To run any successful restaurant, there are a handful of essential things every business owner must have before hitting the ground running—one of the most important things being a point-of-sale or POS system. A POS system allows you to ring up sales and pay for transactions. Depending on the technology and app extensions' sophistication, you can even keep tabs on customer purchasing patterns and inventory.

There are two major players in the POS game, namely Clover & Square. And each one, while they encompass similar capabilities, offers merchants a different set of features. In this article, we'll take a look at each POS system, respectively, and the benefits and disadvantages of how each one can help your business.

What Are The Benefits Of Using Square Payment System?

The best thing about Square’s technologies is that they’re geared toward new businesses who want simplicity. They pride themselves on their easy to use technology and, which is more than appealing to startups and small businesses. POS, reporting, CRM, and inventory are built all in one, and you also have the option to expand some of your capabilities. This is done by installing one or more of the additionally offered ‘Square Tools’ for a monthly fee.

Those capabilities include employee management, email & social media campaigns, loyalty programs, and payroll features. As far as actual hardware, their solutions are all-in-one, and they come with a card reader for every type of transaction. (And the pricing for it is slightly less than their competitor.)

What Are The Benefits of Using Clover Payment System?

The best thing about Clover’s technologies is that they’re perfect for small/medium restaurants and businesses, a major reason is their high flexibility. Like Square, the POS reporting and CRM are all built-in features, with the option to add inventory tracking for free. (We’ll get into that a bit later.)

As far as their hardware, it’s all-encompassing as well. The only downside is the price. However, as we mentioned, there is the option to add additional features and capabilities through their internal app store. Their system includes happy hour, dining, shifts, rewards, feedback, promos, and registration, allowing you to process all types of payments and track all activities.

So What’s The Downside of Using Payment Systems?

So, by now, you're probably thinking: 'okay, all of this sounds great and necessary for my business. What's the problem?' And the short answer is, there isn't one. Hundreds of merchants use both systems daily, much to their pleasure and success. The most important thing is to consider your business's needs and goals and then make the best choice based on that. In addition to that, there are a few things that you'll probably need to consider from a POS point of view to help aid in that decision. One of them being the price.

Things To Consider… Pandemic?

Additionally, we need to address the elephant in the room; the pandemic the world is currently facing has limited contact and various activities, luckily we've created a guide to help your restaurant operate during these circumstances. In our guide, we discuss the essential to-do list to accommodate your guests while preserving customer satisfaction. It is necessary to make your guest feel comfortable when dining in your restaurant; therefore, this covid restaurant guide will allow you to adapt quickly and retain your restaurant's top-notch customer service.

Square Vs. Clover Price

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As we stated earlier, Clover is a bit pricier than Square, which is why most businesses starting off gravitate towards the later. However, considering that Clover has additional apps to better help you with your overall business for free--the ends may justify the means. As we explained earlier, Square is also equipped with some of the same additional features as Clover--but the price to enable them may end up outweighing Clover’s entirely. The other major differentiating factor between these two is the fact that you have to process payments differently. With Square, merchants are only able to process payments with Square technologies. With Clover, you are able to work with various types of payment processors.

Wrapping It Up

At the end of the day, whether you decide to go with Clover or Square, it all depends on your business's budget, preference, goals, and needs. And no matter which system you go with, OrderEm has the integration technologies to handle them both. With Clover, you can still keep track of your online ordering, mobile app ordering, and social media ordering all while showcasing your brand--white labeled by OrderEm. With Square, we power merchants with the advanced tools necessary, to create branded mobile apps, online ordering for online and social media, delivery management and marketing tools. 

Give us a call at 855-210-APPS to learn more or contact us at info@orderem.com.