Open Forum

Museum professionals, how do you feel about your current Point of Sale system? I'm looking for the good, the bad, and the cross selling! Any and all comments will be greatly appreciated. While we’re interested in a merchandise POS we’re really focused on a POS for admission sales. Thanks, y’all!!

I'd go with TAM. It's very user friendly and really easy to work with. 

We use ShopKeep on iPads. It's really simple -- great for volunteers who only work once a week and might have trouble remembering the intricacies of a more complex system. It has a good "back office" feature, but it's reporting isn't all that robust. We use it for both admissions and the Museum Store. We have about 800 distinct items in inventory and entered them in about a week. We're just getting a new facility up and running, and one nice feature is that, as we figure out how we want to track data, we can add and remove "buttons" on the iPads within minutes (different kinds of group tours, for example). Everybody seems pretty happy with it.

Thanks!

We also use ShopKeep. Though it is extremely user friendly and you can track your sales, we find it coming up short on a few things. First and foremost, we would love if there was a demographics feature that did not involve creating an entire customer file. We try to track where all our guests are from for funding purposes and ShopKeep is lacking the ability to just enter in a zip code and nothing else to track those figures. We also wish there was a way to tag certain purchases with a note as you enter them in, or even in the back office, but there is not. That being said, it is a huge improvement over our old POS system!

For admission POS, there are tons of options out there. I would start by evaluating your needs and ask yourself a few questions:

1) am I doing general admission only? or also special exhibits? will any events require a specific date/time on the ticket?

2) do you want to do any form of admission control (scanning, turnstiles, etc) as well

3) do you want to integrate web sales into it?

4) how much do you want to invest? Keep in mind that you may need to replace the hardware you are currently using?

5) Are you looking for a cloud based solution? or an on-site database?

We use Gateway Ticketing's Galaxy POS. It does all of those and more pretty well, but is expensive. If you'd like more details, let me know and I can answer whatever questions you may have.

-Tom