Grocery point-of-sale (POS) systems have all the features of a standard POS software, plus industry-specific capabilities such as scale and scanner integrations, online grocery sales, self-checkout options, and interactive customer-facing displays. However, these extra features typically come at a higher cost. We evaluated dozens of solutions to find the best value grocery POS systems for small businesses.
Top 5 Grocery Store POS Systems for 2021
Grocery Store POS System | Best For |
|---|---|
Best overall grocery POS | |
Best low-cost, grocery-specific POS with scale support | |
Best customizable, feature-rich grocery POS | |
Best free POS for small grocers | |
Best for markets with cafes or prepared food that want ingredient-level tracking |
How We Evaluated Grocery POS Systems
Grocery stores, including supermarkets and corner stores, need a POS system that can handle large volumes of perishable inventory, track and manage employees, and build shopper loyalty with customer relationship management (CRM) features. Often, grocers also need durable and industry-specific hardware, including options for scale and scanner integrations, deli and butcher integration, and self-checkout tools. Given that grocery stores are low-margin businesses, it is also important that POS systems are affordable, providing great value for their prices.
Based on our evaluation, Revel Systems is the best overall grocery POS system. The software earned a near-perfect 4.94 out of 5, with points for grocery-specific hardware and payment processing capabilities including self-checkout, SNAP EBT payments, FIFO and perishable inventory tracking, tools for online grocery sales, and a robust CRM feature set.
To see our full evaluation process for the best grocery POS, click through the tabs in the box below.
35% of Overall Score
Hardware and integrated payment processing features are two of the most important criteria in our evaluation of grocery POS software. First, I looked at whether or not the system provides market-specific hardware, convenient payment processing tools, and a customer-facing display. As groceries typically sell produce and items based on their weight, I also considered if they have scale and scanner integrations. Also, because of the high turnover of shoppers in a grocery setting, I checked whether self-checkout options are included.
35% of Overall Score
Groceries have tens of thousands of products, so I looked at systems that have robust inventory management tools and can account for different variables—like expiration dates and first-in, first-out (FIFO) schedules. I also examined what CRM features—such as loyalty programs, custom coupons, and marketing tools—are covered, and if the software has the ability to manage employee permission levels, schedules, and productivity. Plus, as more people nowadays choose to order online, having an online grocery option is important.
20% of Overall Score
I considered any standout features, ease of use, and whether or not the system offers good value for money. I also checked whether it’s a popular choice among grocery store owners and if it generates mostly positive reviews.
5% of Overall Score
As we are looking for the best grocery POS for small businesses, price is an important factor. I checked whether or not it offers a monthly plan that costs less than $100 and how much software costs for use on additional registers. I also awarded points to those with software fees that are less than $20.
5% of Overall Score
Because grocery stores have a dynamic sales environment, I prioritized those that offered round-the-clock customer support via phone and email. Also, in consideration of businesses with multiple counters or branches, I gave points to those with a hybrid setup, which means they are not entirely dependent on having an internet connection for operations. Finally, I looked at how intuitive each system is to set up and use for employees.
Looking for something different? See our top overall picks for the best POS systems for small businesses.
Revel Systems
PROS
- Excellent online ordering and delivery functions
- Plenty of hardware options for customer-facing displays and kiosks
- Customizable reports that sync across locations
- Back-office management tools are accessible from the register
CONS
- Expensive system; does not offer a free trial
- Contract requires a three-year commitment
- Steep learning curve due to its many features
| RATING CRITERIA | Hardware & Payment Processing | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
| Grocery Features | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Expert Score | 4.69 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Pricing & Setup | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Help & Ease of Use | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
Revel Systems is a cloud-based POS system that offers a highly customizable system for customer-facing displays, online ordering, and self-order kiosks. Although a popular choice for restaurants with multiple locations, the software also provides robust inventory and customer management functionalities, flexible hardware setups, and scale and scanner integrations to make it suitable for grocery stores of any size.
Based on our evaluation criteria, Revel Systems earned a total score of 4.94 out of 5. The software earned a perfect score for grocery-specific features (e.g., inventory management, CRM, online sales, and loyalty), as well as hardware, payment processing, ease of use, and pricing criteria. However, value for money based on our expert assessment prevented it from earning a full 5. This is because the total cost of implementation and setup (which is to be quoted depending on your requirements) might be too high for small businesses.
Revel Systems Pricing
- Software subscription fee: Starts at $99 per month, per terminal (billed annually and includes a three-year Revel Advantage contract); requires a minimum purchase of two terminals
- Cost of software for additional registers: $99 per terminal (billed annually)
- Hardware costs: Quote-based depending on your business needs
- Other fees: Fixed payment processing fees (quote-based); onboarding fees start at $674
Revel Systems Features
- Inventory management: With the ability to manage complex matrix inventories, you can organize items into categories, monitor stock counts in real time, send automatic stock low-stock alerts, and generate purchase orders. Aside from its bar code scanner, you can use your phone to scan items, and the activity will be synced from the app to your dashboard seamlessly.
- Self-checkout options: Increase service speeds without compromising customer service, especially during peak hours, with intuitive self-service kiosks.
- Scale and scanner integrations: Directly integrate scales into your POS system to eliminate double entry and avoid costly errors. All Revel System scales are certified by the National Conference on Weights and Measures.
- Loyalty program and CRM: Create your own loyalty program depending on how your customers want to earn—like earning points per transaction, for buying specific items or based on the purchase amount. You can generate insights from the app’s management console in order to develop a rewards program (e.g., exclusive discounts and promos) that will boost customer satisfaction.
- Employee management: Set up administrator permissions, assign roles and wages, monitor timecards, and manage payroll. The system also allows you to create staff schedules and standardize time sheet rules according to local laws.
- Payment processing: Revel Systems’ management console lets you view credit card transactions throughout a particular period and check on deposited funds. It is also EMV-compliant and integrates with QuickBooks for seamless accounting processes.
- Customer service: Customer support is available 24/7 via the web, phone, and email.
- Reports and analytics: The software generates in-depth sales, inventory, and labor reports, covering factors such as cost of goods sold (COGS), product mix, and employee expenses vs sales revenue.
IT Retail
PROS
- Grocery and market-specific features
- Provides 24/7 customer support with
- Offers scale integration and on-site installation
CONS
- Pricing details for the software and hardware aren’t readily available
- No free trial; steep learning curve
| RATING CRITERIA | Hardware & Payment Processing | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
| Grocery Features | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Expert Score | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Pricing & Setup | 2.50 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Help & Ease of Use | 4.50 | OUT OF | 5 |
IT Retail’s POS is one of the few grocery-focused systems made for small and independent businesses. Its basic plan includes all the standard grocery-specific features that other software do not have (or offer as a paid add-on)—such as multiple-scale integration, rugged hardware, bottle deposit management, self-checkout options, marketing tools, and loyalty programs. Although best for small grocers, IT Retail can also be scaled as your business grows.
In our evaluation, IT Retail earned a total score of 4.85 out of 5. The software got perfect scores on grocery features, as well as hardware and payment processing. Its rather unclear pricing and limited customer service hours are what prevented the software from getting a perfect score, ranking it second on our list.
IT Retail Pricing
- Software subscription fee: Starts at $79 per month for local markets. For supermarkets and larger operations, contact IT Retail for a quote.
- Hardware costs: Quote-based. IT Retail offers a range of inventory, customer display, scanner scale, self-checkout, and PIN hardware, but you will need to contact its sales team for a quote.
- Installation fee: Request a quote for on-site installation fees.
IT Retail Features
- Inventory management: Track your stock levels across multiple locations in real time using IT Retail’s mobile inventory and reporting tools. You can also use the software to receive stocks, generate shelf tags and purchase orders, and make, print, and scan bar code labels.
- Self-checkout options: Accelerate operations with self-checkout kiosks, which helps you save on labor costs by assigning only one employee to monitor two to six lanes. The system can be easily switched between cashier-assisted and self-checkout modes during peak hours.
- Scale and scanner integrations: IT Retail offers customized scale and scanner hardware (depending on your store’s traffic) for quick swipe-and-go capabilities. It also provides tech support and regular programming updates.
- Loyalty program and CRM: Engage with customers better through a customizable rewards system to ensure that they keep coming back. For example, you can reward loyalty points for every purchase, which they can later redeem in dollar amounts or as percentages off a sale.
- Employee management: Track employee activity through its built-in time clock and restrict POS permissions according to job level. The system also monitors staff performance at the POS in real time, allowing you to see the numbers of cancellations, voids, transactions, and more.
- Payment processing: IT Retail supports debit card, check, gift card, NFC, EMV, eWIC, and EBT food and cash payments.
- Customer service: Tech support technicians are available 24/7 via phone for emergency cases, while regular support hours are on Mondays to Fridays, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time.
- Reports and analytics: Generate a wide range of employee, inventory, customer, and sales reports from any device, including profitability reports, end-of-day analyses, and suspicious transactions.
POS Nation
PROS
- Robust grocery-specific features and hardware
- Highly-customizable to meet your store’s needs
- Base plan already includes the necessary hardware
CONS
- Have to use POS Nation’s hardware
- Expensive compared to other providers
| RATING CRITERIA | Hardware & Payment Processing | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
| Grocery Features | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Expert Score | 4.38 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Pricing & Setup | 2.50 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Help & Ease of Use | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
POS Nation is a fully customizable grocery POS software that can be scaled as your operations grow. Its base plan already comes with grocery-specific features and hardware that other software typically offers as paid add-ons—such as receipt printers, touch PCs, cash drawers, chip and card readers, and scanners.
Based on our assessment, POS Nation placed third on the list with a total score of 4.75 out of 5. It earned perfect marks in terms of hardware, grocery-specific tools, payment processing capabilities, and customer support. What prevented it from garnering a perfect score is its steep learning curve, due mostly to its robust features. Its software fees are also on the pricey side, with additional software tagged at over $20.
POS Nation Pricing
- Software subscription fees: Flex Monthly POS, its base plan, costs $99 per month and covers both the software and basic hardware. POS Nation also offers a locally-installed POS (Freedom POS) for a one-time $999 fee, as well as a custom build that depends on what your business needs.
- Cost of software for additional registers: Ranges from $69 to $849.
- Hardware costs: All-in-one setups start at $1,149. This lowest-priced package includes a 15” touchscreen, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD, Celeron Quad Core 2.4GHz, Windows 10 Pro, and a mag swipe card reader.
POS Nation Features
- Inventory management: Generate purchase orders, manage vendors, and track perishables, case breaks, and carton-pack inventory. Additional features include a mix-and-match pricing tool.
- Customizable interface: POS Nation has plenty of different interface layouts, so you can choose what works best for your team. Clerks and cashiers can use the buttons to easily find a specific item and see its SKU, price, availability, and more.
- Self-checkout options: Bring the sale to your customer using the mobile checkout feature on its wireless scanners and tablets. You can walk around the store to approach customers who might want to check out immediately and avoid long queues.
- Scale and scanner integrations: Automatically ring up weighed and scanned items to expedite the checkout process.
- Loyalty program and CRM: POS Nation’s built-in customer tracking feature makes use of purchase data so you can provide a more personalized approach to providing customer service. You can also use the system to create loyalty and rewards programs to ensure repeat business and higher transaction values.
- Employee management: Streamline employee management through its clock in and out functionality, user permissions, and automated payroll and payroll deduction reports.
- Payment processing: Accepts multiple payments, including cash, credit card, debit card, check, and EBT. You can also set flat amounts off certain items at specific times, assign discounts, bulk pricing, and even time-based rates.
- Customer service: POS Nation provides 24/7 support via phone and email.
- Reports and analytics: The system has over 55 pre-built reports, including a detailed monthly 1014 file for users in Pennsylvania, as the state requires beer distributors to monitor the purchase and sales of malt beverages.
eHopper
PROS
- Has a free option that’s already equipped with grocery-specific features
- Supports multiple currencies, units of measure, and languages
CONS
- No payment processing integration in the free plan (need to upgrade to a paid package)
- Customer reviews reveal unstable sync-ups with other software and limited reporting capabilities
| RATING CRITERIA | Hardware & Payment Processing | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
| Grocery Features | 4.75 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Expert Score | 3.75 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Pricing & Setup | 2.50 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Help & Ease of Use | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
eHopper is a cloud-based specialty retail POS software that can operate on many different hardware and computer systems. It is a good fit for grocers because it is equipped with detailed inventory management features, including the ability to sell produce and bulk grocery items by weight. A free plan option also makes eHopper affordable for new businesses.
Another point to highlight about this program is that its free option works wonderfully for small grocers as it already comes equipped with sales, customer, and inventory management features. If you want merchant services and payment processing integrations, you will have to upgrade to a higher plan.
Based on our evaluation, eHopper scores a 4.54 out of 5, with high marks for grocery-specific capabilities, ease of use, payment processing tools, hardware, and customer support. However, relatively basic reporting tools and a generally limited feature set prevented eHopper from earning a higher score, as businesses could outgrow eHopper and, in general, find better value using another program.
eHopper Pricing
- Software subscription fees: eHopper’s base model (Essential) is free, while paid plans cost $29.99 per register (Freedom) and $39.99 per register (Restaurant and OmniChannel).
- Cost of software for additional registers: Additional software for the Freedom plan costs $29.99, while those under the Restaurant and OmniChannel plans cost $39.99.
- Hardware costs: All-in-one hardware packages start at $799, depending on what your business needs. Starter package includes a 14” touch screen monitor, a customer display screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, an integrated 80mm receipt printer, and support for compatible peripherals (e.g., bar code scanner and cash drawer).
eHopper functions across multiple platforms.
(Source: eHopper)
eHopper Features
- Inventory management: eHopper has a pretty standard inventory management system. You can track inventory down to ingredient-level details for prepared food, create custom low-stock alerts, and manage all vendor and purchase order information right within the POS. Its paid plans also include bar code creation, management, and printing capabilities.
- Hardware integrations: eHopper has a self-service kiosk solution but no direct scale offering. However, you can work around this and set up your own solution by managing price by weight in the back-end. Input the price per weight sold, and synchronize in the POS. The system will then automatically determine the price of the product based on how much it weighs.
- Loyalty program and CRM: Enable your team to provide a more efficient customer service by keeping records of their information within the system such as personal or business details, purchasing preferences, frequency of visits, and other relevant notes.
- Employee management: Assign specific roles and permissions to each employee and set the software language where applicable. eHopper also tracks sales by employee, which can be configured to monitor inventory-related actions like stock adjustments. Paid plans have a time clock to track employee hours.
- Payment processing: eHopper supports card payments through First Data, Global, Elavon, Evo Payments International, and TSYS, as well as contactless payments via NFC technology like Google Pay and Apple Pay. Such can be integrated via PAX s300, PAX D210, Dejavoo Z1, and Dejavoo Z11 terminals.
- Customer service: Essential users can access its knowledge base and video tutorials anytime, while subscribers of paid plans can get in touch with the technical support team via chat, phone, and email.
ShopKeep by Lightspeed
PROS
- Basic plan includes unlimited inventory items and employees, plus 24/7 support
- Free credit card reader
- Built-in payment processing
CONS
- Mobile sales tracking and loyalty features only included with higher-tiered plans
- Reporting tools have limited customization options
| RATING CRITERIA | Hardware & Payment Processing | 4.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
| Grocery Features | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Expert Score | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Pricing & Setup | 2.50 | OUT OF | 5 | |
| Help & Ease of Use | 5.00 | OUT OF | 5 |
ShopKeep by Lightspeed is an iPad POS software that has grocery-relevant features like the ability to ring up items by weight and manage thousands of SKUs. It also has cafe-related tools such as tipping and recipe-level ingredient tracking which makes it an ideal solution for grocery stores that also have an eatery or a food kiosk.
Our evaluation ranks ShopKeep by Lightspeed last on this list, though that still places the program at an advantage over the dozens of grocery POS that we considered. Based on our evaluation, ShopKeep by Lightspeed scored a total of 4.53 out of 5, held up by the criteria where it received solid points such as grocery-relevant features, user-friendly system, and the availability of customer support.
Although ShopKeep by Lightspeed pricing starts at $49 per month, most grocers would likely need a plan that starts at $79 or $179 monthly because only these plans include sales restriction settings, loyalty programs, and custom permission settings. ShopKeep by Lightspeed is also only available on iPads and Clover hardware, which may not be ideal for high-volume markets. These limitations prevented ShopKeep by Lightspeed from earning a higher score.
ShopKeep by Lightspeed Pricing
- Software subscription fees: Starts at $49 per month for one license with annual billing, or $69 monthly with month-to-month billing.
- Cost of software for additional registers: $69 per month. However, the Advanced plan, $199 per month, includes unlimited registers per location.
- Hardware costs: The basic retail hardware kit starts at $809, including a cash drawer, receipt printer, iPad stand, and ethernet credit card reader. Note that this does not include the iPad unit yet, which costs upward of $299.
- Payment processing fee (via ShopKeep by Lightspeed Payments): 2.5% + 10 cents
- Scale and scanner integrations: Both are supported and available but are offered as paid add-ons to your preferred plan. Bar code scanners sold at the ShopKeep by Lightspeed store start at $199. Contact its sales team for more details on scale integration.
ShopKeep by Lightspeed Features
- Inventory management: ShopKeep by Lightspeed has the ability to manage thousands of SKUs in bulk with comma-separated values (CSV) files, create customized low-stock triggers per product, calculate profit margins―ideal for cafes and prepared foods―and can tell you which products are best sellers.
- Self-checkout options: Because it is an iPad POS, you can ring up purchases and set up self-service kiosks anywhere in your store to ease regular queues and hasten the checkout process for, say, small basket purchases.
- Loyalty program and CRM: ShopKeep by Lightspeed has plenty of CRM features built-in, including the ability to track customer sales histories, capture buyer information at checkout, send customized email receipts, and import customer information into contact lists. The system also has a Mailchimp integration to create email promotions.
- Employee management: You can track employee hours using its built-in time clock feature, customize permission levels, and generate employee productivity reports. While ShopKeep by Lightspeed has the tools you need for basic time tracking, transaction tracking, and reporting, there are no employee scheduling tools or deeper employee management capabilities.
- Customer support: Tech support is available 24/7 via phone, web form, and email.
- Reports and analytics: ShopKeep by Lightspeed has standard reporting features, including sales reports by category, item, discount, and register. Grocers can also view inventory reporting—like on-hand quantities and cost of goods sold (COGS), sales per customer, trends, top spenders, and sales by employee. ShopKeep by Lightspeed Pocket iPhone app lets you view reports on the go.
Bottom Line
Grocery POS systems need unique features like rugged hardware, scale integrations, time-sensitive inventory tracking, and sophisticated loyalty and promotion tools that aren’t typically part of the retail POS setup. There are many feature-packed small business POS software in the market, but very few are a perfect fit for groceries.
As the majority of grocery stores are low-margin operations, it is important that they have a POS and management software that can perform within their budgets. Revel Systems’ POS has all of these grocery-specific features and more for a base price that is less than $100 per month. Visit Revel to get a quote for your business.
Vanessa Doctor contributed to this article.
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