Clover POS Review

Clover POS is a popular point-of-sale (POS) system suitable for various small businesses. It offers tools for inventory management, loyalty, reporting, and ecommerce, as well as the ability to program other payment services into the system. There is a range of subscription levels for different industries, and every Clover plan gets you a combined software and hardware bundle.

Complex pricing and limitations in some of Clover’s management features prevented it from earning a higher score in our evaluation of the best POS software.

Overview

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Is Clover Right for You?

Clover is a flexible POS system with a broad set of tools suitable for various industries, as well as lots of hardware options.

When to Use Clover POS

• Businesses seeking an alternative to Square
• Businesses preferring proprietary hardware options
• Businesses wanting mobility and flexibility with both hardware and software

When to Use an Alternative

• If you have no preferred merchant account
• If you have a large volume of fast-moving inventory
• If you prefer to use your own devices rather than proprietary hardware

Clover POS Alternatives

Our Comparisons of Clover vs Other Software

• Clover vs Square
• Clover Alternatives & Competitors

Clover POS User Reviews

Many users appreciated the proprietary hardware, which comes in many forms from card readers and mobile POS systems to full-fledged countertop systems.

However, the price structure can be confusing. Many users said that they had to sign up for a few third-party integrations to access additional tools—something that could easily alarm anyone working on a budget, or who just wants to know that they have access to a full set of POS tools right off the bat. Clover also does not currently support inventory images, which other POS systems do, so this software falls behind in that area.

Here’s how Clover scored on a few third-party review sites:

• Capterra^[1]: 3.9 out of 5; over 490 reviews
• G2^[2]: 3.8 out of 5; over 80 reviews
• Finances Online^[3]: 4.6 out of 5; over 25 reviews
• Apple App Store^[4]: 4.9 out of 5; over 48,000 reviews
• Google Play Store^[5]: 4.5 out of 5; over 5,000 reviews

Clover’s pricing scheme is complex compared to other POS providers. While the Starter subscription plan is quite attractive, some features that require add-on costs and flat-rate transaction fees can quickly eat away at your revenue. Also, note that Clover has little control over resellers’ prices and set terms of use, so these many options can be overwhelming for those who are not familiar with Clover.

Clover offers industry-specific subscriptions that we’ll cover below. It also has a Payments plan with no monthly fees that lets you accept payments via cards, cash, and digital wallets like Venmo and PayPal. You can accept these payments by purchasing a Clover Go handheld card reader ($49) and connecting this to your smartphone. You can also use other Clover devices or no device at all—just your computer.

With the Payments plan, you can also set up invoicing and recurring payments, generate basic sales reports, and access some staff management features. However, you can’t perform order management, track items, or connect to an existing online store (you can build a new online store with an add-on, though). If you just want to process payments and don’t need a ton of business management tools, the Payments plan can work for you.

Clover’s other subscription plans will depend both on your business type, and the proprietary hardware you choose to get. Within each subscription plan are software plans with functionalities varying based on the hardware. Thus, the price of your system will be a combination of these factors, which can easily get confusing.

Prices for Retail & Professional Services Businesses

Prices for Restaurants

Notice that the monthly subscription plan determines the software plan and payment processing rates. Choose a monthly subscription and note the available hardware for each.

Clover Hardware

You can purchase Clover hardware from Fiserv, Amazon, or any of over 3,000 resellers—which may give you a better price. Some may even lease the hardware, though we do not recommend this.

Clover Payment Processing

Fiserv, one of the largest merchant services companies in the world, owns Clover. However, it allows other merchant services to resell the POS system. It lists more than 60 approved resellers on its website, but you can find Clover systems elsewhere, even on Amazon. They all use Fiserv as their backend payment processor but can impose their own terms and pricing.

This means you may be able to find more equitable payment processing rates and cheaper hardware—or you may find yourself in a bad deal. Fiserv has a list of trusted resellers but does not monitor them all. Do your research to find the most reputable merchant service.

Regardless, the software remains the same. As long as your reseller can process the payments, you can accept credit, debit, gift cards, and contactless payments like Apple Pay

That said, Clover’s default payment processing fees (with Fiserv) are listed as follows:

• For retail and services: 2.3% + 10 cents to 2.6% + 10 cents per card-present transaction, and 3.5% + 10 cents per card-not-present transaction
• For restaurants: 2.3% + 10 cents per card-present transaction and 3.5% + 10 cents per card-not-present transaction

Virtual Terminal

If you prefer not to use Clover hardware, you can sign up for a Clover merchant account and use the virtual terminal to start accepting payments over the phone, in person, or with an invoice. It comes with end-to-end encryption to meet PCI compliance and is preloaded with your Clover dashboard.

Clover Virtual Terminal monthly fee: Free 90-day trial, and then $14.95/month; 3.5% + 10 cents keyed-in rate (Fiserv)

New Features

• Multiple service charges: Merchants using Clover POS can now add multiple service charges to an existing order. You can implement separate service charges for each line item in a single order instead of a single service charge. This makes it easier to calculate and review service charges for your offerings and can help boost profits. Note that not all merchants will gain access to this feature at the same time.
• New daily limit for unmatched refunds: Unmatched refunds are refunds not associated with a completed customer order or sale. Clover software now includes a safeguard feature: if the total refund amount exceeds a specific limit, the system will decline the transfer. Merchants can increase this limit, but they’ll need to contact Clover Support to do so.
• Clover Kiosk: Clover now offers a self-service kiosk for restaurants. The device includes a large touch-screen display; a payment terminal for contactless, chip, swipe, and debit PIN payments; a thermal receipt printer; and syncs with your POS and Kitchen Display System.

Overall, Clover is an intuitive, versatile, and feature-rich system, offering several configurations and add-ons to quickly streamline your checkout process and improve customer experience. It allows you to ring up sales, run taxes automatically, input (or suggest) gratuities, program discounts by the hour or time of day (e.g., Happy Hour), and apply service or delivery charges automatically.

Many of these features are available with the basic paid plans, but note that some features are paid add-ons.

Here are a few things you can do with a Clover register:

• Accept swipe, dip, or tap payments using credit and debit cards, as well as contactless payments like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo
• Process expanded payment methods such as scan-to-pay, store credits, layaways, gift cards, and Buy-Now-Pay-Later options
• Add mobility with the Clover Flex handheld device, and Clover Go mobile card reader
• Print or email receipts—or with Scan and Pay, add a QR code to allow customers to pay with their phones. You can include feedback coupons as well.

Customer Management

Clover’s customer management tools let you set up customer profiles automatically from credit card sales. You can garner sales histories, names, and birthdays and save photos so that your employees can recognize and greet customers by name. Also, tracking contact and marketing preferences is easy.

The free mobile app (available for iOS and Android) lets you create a data-driven rewards and loyalty program and promote it to customers. Send promotions via email, text, or social media. Develop segmented lists to focus on customer preferences, track customers who have not been back in a while, and tempt them in with a special deal. Finally, request customer feedback on receipts and set up a coupon reward. There’s also a reply function for following through on customer feedback.

Online Ordering

With online ordering, you can design an online menu and let customers order, pay for their purchases, and arrange for a delivery or pick-up. You can also set it up so that even your dine-in customers can order and pay through their mobile devices. Clover’s omnichannel feature ensures that you get alerted to your online orders directly on your Clover terminal and that inventory is always updated for both your online and in-person orders.

Ecommerce

Clover can easily integrate with your existing website, or Clover can help you create one through its partner ecommerce platform, BigCommerce. Clover’s inventory tracking occurs in real time as transactions happen both in-store and online, letting you manage everything from a single platform.

All orders and customer data also sync across sales channels, so you’ll only need to check the centralized POS dashboard to keep track of everything. Clover’s ecommerce functions let you enable appointment booking and sell via social media platforms and public marketplaces, too.

You can also find other ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify, and appointment scheduler apps for service-based businesses. Developer tools are also available for those who want a highly customized website.

While not the best in class, Clover’s industry-specific management tools are robust enough to handle fast-growing businesses, particularly restaurants. You can track ingredients and their costs, items, and variants, manage employee access and shift schedules, create and track invoices, and generate detailed sales and tax reports.

However, Clover does not have built-in vendor management tools. Also, most of the advanced features are gated in its higher subscription plans, which means adding more third-party integration fees and increasing your monthly cost.

Inventory Management

The Clover inventory system includes bulk editing, stock tracking, enhanced filtering, multi-location stock transfers, and itemized order creation for special work orders. It also automatically adjusts stock levels when processing returns and exchanges. For restaurants, Clover supports color-coded categories, marking “sold out” by item, and item modifiers and labels.

However, one black mark on Clover is that it does not support images for inventory items. This is a much-requested feature by Clover customers.

Invoice Management

Clover’s virtual terminal comes with invoice management, which lets you create simple, professional-looking invoices with “pay now” buttons for frictionless payment via credit or debit card. You can use your Clover web dashboard or any smart device to send these invoices via email and track the status until they get paid. You can also automate the sending of recurring payments, client notifications, and payment receipts. Clover keeps track of all invoices that have been sent or paid, or that are pending.

If you prefer to use third-party apps for invoicing, Clover integrates with several options such as InvoiceAble and Invoiss.

Employee Management

Clover allows you to have unlimited employees on a single console and set permissions to limit access to what each worker needs for their job. It also links with apps—some free and some for an extra charge—to help you manage employees.

Clover’s software also allows you to incentivize employees by setting up customizable tip screens, letting customers select a percentage tip to give your staff.

Clover offers the free app Time Clock by Homebase. With a paid Homebase account (which starts at $24.95 per month), you can manage performance, get health and safety screening, job costing, and even dedicated HR advisers. Homebase is one of our recommended free employee scheduling apps. Other apps are also available for functions such as tip pooling, managing payroll, and calculating commissions.

Reporting & Analytics

Clover’s cloud-based reporting dashboard can be accessed on any desktop or mobile device via the Clover Go mobile app. The dashboard features a quick summary of overall business performance including end-of-day reports, total sales per employee and across locations, best-selling products, credit card transactions by card type, and more.

Some Clover reports are available only for paid plans. This includes advanced inventory features like variants, returns and exchanges, and scale integrations. However, real-time sales tracking, employee shift management, and tax reporting tools are available in all plans. You can also build customized reports to match your growth goals.

Overall, we find Clover a solid POS with sophisticated features to run a busy retail or restaurant business. Subscription plans advertised on its website are within reason and user feedback on the system is generally positive.

One advantage of the Clover system is that it comes with all the tools you need, and as you grow, you can add features from its list of apps. When setting up your business, you can also get 24/7 customer support by phone or email, as well as concierge-level setup if you want this.

Clover’s interface is clear-cut; click on what you need to do in the menu bar, then follow the directions. When inputting inventory, you can create it for online ordering and for the console. You can also import inventory from a spreadsheet rather than adding items individually. Finally, Clover has over 200 third-party integrations, greatly increasing its versatility and functionality.

Two things detract from Clover’s ease of use: one, the lack of images in inventory management, which can make it more difficult to find specific items; and two, the lack of built-in vendor management tools, which means you’ll need to search elsewhere (such as third-party integrations) for this function.

Methodology: How We Evaluated Clover POS

To evaluate Clover, and all POS systems, we test each system ourselves. We start by looking at affordability along with a core set of features every POS should have, including easy transaction and order management, robust and flexible payment processing tools so you can affordably accept your customers’ preferred payment method, along with core business management features like inventory tracking, sales reports, and team management.

Of course, each system also needs to be easy to use, offer good value, and be able to grow with your business.

We use these criteria to examine the best overall POS systems. However, when looking at specific use cases, such as for retailers, complex inventory management, or mobile POS, we adjust the criteria to match the needs of those business types, which is why every POS has multiple scores across our site depending on the use case you are looking for.

Click through the tabs below for our retail POS evaluation criteria:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Click through the questions below to get answers to some of your most frequently asked Clover POS questions.

Can I add extra devices or accessories to an existing Clover POS system?

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How do I set tax rates on Clover POS?

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Why is there a discrepancy between Clover user reviews and expert reviews?

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Bottom Line

With a customized software and hardware package designed specifically for your business, it’s hard to find something not to like about Clover. For savvy retail and restaurant business owners, it’s worth checking out. However, note that Clover can be purchased from thousands of resellers, and the system cannot be reprogrammed, so it can get tricky if you have not worked with a merchant account before. Our suggestion: find the best merchant service for you, then ask about Clover. Alternatively, you can also go straight to Clover and ask for a demo today.

Visit Clover POS

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User review references:

¹ Capterra
² G2
³ FinancesOnline
⁴ App Store
⁵ Google Play