Winery POS Systems
Our team tested 17 of the best selling POS systems in the wine industry and we chose the top 5.
Deciding on a POS will depend on whether your business model is based around wine production and tasting room sales, online ordering, a subscription-based wine club, or wholesale provision to wine bars.
Read below as we dig into each of the 5 chosen winery POS systems and compare them to help you decide which is perfect for your business.
POS System | Pricing | Sales Features | Customer Relationship Management | Tasting Room Booking | Business Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
From $69 per month | 9/10 | 9/10 | 9/10 | 10/10 | |
From $199 per month | 9/10 | 9/10 | 10/10 | 8/10 | |
From $79 per month | 8/10 | 8/10 | 9/10 | 8/10 | |
Quote-based | 8/10 | 9/10 | 8/10 | 7/10 | |
Quote-based | 8/10 | 9/10 | 8/10 | 9/10 |
The 5 Best Winery POS Systems
Quick Answer:
Lightspeed - Most versatile POS system
Xudle - Best winery-specific POS
Wine Direct - Best for DTC sales
360Winery - Most complete winery solution
Vintegrate 360 - Best customer support
Although not designed specifically for wineries, Lightspeed is one of the most popular point-of-sale software providers on the market. They offer comprehensive POS solutions to both the restaurant and retail sectors, covering most features winery owners might require at a very competitive price.
Sales Features
Lightspeed POS is a streamlined point of sale solution for retailers, restaurateurs, and a great choice for winery owners. Retailers can scan bar codes or search by name to enter wine stocks into Lightspeed's inventory control system and track across multiple locations.
Lighting fast check-out features allow you to process customer orders efficiently with options for club member discounts on the handheld terminal, as well as online ordering.
Tasting Notes
The product management module of Lightspeed Retail POS software allows detailed product descriptions which are perfect for including tasting notes and information from online reviews. Products can also be grouped, and the system's analytics will automatically identify purchasing patterns. This means that, when customers buying one wine are also fond of another, these insights are readily available to help your staff upsell similar wines.
Restaurant Management
With the Upserve restaurant package from Lightspeed POS, staff get all the tools they need for faster turnaround times while still delivering an excellent dining experience. Order-taking is via mobile input from a tablet at tableside, transmitted to a printer or digital display in the kitchen, while the modifiable menu features easily facilitate daily specials or menu rotation.
The Menu Intelligence feature can be used to identify trends in dishes (and wine pairings) that sell best among specific groups of customers.
Tasting Room Bookings
Another reason that the Lightspeed Retail POS platform is the best pos system for wineries, is because it includes an appointment management system designed to increase efficiency and reduce no-shows. Online appointment bookings have customer purchase history data attached and clients will receive confirmations and reminders to help ensure they are on time for their tasting. Alternatively, tasting room slots can be booked using the table management features of the Upserve restaurant package.
Xudle claims their winery POS software was created in response to other point-of-sale solutions being too disjointed and winery owners having to run several systems to get the full functionality they need.
It's certainly one of the most comprehensive systems available for the wine industry, although some features, including restaurant management, cost extra on top of the basic package.
Xudle does offer a great software solution. However, with higher monthly rates than some, and setup fees starting at $1500, you'll want to make sure you really need all of the functions of this system before choosing to splash out.
Below I've outlined some of the standout aspects of the Xudle system.
Branding and Marketing
The team at Xudle pays particular attention to working around your brand. They offer custom web design for your sales and bookings site, alongside a range of marketing tools which, whilst not dissimilar to some of the other winery POS systems, are tailored to your business with ROI always being the top priority.
Reservations and Events
The reservations system on Xudle goes beyond booking tasting room appointments. Tickets can be generated for almost any type of event and sold on an inventoried basis to prevent oversubscription. The system captures guest data alongside sales and allows offering different tiers of tickets based on your membership categories or guest purchase histories.
Restaurant Features
Unlike some winery POS systems, Xudle incorporates a restaurant management module (priced from $99/month) aimed primarily at quick-service restaurants. Although not quite as comprehensive as the software offered by food and beverage specialists such as Toast, it covers the needs of most establishments very well and integrates nicely within the Xudle package.
Orders can be transmitted directly to kitchen printers, there are options for pay-on-order and pay-at-end business models, and plenty of flexibility, from menu modification at the point of ordering to custom discounts for specific member categories.
Wine Direct is very much focused on optimizing Direct to Consumer (DTC) sales. They boast a completely mobile (cloud-based) solution for both tasting rooms and selling wine online, handling every aspect from lead conversion and customer relationship management to streamlining the ordering and delivery process via your mobile POS device.
Reservations and Customer Relationship Management
Wine Direct has entered into a partnership with Tock, a specialist provider of reservations and customer relationship management solutions.
Through integration with the Tock platform, customer information is automatically added to tasting room bookings, so your employees have access to a host of data about previous purchases, tasting notes, and even allergy information before the client even arrives at your winery.
The system also has handy scheduling and reminder features to help make the most efficient use of your bookable spaces and reduce no-shows.
eCommerce and Fulfillment
Being a popular choice among wineries, Wine Direct has built up a wealth of expertise on optimizing online sales and delivery. In addition to this informing the features of their POS, they provide training materials to help wineries increase the profitability of their online sales channels and develop a reputation for personalized service.
For direct-to-consumer upselling, there are automated "Carrot" alerts, which suggest other wines customers might want to add to their order based on their current and previous purchases e.g. if you're offering reduced shipping costs on full cases.
Wine Club Management
Whether you're running a simple membership discount scheme or a multi-tiered rewards program, the Wine Direct POS manages sign-up, membership alerts, upgrades, and membership category suggestions based on user preferences. There's even a free e-book about the role of wine clubs and how effective wine club management helps grow your business.
Winery 360 is an integrated cloud-based winery POS system, handling admin, costings, warehousing and distribution, wine club memberships, restaurant, and viticulture.
Five years in the making, it provides all the tools needed by a winery to operate efficiently at every stage of their business – from admin through to logistics and order taking. It can be used on multiple devices and accessed from anywhere.
Sales features
An overview of wines, prices, and customers is available on a single screen. Inventory management and inventory tracking are comprehensive and easy to use via barcode scanning, which is supported for both wines on hand and stock ordering.
Customers can be grouped into wine club memberships (the same person can belong to several clubs), or tracked by unique customer ID number. Customer/wine club information can be saved for future orders, as well as being used for marketing purposes.
Restaurant Management
Order taking, invoicing for purchases or bills from a winery's restaurant, and dealing with kitchen stock issues are all covered within 360Winery. The restaurant inventory management data covers not only the food and beverage products themselves but also consumables – plates, cups, sauces, etc.
Employee Management
360Winery has a full employee management and payroll system. Comprehensive sales, stock movement, customer, restaurant order, and administration data can all be logged to individual employees as they happen. This allows you to identify the strengths of individual team members as well as areas for training and support.
Fully Integrated
As well as automatically communicating with the Inventory and Restaurant systems, Winery 360 links into a winery's website (if present) so customers can order online. Inventory allocation information is automatically passed on to Inventory, which in turn will generate the relevant purchase orders.
Part of the KLH Consulting group, Vintegrate see themselves less as a provider of POS software solutions and more as a business consultancy service.
In their literature, the platform itself is presented as almost secondary to the partnership approach, whereby a team is assigned to investigate the needs of each new client and identify how best to match those needs to the capabilities of the software.
This process starts with a business review and continues all the way through planning, implementation, testing and training before bringing your new system live (with ongoing support).
As to how the system itself stacks up against the competition, the Vintegrate winery point-of-sale software has some impressive features, especially in terms of collection and use of customer data, Business Intelligence analytics, and supporting wholesale business alongside direct to consumer (DTC) sales.
Business Intelligence
The integrated Business Intelligence features in Vintegrate give you powerful tools to analyze and improve the performance of your wine business. The system allows management to view sales trends by location, product, customer, and employee. That way you can identify weak performers and opportunities with real-time reporting.
Vintegrate also includes new ways to keep track of your inventory. With the recent addition of bottle labels in Vintegrate, you can instantly see what bottles are available at which locations as well as their backorder status (if any).
Customer Data Management
The Vintegrate customer data management features will help you manage customer information and increase customer loyalty.
You can create customer profiles to store customer name, address, email, phone number, and initial salesperson information. Clients can also be grouped by customer type, marketing preferences and more, to assist with the production of targeted marketing materials.
Online Wholesale features
Vintegrate eCommerce features allow you to sell through your own website. You can manage orders, shipments, and payments from inside Vintegrate. This gives wineries the ability to automate and manage e-commerce activities independently, without paying third-party fees.
For wine stores and other wholesale customers, you can use the Vintegrate eCommerce features to streamline wholesale pricing, inventory, and shipping. The clients then have access to a dedicated wholesale web portal from which they can place and track their orders.
Factors To Consider When Buying
The wine industry is a unique one and, although sharing many features with other retail businesses, has specific requirements winery owners need to consider carefully in choosing a new POS system.
However, this doesn't necessarily mean all wine-sales-specific POS systems are a better option than the best general point-of-sale and management software packages. There are some excellent and versatile systems out there, so each winery or wine bar should be looking at which of the following areas are the most central to their needs and selecting a POS on that basis.
Customer relationship management
Wine clubs are as much about providing a customer experience as the wines themselves. The CRM features of the best winery POS systems help you get to know your customers even before dealing with them in person. Being able to tailor wine club membership categories, advice, and promotions to their specific profile makes your wine club members feel valued and understood, making this one of the most vital features to consider in choosing your new winery POS system.
Inventory management
An inventory management system is designed to monitor your wine inventory from top-to-bottom, which helps you keep track of wine stocks and eliminates errors when purchasing or cataloging wines. A good system keeps an eye on what goes out the door or in, so you know if any bottles are damaged or stolen, thereby saving money as well as time.
A good inventory management system also allows you to perform inventory audits, which ensures your inventory data is correct. It should have an inventory stock reorder function that will calculate the items you need to buy, given the wines already in stock and their reordering frequency.
Tasting room reservations
A POS solution with a tasting room online reservations system helps the winery staff know what days they will have high visitor numbers and allows them to plan for special events by knowing how many people will be in attendance, so they can make sure there is enough wine, food, and wine sales staff available.
The best online reservations systems automate the booking reminder process and link customer data from the Customer Relationship Management module to the booking, so staff can identify which wines to offer based on a customer's purchase history before they even arrive.
The Final Verdict
The best winery POS software for you depends on how you choose to sell wine. An online wine club selling to wine enthusiasts around the world has needs that differ greatly from wineries relying on wholesale orders generated by tasting room visits, or wineries that generate additional income from a restaurant with table service.
However, there are systems that can handle all of these operations. If you want to maintain the greatest flexibility in your business model, you can't go far wrong with a package from Lightspeed or Xudle.
Tyler Connaghan
Contributing Author