ShopKeep was founded in 2008 in NYC and puts your cash register on an iPad. With ShopKeep, you can accept any form of payment. It also provides essential features like automatic inventory tracking, employee management as well as real time sales reporting.
ShopKeep offers several monthly pay-as-you-go plans. Their Basic Plan is the most inexpensive, but they also offer an Essential Plan and an Advanced Plan. All plans come with the typical POS features you’d expect as well as 24/7 support if you need it.
Unfortunately, ShopKeep doesn’t list each plans’ cost. Beyond the Free Plan, you can expect to pay at least $49 per month. You’ll need to contact ShopKeep to get a quote.
But first, if you’d like to just try ShopKeep out, they do offer a very limited Free Plan.
The ShopKeep Free Plan includes just one register for one employee. It still offers unlimited transactions and sales reports, but only limited access to the ShopKeep Pocket App. We’ll go over the app soon, but it’s a nice addition to the ShopKeep Suite.
All things considered, the Free Plan is only useful to the smallest businesses. But it’s still so limited that we wouldn’t recommend it for much more than a test or a consistently small business.
The Basic Plan offers one active register and a free credit card reader. But the plan doesn’t come with any restrictions. You can conduct unlimited transactions and have access to the following features:
• Employee management
• Inventory management
• Sales reports
• Text message payments
The Essential Plan offers everything the Basic Plan does, plus several additional features that support modern businesses. This plan is meant for small businesses that also have a large online segment. To support the online side of your business, the Essential Plan offers:
• An eCommerce store
• The ability to send online invoices
• QuickBooks integration
• MailChimp integration
• Additional sales tracking tools for the online store
The Essential Plan is also useful for brick-and-mortar operations. It offers customized gift cards but lacks the advanced customer loyalty rewards of the Advanced Plan
The Advanced Plan is for businesses that are on the larger side of the “small business” spectrum. This plan includes all the other benefits we’ve gone over and builds upon them. With the Advanced Plan, you get:
• Unlimited registers
• A complete customer loyalty program
• A social media management tool
• Priority customer support
• Hardware-specific benefits (Eg. iPad stand, receipt printer)
The Pocket App is a great solution for business owners that can’t stay in-shop all day. The app is available on iOS and Android.
You can receive important notifications and keep track of all online sales from your phone with the app. If your ShopKeep Account supports online sales, you can manually accept a credit card sale by punching in the card’s number.
One major problem many POS systems overlook is the challenge of accounting for different tax rates. With ShopKeep, you can set a default tax rate and then create special tax rates for select items. All you need to do is push the “new tax groups” button.
Gift card integrations come with some of the ShopKeep packages. But you can also print email receipts and keep track of customers for current or future rewards programs and promotional events/sales.
ShopKeep’s interface offers excellent inventory management functionality. You can track the quantity of each inventory item. In addition, you can prepare reorders at designated inventory levels. Using the “matrix inventory” you can set a ‘parent’ item and offer variations of it. But the most interesting feature (and the most useful for some businesses) is that is can inventory items as raw materials and create assemblies.
With this, you can track the components of any order a customer makes and know when you need to order more. Whether it’s a cake you’re baking or a machine you’re making, you can make sure you always have all the pieces you need.
The ShopKeep back office manages your inventory, your customers, your employees’ worked hours, and all your transactions.
Using the information collected by the back office, you can view reports on many metrics. Sales-per-customer, sales by discount, the average cost of sale, and many other useful pieces of information are available.
The advanced reporting suite offers you the ability to delve deep into your business and see beyond the dollar values of your transactions.
As we mentioned, ShopKeep integrates with two common resources that many small business owners use.
QuickBooks is an accounting software commonly used by businesses with a large online presence. The software comes integrated with ShopKeep. So, if you already use QuickBooks, ShopKeep can easily be added to your business tools collection.
MailChimp is a marketing automation platform that is very popular in email marketing. It’s an all-in-one package that helps you manage your relationship with existing customers and reach out to new ones. If email marketing is important to your business, this is an extremely useful addition to an online-friendly POS system.
You don’t need to purchase hardware from ShopKeep to use their service.
ShopKeep is compatible with Clover devices and Poynt terminals. But the software runs best on Apple products. Some of their bundles even come with an iPad stand.
You can run ShopKeep on an iPad or iPad Mini. The software supports iOS 9.3.5 or higher. As we mentioned above, you can also manage your business on the go with the Pocket App.
ShopKeep also works on android tablets with v5. 0 Lollipop and above
The ShopKeep interfaces are all inviting and easy to use. The iPad ShopKeep app is the best when it comes to usability. You can browse through the common interfaces with ease and won’t have a hard time finding the less used interfaces. Setup is also simple.
The main problem with ShopKeep is reports of bugs from some users. While it’s not an endemic issue, ShopKeep is working to correct all discovered software bugs in later patches.
Additional customer support:
Community Forum
There is no forum on the ShopKeep website. However, you can find discussions on other online forums like Reddit and TrustPilot.
Blog
ShopKeep has a blog on their site that provides interesting tips and articles aimed at small businesses.
ShopKeep is a well-rounded and affordable POS system for small businesses. The company advertises itself as a good choice for smaller full-service restaurants and retail stores. Their claims are fully justified. If you run a small business, it’s worth a look. Small restaurant owners will find the inventory management tools especially useful, making ShopKeep a great alternative to more expensive restaurant POS systems.
