We are a unique company with three locations and use retail and layaways. looked at a TON of different software programs and this is the only one that could customize our Layaways for what we needed. Do you have to wait sometimes for answers? well yes, who doesn't? The majority of the time I get through right away. However, when my server went down and I needed them ASAP, THEY ANSWERED VERY QUICKLY! I was up and running withing an ' hours' and it took me over a week to get my server back. (wasn't Amber's fault it was default hardware). We were still able to run the program on computers/registers without a server. (not many software companies can boast that) I have dealt with another retail software program in the past where SQL was ALWAYS BREAKING DOWN (for days) then all of our stores were literally down. This system (AMBER) has a great SQL structure and database. There is no perfect software company but Amber has always been kind, considerate and helpful whenever I called for issues. The problems have always been fixed (some require patience which in today's world- no one wants to wait). the most important thing is to have a stable system AND having someone in your company who can help train those who are computer illiterate. it is up to you to make the changes in your company. there are SOOO many reports to choose from that I still haven't used all of them. the best part is having all the customer history and all this history of purchases, sales etc that you can use. Amber does a great job of tracking individual items, so you can easily see who purchased them. Exporting is great to excel spreadsheets.

Customer History and product history. this software tracks EVERYTHING that you do with a product.

glitches that come occasionally with updates.

We are a small rapidly growing specialty garden store. We have used a few different POS systems since opening, about 6 years ago. All of the systems we worked with in the past had too many functionality issues for us to keep using their software for very long. Since switching to Amber POS almost 2 years ago, our system has become much more streamlined and much easier to use. We have a warehouse that we use for excess product and bulky item storage. Amber POS can accurately track ALL of our inventory in both locations. When we expand to more store locations, we can add an infinite number of additional stores, using all the existing information. No need to retype anything in! All business information is now kept in one place. It's very easy to find any information needed from product information, vendor information, customer information, to all sales history & reports. The staff at Pacific Amber has been a blessing for our business. They are always ready to help with any issues that may come up. They usually answer the phone on the first call, but if I have to leave a message, I get called back quickly. Try that with Quick books and see how you feel endlessly waiting for help that doesn’t come. We had some issues setting up our old accounting program on new computers we bought. The staff at Pacific Amber even helped us install software from another company! I'm not saying that they are supposed to or expected to, but service like that is one of the many reasons that I am extremely happy with their software and support. They care and it shows. They also got our new website up and running! They advised us which shopping cart software to use, and then integrated it to the Point Of Sale. Now we can upload, update, edit, add and remove products from our online store right from the POS window! When we sell an item online, the transaction can be downloaded into the POS without having to retype any information! I'm sure you can see how much time this can save! We can even sell on eBay though our website and not have to retype in ANY information; it all gets downloaded correctly right into the POS. All in all, this is a great system and I am very happy with it and the staff at Pacific Amber Technologies. I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs a solid POS system, from a single store with a small inventory, up to large retail companies with dozens of stores and thousands of products. This software can handle whatever you need it too.

It communicates well between 2 stores. You can set up a way to track frequent buyer cards even though it's clunky.

Getting things set up is incredibly clunky, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will go wrong. They force you to buy a subscription to their customer service help, so at that point, it adds on to the price. And if you don't, you get absolutely no help getting their software to really work for you. Most of the problems we have had are entirely THEIR fault and they still won't help you without the "customer service" package. a) we keep getting a message that says "duplicate entry or something is wrong" and they won't/can't fix it unless we pay. We can't rearrange the order of the point system items without literally going in one at a time and hitting "up up" until it gets to where you want. This takes HOURS. You can't delete one transaction that you've "held" (or "parked" in their terms) without deleting ALL parked transactions. The frequent buyer program/points system is clunky and hard to manually fix anything.. I guess it's trying to prevent fraud, but... for instance, I'm a pet food store... we do a buy 12 get 1 free program on our bags of dog food. If a person buys 6 bags of one food, and then switches to a different line of foods but the first 6 bags might sort of count (like they buy 15# bags, then buy 30# bags) you can't transfer the points from the first 6 bags at all... there is no way to "force" the free bag and deduct points. If you comp the bag manually, the customer gets one more point, not 6 less points. There is no report that I can find that tells you how many returns you've done in 1 month, or from 1 vendor, or from 1 customer, etc.. no way to track returns at all as far as I can tell. Sales per day of the week is also not found. In order to do my taxes each month, I have to run 2 separate reports... 1 to find service sales (non-taxable) and another to find tax exempt sales (like for government orgs). shall I go on?

I run a small business shoe store. The store has been in business for 33 years and coming into 2011 had never had any type of POS/inventory management. I came to SoftwareAdvice.com looking for assistance in locating the perfect retail software for a business that had previously never had as much as a computer. After a couple of months, I was able to narrow my search to Pacific Amber Technologies and their AmberPOS software. Despite being based out of Vancouver and having a 3-hour time difference to me on the east coast, Pacific Amber's customer service was top notch. Since they are a smaller business themselves, they seemed to understand the constraints of time and money and really worked to make sure I was getting everything I needed without spending more than I had to. In the early stages of getting all of the hardware, if they didn't have a product that I needed for a price that worked, they would direct me towards where online I could find it while maximizing my dollars. They assisted me every step of the way, from installation of software, to setup of any hardware, to getting my inventory tracking up and running. When it came time to set up my online store, AmberPOS was once again a huge help. The integration with my physical inventory and my online inventory was synced without much hang-up. As a business that hadn't used any type of inventory tracking previously, or anything digital at all, AmberPOS was relativity simple to teach to my sales staff and owner, all of who had very little computer experience. Most caught on very easily, and I definitely think that AmberPOS's layout and graphics not only make it a nice system to look at everyday, but much more inviting to someone who wouldn't be as comfortable with a system that functioned the same but looked like a spreadsheet. Over the past six months that we have had AmberPOS up and running fully in our store, any time we needed assistance we never had much issue getting in touch with their support team. Usually we could get the issue resolved within 24 hours, and they always checked back in to make sure everything was running smoothly. I cannot recommend Pacific Amber and their AmberPOS software more for a company of any size. The only reason I gave Functionality a 4-star rating is there are still a few minor issues, but whenever those are brought to their attention they are pretty quick to listen and update the software. I'll be sure to use AmberPOS for years to come!

I love that the system is easy to customize and flexible. The Amber staff is always available and willing to help, and have helped me craft the system to work exactly how we need it to work for the unique needs my retail store has. They are able to remote into our computer and help us create new features or troubleshoot problems in real time.

I would normally call it a con that I have to sometimes leave a voicemail, but honestly, it's faster than going through 20 different prompts before I can reach a live person. When I do leave a message they call back right away. There are no voice prompts. It's either a live person straight away or a quick call back. And the support staff is a small team, so you can easily speak to the same person every time you call, and they know our account when we call, AND they know and understand their product, which is more than I can say for 90% of the technology vendors I normally have to deal with!

Random errors. Their "fully integrated credit card processing" isn't. Sales process through credit card payments but not recorded in register. Customer service's reponse: "Just do a physical inventory of your 15,000 items to determine what sold." Half of the month of sales and receiving history disappeared randomly for no known reason. They don't care.

For anyone looking for a POS system, you cannot go wrong by choosing Amber.

Amber is easy to teach to my staff, remarkably easy to use on the administrative side and offers wonderful and personal support. It is an affordable system that I highly recommend to anyone looking to upgrade. From the people to the program, itself, I couldn't be happier and feel more confident that I made the right choice by choosing Amber.

I operate four separate museum stores and maintain four separate inventories within Amber. My wish is that it could be made easy to toggle between inventories without having to log out of one and into another. I'd love to be able to just log in and be able to maneuver between inventories with a bit more ease. Trust me, I can be a whiner..........and if this is my only complaint........well, Amber is doing okay by me, then.

From the start, the AmberPOS Team has walked us through setup to some minor issues we have had. The fact that they responded with expedience during a 4th of July weekend speaks volumes! The team support has truly been wonderful! Easy program that can be navigated by younger staff, and flexibility of sales ability work very well. Considering that we are a ticket booth, snack bar, and retail store, this program covers all bases for us!

Scalability and user friendly features allow this to remain small but give the ability to increase as the business grows.

Due to our location, internet is a little slow. Although this is not a cloud based POS, it still requires updates that can bog down our internet. This is NOT an issue with the software, it is an in-house issue.

AmberPOS solved our complicated retail business's problems. We sell live animals as well as merchandise, both online and at our brick and mortar. Only AmberPOS could handle our complicated inventory needs and reporting, along with the usual POS issues. Hands down the absolute best customer support we could ask for!

AmberPOS is complex so its interface is a bit complicated. After training and daily use we were able to get comfortable with AmberPOS and use it to its full potential.

None, anymore.

The Rental Program, which QBPOS does not offer.

The software was decent, but almost no support.

They are responsive to requests for assistance. The software has many advanced features. The value is good. The built-in reporting is nice, with some caveats (see below).

As a former software developer with 15 years of experience, there are a few issues I have. These might not bother everyone, though. First, the reporting system is nice, but you cannot alter the format or add/remove fields from the canned reports. This means I eventually had to build my own back end reporting system. The vast majority of people won't be able to do this, so be aware that if your main goal is robust reporting, this is a pretty major issue. Lack of keyboard shortcuts. If I change a SKU I cannot hit ctrl+S to save. I have to click the save button with the mouse. It's annoying. Unable to customize screen layouts. On the customer screen, for example, I cannot choose to display only the fields I use. This means there are a ton of fields I don't care about that I can't hide. This is the same for all the screens. The software has a lot of fields because of the advanced nature of its design. Even so, I don't need all of them, so being able to hide them would be wonderful. The label design system lacks a "snap to grid" system. Actually, it doesn't have a grid system at all. This makes designing a label unnecessarily difficult Custom queries cannot be altered later. If you setup a special price rule with a custom query and later wish to modify it, you must start over. Any attempt to change it will give you an error. This is annoying and leaves you open to risk that your new rule will miss logic you built into your old rule. It rounds down on sales taxes. If you sell any item that results in a sales tax value less than a penny, it won't charge sales tax. When you move thousands of dollars a year in these small transactions, this can lead to a substantial amount of sales tax you owe that the system never collected!

Would love to be able to have a convenient suggestion box to enter suggestions for improvement - and a newsletter emailed or on program to access letting us know what changes made and what changes you are working on to improve the program.

After a bit of a learning period since I was not used to working with spreadsheets, I found it easy to work with. After two years I am still finding out features that I find useful. Have also found tech support friendly and helpful. Integration with Big Commerce added additional challenges that Amber seems to be trying to deal with .

Tech support feedback not 100%. Had sent a few questions that did not get answered. Would really like to have an emailed newsletter announcing what improvements and changes have been made to the program. Found out that I needed to log onto a special site that had that information after being with Amber for a few years. Although POS program seems non geek friendly this information is aimed at the techs.

Great experience.

Amber is easy to use on a daily operations. The best thing is without a doubt the support I have received from Amber Team, specially [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] himself. Always professional, supportive, willing to listen to any issues and help solve them.

The system is local server base and and not cloud, which required higher cost on IT services and hardware maintenance.

For a stand alone POS solution, this is the one to choose.

AmberPOS has been our retail software supplier for over 15 years. We have had great support and solutions that fit our needs. Their improvements to the POS program has helped Marquis Wine Cellars get to the next stage of growth. Support is timely and knowledgeable. Lots of reporting capabilities and the program has been very stable over all these years.

This could integrate easier with accounting software.

Everything is there and many reports Scans products and works well with the credit processing Can preform queries on data

only had a few credit processing to use that would work with the system Ability to scan DL to get age verification still haven't been able to figure this out. When it scans, you get the driver's license number, not the birth date. very costly better off to purchase the software as the support they refer you to the online manual anyway. Once into your second year, your system will be paid for. make sure your data is the way they load into the system or you could be in big trouble with inventories not right.