Vend POS Reviews: UK Fees & Pricing

Vend is a point-of-sale (POS) system that helps businesses manage their sales, inventory, and customer interactions. The system is installed on a device (usually a tablet), and both you and your workers can use it to manage the store and the products.

The system comes with inventory management features, accounting capabilities, sales incentives, and plenty of other useful features that we’ll go over below.

Features

Due to the vast number of useful features, we divided them into several categories.

General

Operating System – Vend can be installed on any operating system. Regardless if you’re using an iPad, an Android tablet, or a device that runs on Windows, the installation process is the same on any device. Log onto your Vend account through the device, and simply download and install the system through the instructions provided on the site. 

Online and Offline – The Vend software processes all of the payments and product orders on the tablet, but all of the data on these transactions is stored on the cloud. Offline the software works exactly the same as online, however, the data on the transactions won’t be uploaded and backed up on the cloud until you have an internet connection again.

Vend Display – The Vend display shows a lot of features on your screen, but they’re all large displays that are clearly marked and easy to find. You can also change the number of features that you’re shown, the exact features that appear, and a few other things that might make things easier to navigate.

Notes Feature – You and your employees can take notes on your devices that are easy to store and find. Notes can also be made exclusive to a single account, or stored in a charred folder or common location where everyone can access and read them. You can write down everything from the spending habits of certain customers, to any issues that you might have with your products so that you can correct them.

Automated Tasks – A lot of the features on the Vend system can be automated so that you can delegate the more menial tasks and focus on the ones that require a more hands-on approach. The generation of certain reports, inventory tracking, and tax adjustments are all good examples of tasks that can be automated. Certain factors can also be adjusted when the automatic processes run so that the task in question is performed as close to your specifications as possible.

User Accounts and Permissions – All of your employees will be given their own user accounts. All of the accounts can be made password protected so that only one employee can ever access them. However, you’ll be granted administrator privileges, so you’ll be able to access all of your employee accounts and make any changes if necessary. You’ll also be able to add as many accounts as you want, assign each account to a certain device, give certain employees more permissions to the system than others, and do much more.

Customer Profiles – Similarly to the user accounts, customer accounts are another feature that you can add to your system. This will allow you to store the data of certain customers in your system and retrieve it whenever you need to. The data will show the products that they’ve bought in the past, suggest new products based on those past purchases, and make the payment process proceed much more smoothly.

If a customer has an account in your system, then they probably already have their payment details stored. Instead of having to manually scan any cards or input payment details, all you need to do is select one of the already used payment methods, and the payment simply needs to be confirmed before it can be processed.

Customer Groups – You’ll be able to create custom groups for all of your customers by placing tags on their accounts. The customers can be sorted any way that you see fit, and you can sort them by everything from past purchases to average spending budget. These groups will tell you a bit more about which products should be marketed to which groups in order to get the most potential interest.

Custom Reports – Regardless of which stats you want to look up, Vend lets you generate as many reports as you want. These include your most popular products, the number of sales you’ve generated on a certain day, the number of sales that you average per week, and so on. The reports can be based on a certain time frame, product, price, and many other factors.

Email Marketing – The Vend service comes with an email feature that you can use in order to craft both custom emails and email templates. You can then use this info to send out an email about any sales, discounts, or new products that you have in your shop.

App Integrations – Several third-party apps can be added to your POS system and your device, and they can help you with all aspects of your business. The most popular and helpful apps of the bunch would probably have to be the accounting apps like Xero, Quickbooks Online, MYOB, or AccountsPortal.

These apps will make accounting much easier by organising your payments, calculating taxes, managing your bills, and doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the financial aspect of your business.

Support – Vend has a support team ready to answer any questions that you might have about the system. The services are available through both live chat and email, and they’re open all days of the week 24 hours a day. Aside from questions, they’ll also try and help you through any issues that you might be having, as well as assist you in the very setup of the system itself.

There’s also a Vend University where you can sign-up and attend exclusive on-demand courses hosted by Vend experts. These courses will give you a much better grasp of how all of the features work, and help you get on your way to achieving success through the system.

Sales

Discounts and Coupons – You can create custom discount rates and coupons and give them out to your customers. The discounts can either be flat rates or percentages, and they can be applied to any item online or in-store. The coupons can also be adjusted to include or exclude certain items or be universal price reductions to any product that you might be selling.

You can adjust the prices and the amounts however you want, and you can also add time restrictions on both. You can set the discounts to be automatically removed at a certain date, and you can add expiration dates to your coupons so that customers are incentivised to take advantage of them in a certain timeframe.

Gift Cards – Issuing gift cards is another good way to gain some repeat customers, while also generating revenue. Similarly to the discounts and coupons, the gift cards can be used both online and in-store. They can also be for any sum, percentage, or item that you want them to be. They’re a good way to get rid of inventory that might not otherwise be selling, as well as promote items that you might want to draw people’s attention to.

Custom Receipts – Add your logo and website URL to your receipts. All you need to do is use the customisation feature to choose the location and the size of the logo, as well as the location and the font for the URL. Once a template exists, you can then set all of your receipts to be printed on it. It’s an incredibly easy process, but surprisingly effective at getting people’s attention and gaining you some repeat customers.

Split Payments – Any receipt with more than at least 2 items can be split in two. If your customers decide that they would like to pay for their items separately, then you can simply select the items in question and separate them however they want. The customers will be able to tell you which items should go on which receipt and all you or your workers need to do is select the items in question and print out two or more receipts.

Refunds – You can also process refunds by simply scanning in the receipt of the product, and it’ll automatically be entered back into the system and the money will be subtracted from your reports so that everything is kept organised.

If the customer doesn’t have the receipt, you can still manually enter the items back into the system and the same thing will happen, although it’s a bit more work than simply scanning a bar code. Additionally, you can also add expiration dates on all of your receipts so that your customers know the deadline for returning any products. You can also add disclaimers that say you can choose which items you refund so that you’re covered in case of damaged merchandise.

Store Credit – Instead of getting their money back, you can choose to give your customers store credit. Depending on the refund they get, they’ll have a certain amount of money transferred to the account that they have in your store to spend on any item either online or in-store. If they don’t have an account and the refund is in-store, it’s always possible to use the money there and then.

Upsell and Cross-sell – Both of these terms essentially mean that you can offer your customers products that complement or go with the product that they just bought, while upselling means that you can offer them upgrades to the products that they’ve bought.

The distinction between the two categories of items starts to blur at a certain point, but the important thing is that your customers will get suggestions that directly relate to their purchases, which might encourage them to make additional purchases.

Credit and Debit Cards – While cash payments are obviously accepted, the system is also capable of processing credit and debit cards from all over the world. The major players like Visa and Mastercard are obviously included in this lineup, but there’s no mention of any specific cards that can be used or any exceptions that can’t be processed through the system.

Mobile and Contactless Payments – Most of the major mobile and contactless payment options are viable on the Vend system. This included Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more. You’ll also be able to integrate certain payment options directly into your system to expedite the payment process. Vend draws particular attention to their Lightspeed integration option, but you can also add services like PayPal, Smartpay, Square, and so on.

Split and Delayed Payments – If customers aren’t able to pay for a certain product at once, then they’ll be given the option to either delay or split their payment. You’ll be able to choose the maximum number of days weeks or months that a payment can be delayed by, and you’ll also be able to pick the maximum number of instalments that a payment can be split into.

This feature is primarily used for more expensive items that can’t generally be paid off at once, but you can add this option to any and all products that you stock.

Customisable Taxes – Unfortunately, “customisable taxes” doesn’t mean that you can lower them however you want. However, what you can do is adjust the tax rates on all of your items to match the country or state that you’re operating in. This will allow you to set different taxes for different locations and always have your items sold for the correct estimate in each country or state.

You’ll also be able to set specific tax rates for different item categories. This way, the items will automatically receive a certain tax based on whether they’re in the food category, the luxuries category, and so on. All of this makes accounting much easier as you won’t have to calculate separate tax margins after selling an item and the correct price will always appear on your reports.

Inventory Management and Reports

Quick Keys – Products can be assigned to specific keys or tabs on your tablet so that you can open them more quickly. This will allow you and your workers to quickly add or open certain popular items and significantly speed up the transaction process. Any item can be put under a quick key, and you can set as many of them as you want. The size of the quick keys is also adjustable, so you can fit as many as you want on one screen.

Barcodes and Labels – Adding a product to your inventory is as easy as scanning the barcode. Once the barcode is scanned, you simply need to assign a label to the product in question. Similar products from the same distributor usually share a barcode, so once one barcode is in the system, the next product with the same bar code will automatically be added to the same category in your inventory.

The products will automatically be added once they’re scanned, but you can also scan the same item several times.

Automated Management – Once all of your products have been entered into inventory, the system will automatically keep track of them for you. Each purchase will automatically remove a certain product from the inventory and the number will adjust itself. The same thing happens when you scan in new items – the number in your inventory will increase proportionally.

Multiple Sell Points – Depending on how many sell points you have, you can adjust your inventory accordingly. You can distribute your products however you want among your multiple stores, and you simply need to make sure that your counts are correct once you take inventory for the first time.

As we already mentioned, the system keeps track of the numbers for you, so as long as you correctly add the number of products that you have in each store, you should always know how much of what you still have in stock.

You’ll also be able to designate which items are sold in which stores, and which products are exclusively for online selling and in-store selling.

Multiple Locations and Warehouses – Similarly to the stores, the inventory in your warehouses needs to be counted up properly when the products are bought, and you don’t really need to know about anything else after that. However, when it comes to your warehouses, you can make manual adjustments to the numbers if you ship a product to your stores or if you transfer an item from one warehouse to another.

The automatic product tracking will keep track of the numbers for you, so as long as you enter the exact numbers when you make any such transfers, your products will all be accounted for.

Product and Customer Search – All of your products and all of their relevant info will automatically appear on your screen once you scan the barcode. You can also find them based on the assigned label or the keyword that you put them under.

In a similar manner, you can also find customer accounts by simply inputting their username into the search bar. Alternatively, you can find your customers based on the email address that they used for their account, or their phone number.

Automatic Reorders – Much like a lot of processes, product reordering can also be automated. Since the system keeps track of your inventory and the number of each product, you simply need to set a minimum number that the items can be reduced to. Once the number is reached, a reorder request is automatically generated and it’ll be displayed on your dashboard where you can approve it and then send it out.

You can adjust the request even after it’s generated in case you want to make an adjustment from your normal order. You’ll also be able to choose which products get automated reorder requests, the order amount for each product, and so on.

Cash Management – Once a transaction has been made, the payment is registered and the cash automatically gets tallied up in the daily total. Even if you or your employees make a mistake when it comes to handling the cash itself, the system still has a record of the exact amount that should be in the register, so you never have to worry about making a mistake. The sum is also automatically reduced if you give a customer a cash refund on a product.

Closure Reports – The system automatically generates daily register closure summaries, sales history reports, confirm payments, and many other reports. You can print these reports out, view them directly on your device, or even have them sent to your phone every day. The system also checks for discrepancies like inventory numbers that don’t align, if the cash in the register doesn’t align with the sales of that day, and so on.

Prices/Fees

All of the plans Vend offers come with 1 included register. This means that the installation on the first device is covered by the plan. You do have the ability to add the system to additional devices, although it’s not made clear if that comes with a fee or how high that fee might be.

Lean

The lean plan will cost you $139 on a monthly billing plan, or $119 on an annual billing plan. 

That will get you access to the Retail POS (X-Series), the Lightspeed payment system integration, 24/7 customer support, API access, and a dedicated account manager. The dedicated account manager is probably the best resource that you get access to since they can help you figure out the system and how best to utilise it for your business.

Standard

The Standard plan is $169 if billed annually, and $199 if you’re on the monthly billing plan.

This plan comes with all of the perks from the previous plan, as well as the option to integrate third-party accounting systems like Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB to your system. You can also connect to eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, and others.

Advanced

The Advanced has an annual billing option that’ll cost you $249 a year, as well as a monthly billing option that’ll cost you $319.

The final plan comes with all of the perks from the previous two plans, as well as a loyalty plan for your customers, advanced reporting options, and the Lightspeed payment integration serialisation feature.

Payment Options

As we’ve already mentioned, Vend allows you to accept payments through cash and most credit and debit cards.

Online payment systems can also be integrated into the system, but each third party payment option has its own transaction fee per purchase.

Vend is actually in a partnership with Lightspeed Payments so this particular payment integration comes with the most perks.

There are no monthly minimum transactions, and there’s a predictable flat-rate pricing model. You also get:

• Card Present Rates: 2.6% + $0.10
• Card Not Present Rates: 2.9% + $0.30
• Preferential software rates

Company Background

Vend is a relatively new company that was started in 2010 with the goal to help retailers modernise their business by enhancing the efficiency of various retail operations and providing tools to manage various aspects of their business.

Vend joined Lightspeed in 2021 and the partnership has led to the introduction of new helpful features to the POS system.

User Reviews

Vend got 4.5 out of 5 stars on PCMag and the reviews praise the compatibility with all operating systems and the 24/7 customer support.

Merchant Maverick gives Vend 4 out of 5 stars, with the negatives being the expensive monthly cost and the lack of built-in eCommerce capabilities.

TechRadar gives Vend another 4.5 out of 5 stars and mentions that the compatibility with multi-outlet stores and the ease of use are some of the best points of the system.