major issues.

Cons

I wish there were more options on payment services than just Vantiv. Also, since this is cloud base, it will take a while for all your products to sync. For instance, if you're uploading new product and plan to do a count, I'd suggest waiting about 5 minutes for the upload to be completed before setting up the inventory counts to be safe.

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!

Pros

I absolutely love the multi-store functionality of Vend. We used to have to create multiple transfers because our previous software was not cloud based and did not communicate between stores. It was a huge headache to manage two completely separate inventories. Vend solved this problem and cut our work load in half. Our inventory counts are now far more accurate and easy to facilitate.

The interface is extremely user friendly, and new employees typically need very minimal training to become proficient completing transactions. The reporting is absolutely fantastic and thorough. The thorough reporting has allowed us to order product far more efficiently and accurately than before.

The price is reasonable, the customer support is fantastic.

Cons

I really can't think of much negative to say about Vend. We have had a great experience with Vend, and all of the issues that we have had were successfully resolved in short order by the outstanding on-boarding and support teams.

Pros

The ease in setting up an online store and having the actual inventory be available is amazing. Being able to set if you want items available online or not is a plus, as being able to set a product with unlimited inventory so that it is still available to order online, even if you physically sell out of the item. This is great for quick to order in products.

Cons

It would be nice to have better integration between my POS system on the iPad, so that I could use a receipt printer and auto-cash drawer without using a PC setup.

Pros

Vend is easy to get going, but has a learning curve. It has a design that is geared towards more specialty retail with lower volume sales. Installed in a resale clothing store, and it worked great, it has multiple picture features and offer integration with ecommerce. The level of options is great for stores like clothing, toy stores, hobby shops, etc.

Cons

The user register screen was hard to get us too. Its not layout in a standard cash register layout. Their was no use of a virtual number keypad. Which is hard to get use too. There are work arounds for it. They really need to redo the user register interface to be more streamlined.

Pros

We used this for a small retail clothing store. It was managed remotely and easily updated within the shop. It was easy to see analytics for sales

Cons

Our CC processor wasn't accepted at the time, so we had to input our credit card sales manually. This was a hassle but was eventually fixed.

Pros

It is easy to use how ever with a very limited functionality offered.

Cons

We subscribed to vend approximately a year ago when we had 2 shops and not very many sku, the system worked great and although few issues for which customer service was never really helpful we were able to manage and circumvent.   The issues started to build when our shops and sku started to increase, it was at this point we started to use there import and export functionality to mass upload data. Unknown to us at that time we started to see huge inventory issues within shops, from stock figures constantly being wrong to stock transfers always being incorrect. Upon investigation we found bugs when uploading re order level and qty, the system would automatically delete and add stock, we reported this issue to vend 6 months ago, they then came back to us with a solution   “ to manually edit 2000 sku across 20 stores whilst they resolve the issue”  It has now been 6 months vend has still not resolved the issue, there is no way we can manage to edit as per there solution needless to say we have had to build a complete off line solution to manage our inventory which is a core feature for why we purchased vend in the first place.  We are now urgently looking for alternatives as this has impeded our growth caused customers to walk away due to non stock items and will cause us a huge cost in technology change across 20 stores . I strongly recommend anyone taking vend to test the system robustly, above is just one of many unresolved issues 20 stores .

Pros

Front end is clean and simple for employees to use. Fine for a very small or beginning business.

Cons

Reporting functions are terrible. System was not designed by anyone with any understanding of accounting or running a B&M retail business. Only capable of working for a very small retail business.

Pros

Great customer support, they are there for you with the answers to all of the "problems" that i have had quickly and ready to fix it

Cons

The few problems that i have had were all update related, either of the vend program or the IOS version, in those cases the updates were not known to me and in some cases one or the other did not communicate well after the updates. It would be nice to know of potential problems ahead of time rather to be in the middle of a transaction and have to start the troubleshooting process, or have to wait for the update during peak selling time rather than knowing beforehand to take care of the problem during down time.

Pros

The Inventory Management system is leaps and bounds above other POS systems we've look at. This is by far the main driver behind why we selected Vend as our POS system for our Cigar Store. Our small retail store can easily hold 10,000+ SKUs and we needed a system that could easily manage that. The reporting system is also very robust allowing us to quickly produce reports, or export data to allow us to measure sales trends, and make informed buying decisions.

Cons

There are some limits to the loyalty system and discount aspects, however they have improved consistently with regular updates. We have a VIP Club system and I'd like to have a higher loyalty tier system for them, however there isn't a universal way to do that.

Pros

We've been using the Vend POS system for just over a year and recently upgraded to Vend Ecommerce (integrating our website/online store with our POS system). We're really happy with both systems; the POS is very intuitive and training of our staff, even those without any POS experience, was a breeze. The Ecommerce solution saves us a lot of time and effort (and eliminates the possibility of errors in pricing) as we now only need to enter/ammend product info in one database to keep our records all up to date.

From a service POV Vend's team are fantastic. They respond quickly (usually within a matter of minutes) to any tickets we submit thru their online service center, and the staff always follow up to make sure whatever issues we raised are resolved. When we set up the Ecommerce system, they provided several sessions of personal, live training over the phone and skype which enabled us to create a new website from scratch, even though we had no prior experience in doing so.

Being a cloud based solution also gives us a lot of flexibility - we can process sales or access our backend thru laptops, iPads and even our phones. We also necer need to worry about backing up or losing our data.

Cons

Being a standardized solution, the Ecommerce platform doesn't yet have all the features you would get with a custom designed website/online store. However the cost is a small fraction of what you would pay for a customized site.

Pros

It has all the bells and whistles when it comes to setting up your retail store. It allows more than one register and many users.

Cons

The inventory management was terrible. I had one brick and mortar and an online store and the inventory was constantly off. Also you have to pay extra for customer support if you need to call and solve a problem immediately (register not working during business hours etc.)

Pros

The reports are easily accessible, I like the quick keys for the register, is easy for training. I like the daily sales ledger to show sales by associates and also easy for returns also. Daily totals during the day are nice to see where you are in sales also.

Cons

Putting in products and variance are a little confusing. I also think inventory could be easier in the software.

Pros

it's easy to use, has a very small learning curve and the ability to quickly complete many functions in relative short order. The customizability is is pretty good but does have some limitations.

Cons

Vend does not always report correct values or numbers, because it it always being updated new glitches and bugs can be introduced causing havoc for your day. I found out that when you close (Delete) an outlet that it deletes all attached reports other than the historical sales, so unless you back them all up they're gone forever, I feel like this is a huge issue for vend as these reports can be vital to have if your subject to audit like we are. While customer service is great I rarely get the answers that i'm needing or a solution for my problem.

Pros

Easy to train new employees on the POS. It's integration with Shopify, Deputy and Square. Clean and pro looking (would like to be able to customize it more for my shops character).

Cons

I don't like that I have to activate the scanner, it really slows things down. The label making software is not very adjustable, and it makes it difficult for the scanner to read. No pictures for variants.

Pros

It integrates well with Xero our accounting software. It is very user friendly and easy to learn how to use.

Cons

The stock order process is very time consuming and cumbersome. I would like to be able to adjust the date on stock orders, so that it can be matched to the invoice/payment date in the event that the stock order is not received in VEND until after the invoice/payment date. Also it allows you to receive items that have been marked as inactive, it should pop up to make them as active again.
When scanning product through, unless you are watching the screen, you can't tell when a product scans up with an error/bar code not in the system etc, the beep tone needs to be different.
I wish it was integrated with Moneris merchant services.
It would also be nice to be able to have more control over what users have access to more individually.

Pros

It is fairly simple to learn and use on a daily basis. It can handle a lot of SKUs. The customer phone support is very good. It integrates with our online store that uses Shopify.

Cons

It doesn't sort sales by payment method. We cannot get all of the historical reports that we would like to access. It is not easy to print reports directly from Vend.

Pros

It's really so natural to utilize, and preparing new colleagues requires just minutes, as the plan of the framework is instinctive and very thoroughly examined

Cons

VEND has a hearty contribution of elements and functionalities; however very much like any other software, there's no "great" answer for all organizations. To begin, Vend is certainly not an across the board POS arrangement. Since it's appropriate for retail organizations, it doesn't have fundamental elements for organizations in the food business to deal with their tasks, for example, endlessly table side requesting, custom menu and floor plans, and full-administration or quick relaxed administration.

Pros

Great cost effective software for our retail business. Our associates find it easy to use and has regular updates that are easy to implement.

Cons

Needs more enterprise like features for the back-end inventory management. Some more mobile functionality with payment options would be better.

Pros

I love the ease of use and user-friendliness. Overall a great program that I definitely recommend to other retailers!

Cons

Honestly I just wish that sales could communicate between the Vend program and my Shopify online store that is integrated? Though it's not a big deal as it's very easy to run sales in the online store through Shopify, so it's not the end of the world.

Pros

We originally went looking for a full-featured POS software and found them we originally went looking for a full-featured POS software and found VEND. Imagine or surprise to find a cloud-based solution where everything from inventory to reporting is seamless and integrated.

Cons

About the only feature it is missing and we wished it had is serial number capability for tracking by item.