Hospitality/Retail Business Owners of OzBargain: POS Solutions?

jc2218 on 23/05/2025 - 15:55
Last edited 23/05/2025 - 21:45 by 1 other user

Hey fellow Ozbargainers,

For those in the Hospitality/Retail biz, what POS do ya'll utilise?

I run a fast/casual takeaway restaurant and at the moment we have some ancient technology + a couple of Verifone EFTPOS terminals with St. George Bank. Right now I pay roughly 0.85%+GST for Visa/Mastercard transactions and $25 for each terminal to St. George.

I am looking to upgrade to a solution that has more front end reliability (touch screens, reduced human error) and back end support (reporting, inventory etc)

I have talked to some digital POS providers like Square and Lightspeed but have found them to be not very transparent when it comes to pricing. For example, with Square, they are offering 1.25%inc.GST merchant fees with a $59/month subscription fee and a 1k onboarding fee??? Discounted from 2k of course.

I would like to know what ya'll use as your current POS solution and what are the associated expenses that go with it?

Thanks a bunch!

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  millie2323 on 23/05/2025 - 16:04

  Back when I used to own a hospo business, we used https://loyverse.com and then used the Tyro integration for easy settlement.

  Would definitely recommend for a cheaper option.

  If you have some dev experience you could use the Loyverse API (https://developer.loyverse.com/docs/) with something like n8n for making easy automations.

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    jc2218 on 24/05/2025 - 21:54

    Playing with the free version of Loyverse at the moment. Do you recall how much Tyro charged back in the day? Any comments on their reliability?

    One real perk of St George is if a terminal has issues it will get replaced same business day for free.

    No dev experience here, spend too much time in the kitchen.

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    ATTS on 29/05/2025 - 15:41

    Curious ,What led u to leave the hospo bus?

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  AustriaBargain on 23/05/2025 - 16:47

  You could use whatever POS you wanted and have your staff key in the total into your St. George terminals. You can use the Square app for free this way for example. Been a while since I looked at it, but Square app has annoying limitations, like you can't reorder tabs in the POS, you have to rebuild them at least a few years ago when I last looked at it seriously. But it is pretty advanced still and on a new iPad it runs very well. Makes your business seem more hip too when doing it on an iPad compared to those chunky displays so many POS businesses will still try to sell you.

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  apsilon on 23/05/2025 - 19:17

  Square though I believe they have a restaurant specific version which I'm not familiar with but may fit your needs better. Front end POS is great. Backend is constantly being changed with little. or more commonly. no notice. Changes are rarely an improvement. If it matters to you online works but is a poor experience and no investment is being made in infrastructure. Reporting is poor, custom reports especially. Support is basically non existent, support staff often simply don't respond to issues and when they do it's clear they don't know the product at all and can only recite what's online. I will say it's reliable. I think there's been 2 outages in over 3 years we've been using it.

  For retail with an online store I simply wouldn't recommend it. For someone doing a side business, market stalls etc probably yes. Having no experience with a restaurant you're probably somewhere between the two so could go either way.

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    AustriaBargain on 23/05/2025 - 19:28

    If anyone knows of a free or cheap POS that works good in store and online, or has an API that lets you centralise and decrement inventory on both at the same time, I'd like to hear it.