5 Best Vape Shop POS Solutions
Running a successful vape shop is more than discussing the best products and flavors with your customers. You’ll need to juggle tasks like managing inventory, handling sales, and keeping customers coming back for more. Is your head spinning yet?
In today's tech-savvy world, you don’t have to go it alone! Instead, you can implement a vape shop POS solution to simplify your life. Today’s vape shop POS systems aren't just about processing payments; they're the powerhouse behind your operations, simplifying everything from inventory management to customer loyalty.
This post walks through the key features of a vape shop point of sale system. Then, we’ll discuss five top solutions you might explore for your POS system needs.
Key Features of a Vape Shop POS
Before discussing our top picks for vape shop POS solutions, you need to understand the features and functions you should look for when selecting your store's point of sale system. Some of the features every vape shop needs include robust age verification, multi-channel inventory tracking, integrated payments, customer relationship management (CRM), and advanced reporting. Let’s examine these in more detail.
Age verification is critical to your store’s success and compliance. To confidently run your store without risking selling age-restricted products to underage customers, you need a point of sale system with built-in age verification. A strong POS system automatically prompts cashiers to check IDs and validate customer ages or scan the identification with an integrated ID scanner before finalizing transactions.
Vape shops carry diverse products, including e-liquids, devices, and accessories. As a result, you need a point of sale system with advanced inventory management features. You need visibility into stock levels across various brands, flavors, nicotine concentrations, and other product types. Your point of sale system should also allow you to break cases for fine-grain inventory tracking, giving you flexibility to sell items individually or by the pack.
Related Read: 6 Must-Have Vape POS System Features
Another critical feature for vape shops is flexible payment options. Your POS should enable chip cards, contactless payments like Apple Pay, and cash payments. Leveraging customer data is also key, so seek out sophisticated CRM features to track purchase history and shopper preferences.
Rounding out the "must-haves" are robust analytics and easy-to-digest sales reporting. With the right data, you can spot sales trends, gauge which products perform best, and adjust inventory levels accordingly. Lastly, select a point of sale system with an easy-to-use interface. This simplicity makes it easier to train staff and keeps processes moving quickly during peak hours.
1. NCR Silver
NCR Silver offers a cloud-based point of sale system that centralizes inventory, customer management, and reporting in one dashboard. You can sign in remotely and track real-time stock levels across multiple channels and store locations, preventing stockouts. The software also enables seamless product lookups by barcode scan, alongside saved customer details like prior purchases and reward program status to make for personalized experiences.
When checking out patrons, built-in tools help process payments quickly, while securing sensitive financial data. NCR Silver generates insightful sales reports on all transactions, giving you critical insight into your store’s performance.
Pricing: NCR’s pricing is unavailable on their website, and you must contact sales to get a quote.
Reviews: “Accepting payments on various channels and different currencies, NCR enabled us to do daily auditing of all transactions and products and reduces the time for stock-taking.” –NCR Silver User
2. Lightspeed
Lightspeed is a popular solution in the retail POS space. This solution offers advanced reporting and analytics, giving you insight into business trends and sales patterns in intuitive, all-in-one dashboards. See bestselling items by day, customer demographics with the highest loyalty membership engagement, and other trends to optimize merchandising and staff planning.
Lightspeed allows you to manage thousands of SKUs across brands, types, flavors, and nicotine concentrations. You can also track customer purchase history and personal details like birthdays to deliver personalized incentives and recommendations through the registers. For employee oversight, set permissions restricting specific actions to minimize fraud.
Pricing: Lightspeed’s Standard package starts at $119 per month.
Review: “It is a capable software system that can handle your small retail shop with ease. inventory management, barcoding, point of sale, price tracking, reports, etc all work well. It is a bit hard to reach for customer service, and lots of training is required.” –Lightspeed User
3. Square
Square offers a unique pricing structure and point of sale solution for retailers, service businesses, and restaurants. Square accepts all major credit card types at a fee rate of 2.6 percent plus 10 cents per transaction.
You can use Square for advanced reporting and transaction insights into customer activity, sales by category, and other metrics. Square also offers offline processing capabilities, meaning you can process sales uninterrupted without an internet connection. Finally, Square offers customizable loyalty programs and integrates with accounting software solutions like QuickBooks, Xero, and StitchLabs.
Pricing: Square’s Plus package starts at $29 per month, plus processing fees.
Review: “Overall, Square has simplified our POS system and with its easy to use reporting, we are able to manage our books quicker and more accurately.” –Square User
4. POS Nation
POS Nation provides an all-in-one point of sale solution for small to mid-sized retailers. You can use POS Nation’s tools for inventory management, employee optimization, and marketing and promotions management. Beyond these features, POS Nation also offers built-in age verification, saving you time while limiting your risk of selling age-restricted products to underage customers.
Related Read: Mastering Smoke Shop Inventory Management: 4 Top Tips
Additionally, POS Nation offers smart inventory features like carton-pack tracking, allowing you to track sales by individual units, packs, or cartons. Upload catalogs to your POS solution and connect label printers for dynamic on-counter marketing. With certified integration across leading accounting platforms like QuickBooks, seamlessly handle finances and taxes from one dashboard.
Pricing: Get a custom quote with their pricing tool.
Review: “Our delightful Customer Success Manager has been by our side since day one, helping us get our new POS system up and running. We have found the software rather intuitive and easy to use so far.” –POS Nation User
5. Cigars POS
Developed specifically for tobacco and vape store operations, Cigars POS offers all the features and functionality smoke and vape shops need to run efficient and profitable businesses. You can use our solution to upload custom product catalogs, design specialized sales and promotions, and manage customer loyalty programs.
Cigars POS also offers detailed inventory management features. Real-time inventory insights, case breaking, carton-pack inventory tracking, and integrated barcode scanning features are all available to help manage inventory more smoothly. Customizable employee permissions also help increase security and minimize shrinkage due to employee theft.
Pricing: Use our transparent build and price tool to price your perfect solution.
Reviews: “I could see, not just my daily sales, but I could find what cigars were trending, I could find what times of the day my cigars were trending. That enabled me to promote and push additional sales.” –James Thompson, Huntington Humidor
Get Started With the Best POS for Vape Shops
These five options give you a solid shortlist of POS systems to explore for your vape shop. But the "best" solution won’t be the same for every store. To pick the best POS for your vape shop, you need to find a solution with features that align with your unique business needs.
If you want a point of sale solution designed specifically for tobacco and vape shops, Cigars POS might be the right solution for you.
Our solution centralizes everything vape shops need, from compliant age verification features and dynamic inventory control to custom reporting and flexible payment processing. Our POS software also plays nicely with the other technologies you rely on, from barcode scanners for speedy checkout to label printers for promotions. With compatibility across single or multi-store configurations, we scale to any size operation.
If you want to experience the next level of convenience and insights for your vape shop, schedule a software demo of Cigars POS today.
