A liquor store point of sale system does more than process payments. With the right technology, you can keep a sharp eye on your inventory, remain legally compliant, maintain a loyal customer base, and much more.
Speed is the name of the game in a liquor store. If you have just one checkout station, you’ll want a POS system that syncs with a tablet, giving you the ability to check out multiple customers at once. The right system will have to ability to scan ID’s (if necessary) and organize your inventory in a way you can work with. If you have thousands of product variants, look for software that can import those SKUs from your current POS system or supplier.
After comparing various options, we found KORONA POS is the best liquor store POS system. The platform includes a robust liquor inventory system, cashier prompts for age verification, special pricing and promotions, back-end reporting, a powerful array of hardware options, and much more.
Consider other features like personalized profiles, for more personal interactions with customers. With the employee management feature, track when a certain employee is checking in and set special permissions. Finally, access back-end reporting to gauge your sales for the day, week, or month and track which items are best-sellers and which shouldn’t be stocked on your shelves.
Let’s dive into the top six liquor store POS systems, so you can see which one will bring the most value to your store.
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Comparing the 6 Best Liquor Store POS Systems
 | Starts at $49 per month | Quote-based | ||
 | Starts at $99 per month | Included in $99 per month | ||
 | Starts at $75 per month | Quote-based | ||
 | Starts at $99 per month | Quote-based | ||
 | Starts at $75 per month | Quote-based | ||
 | $1,000 upfront and $120 per month | Quote-based |
1. Korona: Best Overall Liquor Store POS System
KORONA has been in the liquor store industry for the past several decades and grown rapidly in the United States, now serving thousands of liquor retailers. The software comes with many features that have been designed specifically for the industry.
The solution is cloud-based and offered to businesses as a subscription service. All updates are automatically included in the subscription, so users always have the most advanced version. KORONA subscriptions start at $49/month per terminal and come with no contracts, processing agreements, extra fees, or cancellation penalties.
Top Features
Liquor Store Inventory
The biggest hurdle for most liquor retailers is conquering a massive inventory. KORONA comes with the most robust inventory management system on the market. The solution handles automated ordering, stock notifications, par levels, vendor management, and more.
Promotions
The software offers liquor stores added convenience with pricing and promotions. It’s simple to set case breaks, create bundled deals, or create any custom promotions that suit your store.
Any changes are applied in real-time and reflected in the backend reporting. Liquor stores can set specific time frames for promotions and adjust them to be for individual items, storewide, or across multiple locations.
Cashier Prompts
KORONA ensures that each cashier gets an age verification prompt for each customer. Plus, stores can set custom permission levels for each employee, controlling drawer access, no sales, voids, comps, price edits, and more. And individual shift reports and a time clock manager helps liquor stores monitor performance and scheduling.
Sales Reporting
The robust inventory management allows KORONA to offer in-depth reporting, too. Hundreds of custom KPI reports can be generated within seconds. These help liquor stores identify overall trends, employee performance, best and worst sellers, revenue, margins, promotions, and a whole lot more.
Loyalty and CRM
KORONA comes standard with a point-based loyalty system. This allows liquor retailers to create a customer database and offer shoppers an incentivized loyalty program. For a more robust CRM system, KORONA integrates with Bottlecapps, the most popular liquor store CRM.
Hardware
The software integrates with various pieces of hardware, including desktops, touchscreens, self-checkout kiosks, tablets, modern payment machines, and all over peripherals.
Multi-Location Capabilities
The software is built to scale with businesses and seamlessly caters to multi-store liquor chains or franchises. Data can be transferred quickly when opening a new location, and all reports and sales metrics can be run by an individual store or as the entire operation.
For franchises, KORONA will calculate royalty payments helping automate more for both the franchisor and franchisee.
Pricing
KORONA features a multi-tiered pricing structure, with every package allowing unlimited users and sales. Their base package, KORONA Core, costs $49 per month. This goes all the way up to KORONA Plus for $79 per month, and KORONA Enterprise, which is a quote-based package. All of their plans charge 0% transaction fees. They also offer hardware leasing and payment plan options.
Potential Drawbacks
The only major drawback to Korona is that there are no hardware and software bundles, meaning you have to license, and pay for, both of them separately.
2. POS Nation: Best Software for Growing Liquor Stores
Liquor stores need a powerful point of sale solution for managing inventory, verifying customer ages, and running in-depth business reports. After doing our research, we’ve found that POS Nation is the team you need behind your package store.
Run Effective Promotions
When it comes to features, no other point of sale provider can compare. With CAP Retail by POS Nation’s mix and match, your small business can increase sales and move inventory by bundling liquor, wine, or beer into enticing deals. If this sounds like an inventory nightmare, there’s no need to stress — the system also comes with top-notch case break tracking so managing cases, bottles, and six-packs is an automatic and hands-off task.
Simple Inventory Management
Speaking of inventory, do you dread counting stock? POS Nation makes it easier than ever to receive a large delivery and keep up with inventory. Set reorder thresholds, and once they’re hit, purchase orders are automatically generated and sent to your vendors. When you receive inventory, the system recalculates stock without you moving a finger.
The integrated mobile inventory feature and handheld inventory device make tracking products a painless task, even for end-of-year stock counts. To top it all off, POS Nation allows you to import an unlimited number of SKUs, so you never have to worry about hitting a limit.
Safe Age Verification
Gone are the days of manually checking your customers’ birth dates. The old school way of checking IDs allows your cashiers to make a small mistake that can result in a big problem for your business. CAP Retail by POS Nation is designed for efficiency, letting your team members quickly swipe or scan an ID to determine whether the liquor sale can be made. No guesswork on the cashier’s end and no business penalties for your shop.
Top-Notch Business Analytics
No matter your business type, reporting and analytics are vital in measuring success. POS Nation‘s reporting allows you to dive deep so that you can make better business decisions. The software makes it easy to track sales by the department and identify which brands are driving sales and profitability.
It’s also simple to export insights specific to liquor, such as 1014 reporting for Pennsylvania beer distributors. And on the other side of administrative duties, POS Nation comes integrated with employee management so you can manage pay rates and process payroll from a single system.
At the end of the day, POS Nation is a solid choice for liquor stores that want to speed up checkout, make inventory management easier, and make well-informed business decisions. The company is a small business too, and they promise to be there for their customers with 24/7 support, payment processing, powerful software, and commercial-grade hardware.
3. IT Retail: Best POS System For Small Liquor Stores
IT Retail has been helping grocery stores, supermarkets, convenience stores, and liquor stores with effective POS solutions for more than 25 years.
Its cloud-based POS solutions are built on the Microsoft platform (Microsoft Windows, SQL Server, .Net) and interface with the Microsoft suite of products, allowing businesses to eliminate the cost of maintaining their own servers, but can also work with site-hosted configurations.
Because IT Retail was developed for grocery stores and markets, it’s not as robustly tailored to the needs of liquor stores as other options, but translates well enough with its core features and functionalities.
Inventory
The liquor store inventory management feature is capable of tracking bottles and cans, whether they are sold individually, in 6-packs, in a case, or all three.
Age-Restricted Selling
In order to stay compliant with age restrictions on purchasing alcohol, the POS system can be configured to force entry of each customer’s date of birth before ringing up a transaction. Age verification is very important to any liquor store owner.
Payments
IT Retail supports all the latest payment technologies for customer convenience such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, 1-Second EMV, EBT, and swipe. All credit card transactions function even when if your internet connection is down, and will automatically sync back up with the cloud when you’re back online.
Employee Management and Theft Protection
Your employees can clock in and out directly through the POS system. This holds your staff members accountable for product inventories during their shifts. It also allows you to track employee performance to generate actionable insights from all transactions.
Pricing
Note that hardware is not included in any IT Retail plans and must be purchased separately. Small, independent stores can use the software for $99/month using the payment processor of your choice. There are also plans for larger single stores (supermarkets) and chains (enterprise), but pricing for those is by quote only.
Potential Drawbacks
Because IT Retail isn’t robustly tailored to liquor stores, it lacks some key functionality, including mix-and-match pricing and case break inventory tracking.
4. Vend: All-In-One Liquor Store POS Software
After countless hours of research and going through user reviews, we’ve (happily) settled on Vend as one of our top-picks for liquor store point of sale software. Why you may ask? Read on to find out!
Vend offers a giant, laundry-list of features, checking boxes on more than just a simple point of sale solution. For example, Vend works both on the cloud and offline. This means you can sync up your iPads, Macs or PCs, and continue selling when the Internet goes down.
In the event your connection does go down, Vend’s liquor store POS system will sync all your sales automatically. There’s no fear of losing data or tracking failure with Vend. Vend even offers fast staff training, discounts and notes, custom receipts, layaway and on-account sales options, returns, refunds, store credit, cash management, and even a multi-user platform!
Do More with Vend
With Vend, the opportunities and possibilities are endless – you’ll keep your inventory flawless and create an easier work environment in the process. What’s the most impressive feature of Vend? The price! Vend offers three different user plans for your liquor store business. Beginning with the starter plan at $69 monthly, it offers an advanced package at $79 after that, followed by a multi-outlet option for $199 monthly.
Each plan offers distinctive features, increasing in number and in utility as the price does. Check out our in-depth review of these payment plans, and even more info on Vend, in our review below.
A Little Bit About The Company
Vend describes its establishment as a company that has taken retail management software to the cloud. They partner with the best, they claim, teaming up with establishments like Apple, PayPal, Square, Shopify, Xero, iZettle and more. Even more than that, they’ve got the support to back them up, legitimizing their claims with 20,000 stores across 140 countries using their system. Vend also specializes in customer loyalty program and more.
Customer Support
Vend claims to make running your liquor store easier, offering not only a strong checklist of must-have features for your liquor store, but also offering 24-7 global support every day of the year.
Customizable
With Vend, each staff member can create their own, custom user profile to help aid in tracking sales, and you, as the business owner have access to restrict what specific users can see or do. There are even neat features like discount and notes, cash management, and quick, intuitive staff training. This makes Vend a top contender among liquor store POS software options.
Cloud-Based Software
More than that, one of the features Vend is proudest of is the cloud-computing software. You can access your software from any device at any time, allowing you to work and manage your business from anywhere and as often as you see fit. Better than that, though, you can continue using Vend even when you’re offline. Worried about all the sales and data you input while you were offline?
Don’t be. Vend has you covered. It automatically syncs up all the sales and transactions you made while you were offline, guaranteeing swift and accurate tracking.
Inventory Tracking
Now, to the biggest and best point of all – the point of sale and inventory tracking feature. As a liquor store, you’re constantly organizing, tracking, and bringing in an influx of new, old, and featured wine, beer, or spirit products. That’s a lot to manage, and even more, that’s a lot to track flawlessly.
With Vend, inventory counts, stock orders, inventory control, bar codes and labels, and stock transfers are a breeze. This point of sale program offers all the features you need to sync your products across all channels, tracking your inventory, and ensuring that you always have the top-selling products in stock.
Pricing
Vend offers three pricing tiers. Their single-location Lite plan starts at $99 per month, billed annually ($119 if billed monthly). For more advanced features, you can select their $129 per month Pro plan, or quote-based Enterprise plan.
Potential Drawbacks
Vend is one of the more expensive liquor store POS options, especially considering the limited number of users and locations you get for that price. Many of the alternatives are more affordable and offer equal or greater value.
5. CashierLive: Best Inventory Management Software for Liquor Stores
Following close behind Vend is our second-favorite point of sale system and software, CashierLive. The company, a Chicago-based establishment that began in 2008, aims to provide a low-cost point of sale system to independent liquor stores and retailers.
Their website states that though they began in 2008, they already have customers all across the United States. As they grow aggressively, they are working to implement new features that liquor store owners want to see in a point of sale solution.
However, CashierLive is not only committed to improving its own product and providing excellent customer service to its users. This POS solution takes pride in their web-based distribution that allows for easy set-up, installation, and automatic upgrades. They claim to be 100% focused on retailers, especially small to medium-sized establishments.
Cloud-Based System
CashierLive is a cloud-based system that works everywhere. Accepting payments is simple, allowing transactions to be made quickly and efficiently – faster than ever before. In addition to that, CashierLive lists features such as email receipts, customer tracking, and hardware compatibility. Also, split payments, inventory management and searches, transaction holding and barcode scanning.
Inventory Management
Let’s dive in and take a closer look at inventory management and searching. As a liquor store, you’re not only selling but holding thousands of different labels and brands in your inventory.
No matter how many products you sell, though, CashierLive has you covered. They make it easy for you to search through your inventory, providing you with a number of ways to filter items, like UPC, description, supplier, reorder number, and more.
Further, it works with a VIN and barcode scanner system. Ringing up items should be easy, and with the provided barcode scanner, you’re able to collect all the information on the items within your inventory. CashierLive can make it even easier, allowing you to hook up Bluetooth with an iPad or using the camera on your iPhone to scan the barcode.
Customer Support
Once again, this POS system provides live 24/7 support. There is no waiting for a live person or shuffling through awkward automated systems. Instead, if you are facing a busy night at your business, you know that CashierLive can immediately help you solve your problems.
Multi-Location
Multi-LocationA huge benefit to CashierLive is their multi-location capabilities. In other words, if you own multiple stores you know without a dought that you can access all of your data for those stores on one POS system. This is a huge benefit, especially if your stores are far apart and it is difficult to check in regularly.
Pricing
The pricing for CashierLive is hard to beat when you consider the number of features offered. For just $75 monthly per location, you’re able to unlock all the features that CashierLive offers, including unlimited registers, unlimited inventory, and even more impressive, unlimited technical support 24-7. They even offer you a 14-day trial.
Potential Drawbacks
The biggest drawback with CashierLive is the fact that it is a generic system, lacking several key liquor store features.
6. mPower Beverage Software: Easiest to Use POS System
Although it’s the last liquor POS software on the list, we still can’t get enough of the mPower beverage software. The company, located in Dallas, TX, and has has been around since the early 2000’s.
It is designed and developed by InfoSolve, Inc. It features dozens of reasons why we believe it to be one of the best.
For starters, the software can be installed remotely with current technology. This gives you the abilities and immediate access to your retail POS software.
Inventory System
The POS Software can import current inventory or use a pre-loaded database of over 20,000 standard beverage items. This is done with UPC, descriptions, sizes, case packs, and assignment in the correct department and category.
More than that, the ordering modules available can help you decide and order what you need based on stock levels and selling velocity. Your inventory will have room for only the hot-selling items that make sense for you.
You can review your history, edit your quantities and cost. Not to mention, you can create purchase orders for multiple vendors all with the push of a button.
Other features in this software include inventory monitoring, company messages, time clocks, barcode scanning, and customer tracking. It also helps you keep your inventory, products, and customer organization in line at all times.
Customer Loyalty
The customer loyalty program on mPower is not to be reckoned with. This POS system allows you to provide your customers with discounts based on how often they shop at your store.
Additionally, the program allows you to set discounts when customers purchase entire cases of a product. This can be a huge benefit when servicing restaurants or customers who know what they like. It also prevents your employees from needing to check and re-check price points whenever they sell a large quantity.
Multi-Location Abilities
When it comes to having multiple stores, mPower simply takes the cake. Not only can you check in on your stores from any place at any time, but it also allows for sales to span all stores. What does this mean?
Basically, all of your stores can have sales of the same items at the same time or allows your customers to use loyalty cards at all locations. This creates an incredibly easy way for you to make sure your customers across regions are satisfied.
Customer Service
Customer ServiceCustomer service for mPower is not as strong as other services. Though they do offer a live line, they recommend that you send many concerns via email. This can simply take longer than most stores prefer.
Pricing
mPower Beverage Software starts at a $1,000 one-time installation fee and $120 per month for a single register. Additional registers cost $250 upfront and $120 per month.
Potential Drawbacks
The biggest drawback with mPower Beverage Software is the high upfront cost. Out of all the platforms we’ve reviewed, it certainly is the most expensive to install.
Buyer’s Guide: What to Look for in a Liquor Store POS System
As you search for the right POS system for your business, here are some specific things to look out for.
Age Verification
The first and most important feature to look for is age verification. This can be done through manual input on the customer side or, ideally, by scanning their photo ID.
Cashier Prompts
Automatically prompt cashiers to verify ages, and set permission levels for each employee, controlling drawer access, no sales, voids, comps, price edits, and more.
Liquor-Specific Inventory Management
With a wide variety of products in your store, having an organized inventory is critical. In addition to robust standard inventory management features, there are also some liquor-specific features you’ll probably need. These include mix-and-match bottle pricing to allow for enticing bundling deals, and case break inventory tracking.
Loyalty & CRM
Build a loyal base of followers with a powerful CRM system that stores important customer information, allowing for a more personalized experience. Plus, you should be able to build loyalty programs with enticing rewards that will prompt your customers to return over and over again.
Sales Reporting
Keep your finger on the pulse of your business. Your POS system should enable you to track incoming sales by cashier, item, category, and other important metrics. You should also be able to pull reports to help you analyze performance and find those areas where you need to improve.
Customer Tracking
As an establishment, customer management and keeping tabs on your customers is crucial. As a liquor store selling alcohol, maintaining the correct customer base is what keeps you running.
Solid liquor store POS systems provide correct and accurate customer tracking, as well as birthday identification and age-checking software. In other words, you can ensure that you’re never accidentally selling to underage patrons.
More than that, these systems allow you to track these customers. That way, you can always ensure someone is giving you the correct identification. Be confident your customers are not purchasing for minors without your knowledge.
Accept Various Payment Types
If you operate a liquor store, chances are that you offer discounts on your products. Maybe you offer further promotions during holiday or special events, where individuals make large purchases.
On a daily basis, simple purchases could contain up to six items in a case or more, due to liquor and beer products usually being sold in sets. For that reason, a robust POS system could make the checkout process so much easier.
Discounts and different sale opportunities could also be made much easier for the clerk and the consumer.
Payment Security
The data usually stored internally is important and should be treated as so. Security levels are pretty much a must-have with anyone processing payments. Recently, many point of sale systems were hacked. There is always some risk or potential security breaches with any system. However, a liquor store pos in high-value target due to the number of credit card transactions.
Therefore, a good liquor pos system would have extra protection or precautions. The system should use two-factor authentication, daily antivirus scan and segmentation of networks.
Ready to Utilize a POS System In Your Liquor Store?
Long times are the first thing you want to avoid in your liquor store. Be sure to choose a system that offers safe contactless payments that can process transactions fast. The right liquor store POS system will help you sell more. From managing inventory, to creating customer profiles, to taking special orders and never missing a sale, the right software will handle every step of your sales process.
By using software with liquor store-specific functionality, you’ll be able to better manage your business and convert more sales. This includes features like age verification, specific inventory features, CRM, and much more.
Also, be sure to take into account each POS provider’s pricing, paying attention to costs like transaction fees, one-time installation or onboarding fees, and hardware costs. For example, POS systems like Square offer the software with no monthly cost, but their processing rates will be much higher than other POS systems. For other costs when opening a liquor store, read our guide about how much it costs to open a liquor store.
A true all-in-one solution will offer solid sales reporting, so all the data is at your fingertips. For growing liquor stores, you’ll need a solution you can scale with, should you choose to expand your current locations or other locations you’ll open in the future. Keeping all these factors in mind will help you choose the right system for your business. If you own a winery or think of starting one, check our post about winery POS systems.
