Brought new life to my store!

Since we opened, we have hand written all our checks and inventory, which has sometimes lead to discrepancies in what we have in stock and prices on items. It also takes longer to cash people out at the register, which has left some customers at an inconvenience when running late to a gig. Since moving to Rain, we are now able to easily see what is in stock and let customers know if we have extra in the back all from our phones. Recently we had a customer whos speaker blew while at a gig and he was able to order a new one online for us to have ready for him when he walked in the door! We love using Rain!

Pros

Rain POS was surprisingly easy to set up and integrate into my exsiting website, it really opened up a lot of doors to help sell things in my store that have been sitting a while. We do a lot of lawaway orders, so it was nice to be able to set up a lawaway option on our online store.

Cons

The only thing I wish I was able to do is have the option to add multiple products at a time to help streamline the inventory process. Other than that, I have had zero issues!

Switched to Rain from Lightspeed

Overall pleased with RAIN and glad we made the switch. A bit more thought into easier workflow within the Register, Special Order and LayAway screens and it will be a force to reckon with. I was hoping for an easier eCom experience, but that is not what I received. Much like other POS Systems that offer an integrated eCom Site...building out the site and making it look the way we want doesn't follow the basic HTML buildout process. As a web developer for over 20 years...I find the eCom platform to be VERY challenging to use and often times VERY discouraging. I can see they worked hard to have the functionality be similar to other CMS Website Platforms (Wix, WordPress, etc), but it's too confusing to navigate effectively taking up valuable time.

Pros

Integrated Marketing Automatic "pushing" of items to our Reverb.com Account Lightweight on system resources on our iMac's

Cons

Special Order Workflow is clunky and needs to be simplified. We've resorted to using the "Quote" option to better manage Special Orders and ring in total sales under a "Gift Card" first. That way when working with multiple vendors on a special order, we have easier use of customer funds when "finalizing" the deal. Register is Average and would prefer ability to see cost of products on screen. In Register - when scanning duplicate items they get entered as "new" line item versus adding to the SKU already input. Can't us an IR Gun on an iPad when scanning incoming inventory or during inventory counts. Layaway Screen has some great features, but workflow is a bit convoluted. Website build out is horribly confusing and NOTHING follows traditional HTML processes. This was the same problem with Lightspeed's eCom platform - hard to work with and no sense of workflow.

Disappointing compared to the hype of what you are getting.

We have a hard time getting on the same page. The communication is mostly by email and the timing is hard because we are so far apart. The support people are very kind and try to get things done but the day to day trying to muddle through this change was not worth it, if I could get my money back I would. I am currently paying Lightspeed just not to loose my past sales and lay-a-ways until someone can merge them, this is costly for a small business. I also wish they would talk to whoever answers the phone as I can't just sit on top of the phone all day waiting for a call, this could have been fixed if they would have just talked to the person answering the phone. There are only three people who work here and all three of us are capable of following direction.

Pros

So far the only Pro is that you can pull a some information from Vendors. Being able to have inventory taken out with sales from Reverb is really nice, it was the catch hook that brought me to RAIN.

Cons

The merge is really rough, I did not get all of my customers merged from my previous POS system, my lay-a-ways were lost or messed up, past sales are lost, pictures had to be taken again. All the upc numbers were mismatched with other products. When you try to put pictures of your product for the website, you never know what picture it may choose no matter how many times you choose the correct one. I have had a bass I have tried many times to add a picture and it refused to add it and puts up a picture of a gig bag. I was told if I used Chrome many of the issues would subside, sadly this is not true. If you are starting out fresh, this may be an okay system to use, if you are migrating from another system, I would NOT recommend using RAIN. I really had high hopes but this has been a disaster. Even the work orders, which I thought would be easier, are a huge pain.

Like Sew POS Review

Overall we are happy with Rain/Like Sew. It gives us an easy to manage Web front end for our store that behind the scenes in completely integrated with our Brick & Mortar operation. Improvements are still needed in many areas - the system is a work in progress regularly rolling our new and improved functionality.

Pros

We bought it for the seamless integration of Web and Brick & Mortar inventory management, sales and ease of use. It works very well for this purpose.

Cons

It is ultimately POS and Inventory Management software with little Accounting functionality. Daily exports to QuickBooks or other software are required, with additional entries in the accounting s/w to accommodate accounting best practices, Taxes on Receiving orders, billing and other financial tasks not accommodated in Like Sew. There are still some issues with Sales, Shipping and Taxes in Canada, and there is no ability to set up multiple price levels internally

Rain POS

Pros

This is a great program that integrates a point of sale program with a website store that keep inventory stock levels on the website. The basics functions are easy to use and learn.

Cons

Rain POS needs to make some of the reporting more functional so that you can see product sales easier and for a monthly and yearly sense.