Open Forum

We are looking for a new POS system for our gift shop.  What do you recommend for a small museum?

We mvoed to Lightspeed three years ago. It's a great platform!  We have three museum store locations, and this works for maintaning seperate inventories, tranfers and reporting. Well worth investigating! 

@Richard Osgood that seems pretty great that the system separates inventory like that. Is that not necessarily normal for a POS system? 

We actually use PayPal's system which is not as intuitive as some of the others but fully integrates with our existing PayPal account and with Quickbooks. It was called Zettle (when we purchased it 3 years ago), but it looks like its now part of Lightspeed.

We are a small museum and we also began using Paypal Point of Sale about three years ago when it was called Zettle. We needed a way to sell tickets and beverages at several locations during our outdoor fundraiser. Zettle allows us to do this using an app on our personal cell phones in conjunction with the card readers. The setup is easy enough and can be tailored to simple or more thorough descriptions of gift shop items. Some of my more long term volunteers have difficulty in using it, but I think they would have this issue with any new POS system.

We use Clover and I would not recommend it. Their terminals are a bit clunky, their customer support is APPALLING, and the system doesn't manage inventory well (or at all). The reporting features are just ok, not great - and very slow. And to my knowledge, you can't export a CSV of a report to create your own dashboard.

I've used Lightspeed in the past and I was a lot more satisfied with that one so between those two I would pick the latter, hands down.

@Axel Estable I respect the honest feedback for a system. Curious - what's keeping you in it versus finding something new? 

That may yet happen! I've just had more urgent priorities :-)

We are a small county history museum. We use Wix for our website, online retail, point of sale/cash register, ticket sales, donations/donor management, blog, event registration, and soon, research scheduling. Steep discounts are available through TechSoup. I would be happy to talk with you more about it. Wix is not perfect but it is pretty amazing and fairly intuitive. My volunteers pick it up pretty quickly with training documents. 

Fellow Michigander here @Stef Staley! I have no recommendation, here to learn more than anything. But I am curious for folks weighing in ... does it matter whether your POS connects to a CRM where you can track folks and market to them? Or do you typically only worry about the point of sale as a one-off purchase? 

We use Shopify and have been happy with it. We share with the campus bookstore and a few other campus locations. Easy to use and easy to keep separate inventories. We have different user levels for our students so they can do sales without accessing inventories etc. I believe we negotiated discounts as a non profit. We have started playing with the online shop as well.

i used Square at another museum and like Shopify better.

I have checked with our Gift Store Manager, and we use Talech. She said it is a good basic system, easy to operate, and the Customer service is responsive. 

Good luck!

Lesley

Following up on Tracy L's comment. My spouse uses Shopify for her small business for many years, and it works well for them. It is especially good with tracking inventory between in-store and online purchases. They carry a lot of one-of-a-kind products, so that is essential for them.

We use Shopify in our museum store.  It has been great!  It is very user friendly, both for the visitor and the user.  The back end is also very good and makes Purchase Orders, Receivings, keeping track of inventory pretty easy and fast!  Shopify also has a LARGE amount of reports which can be incredibly helpful.