The Complete Guide to Cigar Lounge POS Systems:12 Must-Have Features

Simplified Compliance and Age Verification

Cigar lounges have stricter legal requirements than general retailers, especially if they also sell alcohol. However, manually checking IDs and tracking sales can open your business to compliance risks, especially as things get busy. 

The easier it is to stay compliant, the less likely you are to face costly fines or license suspensions. Here are some ways that a cigar lounge POS system can help:

• ID scanning support: Use barcode scanners to quickly validate customer IDs without slowing down the line. 
• Digital record keeping: Ensure your data collection meets state standards, either by deleting data immediately or storing it for 30 days. A POS system can also generate reports for state or local regulatory audits.
• Employee access control: Implement role-based access controls so that only authorized employees can perform regulated functions or override compliance checks.
• Custom tax setup: Create custom tax configurations and exemptions to ensure correct tax rates are applied to all tobacco products.
• Minimum price enforcement: Ensure all tobacco and/or alcohol products are sold above legally-mandated minimum prices.

A tobacco-specific POS system also makes it easier to stay ahead of regulatory updates with consistent software updates.

Smoother Sales and Transactions

Having flexible, convenient payment options makes checking out less of a hassle, encouraging customers to spend more time in your lounge. Here are some key payment features to look out for:

• Multiple payment options: Give users multiple ways to pay, including tap-to-pay cards, contactless payments, debit cards, and credit cards.
• Suspended payments: Let customers open a tab, minimizing the number of disruptions and encouraging customers to spend more time enjoying your cigars.
• Mobile POS support: Process payments from anywhere by bringing a mobile POS system directly to wherever customers are sitting.
• Dual pricing: Offer discounts for customers who pay in cash while avoiding the legal hurdles of surcharging. 

All tobacco stores require a high-risk merchant account, so make sure any provider you consider supports high-risk payment processing.

Better Customer Experiences and Retention

Attracting new customers to your cigar lounge is important, but providing exceptional customer experiences that bring people back is even more so.  

Here are a few features that can help you elevate your cigar lounge experience:

• Customer loyalty: Create a customer loyalty program that allows visitors to earn points the more they spend, or create tiered membership levels*. 
• Customer profiles: Look up a customer’s purchase history to quickly understand their preferences for tailored recommendations. 
• Personalized promotions: Use custom product tags to send out unique promotions via SMS and email (e.g., “customers who spent $X on Cuban cigars last month”).
• Gift cards: Partner with a third-party service to sell branded gift cards for special events and holidays.

*Note: Some POS systems don’t natively support membership tiers. However, you can sell a custom membership level product and tie it to a loyalty account to implement this functionality without needing an additional service.

Reporting and Analytics

Having an unbiased and accurate view of sales and store performance is essential to refining your selection, understanding customer preferences, optimizing inventory levels, and more. Built-in reporting and analytics tools combine your sales, inventory, and supplier data to generate actionable insights for your business.

With intuitive reports and visual dashboards, you can back up your intuition with data. Here are some of the key ways you can leverage reports on your cigar lounge system:

• Bestsellers: Identify best-selling products and product categories to refine your selection. Use your custom tags to get even more granular insights on customer preferences.
• Average transaction volume: See how much customers typically spend per visit and whether certain items are bought together for better forecasting and to identify upselling opportunities.
• Profit margins: See your profit margins per item, per product category, or supplier to make strategic price changes or to negotiate with suppliers.
• Inventory turnover: Understand how often you sell and reorder certain items in a given period, helping you optimize stock levels and profit margins.
• Tobacco scan data: Take advantage of manufacturer discounts by participating in tobacco scan data incentive programs.
• Tax and compliance reporting: Leverage export options for simplified tax and compliance reporting.

These are just a few of the reports you can pull using a tobacco-specific POS system.