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Top POS Vendors by Restaurant Type *

Market Summary – Point of Sale Systems

Market Overview

The restaurant Point of Sale system marketplace has two key characteristics. It is broadly driven by the many solution providers participating in the category, and there is significant variation in the feature sets offered by each. Capsolve has identified 372 Point of Sale (POS) solutions designed specifically for the needs of restaurants, including solutions designed for a hotel, spa, golf course or country club. This product dispersion ultimately stems from the vast array of needs across these industries.

Restaurants vary in location, type of cuisine, ambiance, and service level, among many other factors. They also vary based on the perspective and industry upbringing of the owners and managers. These considerations, combined with the competitive market, the strengths of its employees, business partnerships, marketing programs, and even technology decisions, all play a role in a consumer’s experience when arriving and ordering at an establishment. As you can forecast, these inputs create the wealth of business needs that generate the existing software solutions in this realm.

As seen in the above image, POS solutions are delivered worldwide by companies headquartered in many parts of the world. The United States has a significant share of those tracked in Capsolve’s research, representing more than 40% of the total, followed by Canada, the UK, India, and Australia.

Marketplace Context

As mentioned, the diversity of these solutions extends beyond the geographic headquarters of their owning companies and into the actual functionality of their respective feature sets. Depending on your business needs, you will find almost any combination of functionality within this marketplace. However, sifting through hundreds of vendors to perform proper due diligence may become an exasperating experience, whether you are a technology novice or an aficionado.

Solution Paths

Changing your Point of Sale System can feel like a rather complicated decision. However, the critical element is deciding what solution you want to select as your new core element of technology. While it is not required to take this approach, the most common path is to choose a POS that will support your most important strategic and tactical technology capabilities and then decide what new or existing technology should complement it. A few standard approaches enabled by today’s technology solutions within this category include:

• Comprehensive Core: a solution with multiple modules designed to provide a fully integrated approach to covering most or all restaurant, pro-shop, or retail needs
• Best Fit Core: a solution with multiple modules covering the minimum requirements in combination with important strategic capabilities
• Minimized Core: a solution typically covering the most crucial strategic and operational needs but providing significant flexibility to connect to other best-of-breed solutions to complement the core
• Best Strategic Fit: a solution providing a balance between comprehensiveness and long-term strategic needs

These solution paths are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Solutions within the marketplace may create the opportunity to combine one or more paths and meet more of your selection criteria. Appropriately formulating an RFP to share with potential vendors will help to ensure you ask the best questions specific to your business while allowing you to learn about the depth of each potential vendor partner.

Pricing Information

Numerous pricing models exist in the marketplace, and it is crucial to understand how each one will affect your total cost of ownership. The standard pricing structures are:

• Base Software Price plus a Maintenance Charge: This pricing is usually charged for on-premise software installed on local servers. It is generally charged based on the number of servers, user licenses, or user accounts. There is an ongoing charge for modifications and upgrades based on the percentage of the base software.
• Subscription Price: This pricing is more common today with the adoption of Software-as-a-Service. The price is often charged annually, quarterly, or monthly and is applied to each location or user account.
• Transaction Price: These fees are based on the volume of activity flowing through the software and closely align with its usage. This type of pricing is usually experienced as part of a payment solution affiliation, where the POS is provided as part of the agreement.

As expected, a combination of these pricing approaches may be applied to any software.

Sales & Marketing Considerations

The POS is primarily an operational center for restaurants and selected amenities that require transactional purchases. However, it may also house a great deal of additional functionality. These capability categories include Restaurant Management, Employee Management, Kitchen Management & Display, Recipe & Food Costing, and key marketing functionality, such as CRM, Loyalty, and features designed for inbound and outbound marketing programs.

Many POS solutions provide or may be connected to CRM functionality to facilitate communication with customers and prospects. When considering the transactional nature of the POS, it is understandable that Loyalty features are often combined in the same manner. It is also interesting to note that while the POS is frequently at the center of a restaurant’s operational systems, it isn’t usually connected to the business’s website and digital marketing aspects. This changed during the pandemic, and the tactical shift is holding steady with the increased deployment of online ordering functionality. More than half of today’s solutions have Online Ordering, with more vendors adding this functionality each month.

All that said, since the POS houses your menu (product and pricing) information, it is a natural path for most businesses to find their place in the digital world. This industry-wide digital transformation recently went from a slow, methodical pace to hyper-speed. More importantly, when a business opens its doors in the digital ecosphere, it can position its products in any channel or be only a click away. This indeed occurs throughout the industry. This all starts with the POS and the data it contains. As your sophistication increases in this arena, your use and understanding of the tools for restaurants to compete may need to be transformed simultaneously. Technical challenges such as online ordering, multi-lingual interfaces and other complexities are getting easier to address as technologies mature and with the advent of artificial Intelligence.

Current Trends

1. Online Ordering: Restaurants scrambled to quickly add Digital Ordering Solutions during the pandemic, which caused solution providers to develop solutions during the same timeline.
2. Food Delivery Services (FDS): Restaurants had to make fast tactical decisions about which services to partner with and in what form, not to mention the technological considerations associated with these services.
3. Increased Changes in Menu: The marketplace has decreased the stability of menus for now. This is caused by the need to provide food through delivery and takeout scenarios and addressing changing demand levels, among other considerations.
4. Channel Management: All of a sudden, restaurants were managing orders from multiple channels, including Websites and FDSs. All the while, they needed to interact with these channels in multiple forms, such as Websites, Phones, Tablets, Text Messages, Social Media, and FDS sites connected or not to the POS.
5. Partner Ecosystem Race: Vendors’ need for a mature set of functionality, bolstered in part by partnerships that are pre-integrated into their solution, continues to become a necessity and point of differentiation for leading solutions in the marketplace.
6. Module Set Meets Business Need: Combining the best selection of modules with a core POS for a given restaurant is an important factor in improving a solution provider’s ability to compete for an account and helping the restaurant find the best vendor.
7. Certainly the Cloud: Cloud solutions are often emphasized or required in today’s RFPs due to the benefits they produce for businesses.

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About this Report

This document reviews the marketing information and capabilities of this category’s solutions and the surrounding technology ecosystem. It contains original content written by Capsolve to provide a perspective of current trends affecting one or more of the hotel, restaurant, golf course, and country club industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.