Clover, honestly

We sell Clover. Here is what a rep should tell you and often does not.

Clover is a genuinely good point-of-sale system for a lot of businesses. The hardware is solid, the app market is deep, and staff pick it up fast. For a café, a boutique, a quick-service restaurant, or a salon it is frequently exactly the right answer.

There are two things about it that are worth understanding before you buy one, from us or from anybody else.

1. Clover devices are bound to the processor that boarded them

This is the big one. A Clover is not a neutral piece of hardware you can carry to a new processor the way you might move a plain terminal. It is provisioned against the processor that set it up.

Which means if you buy a Clover today and want to switch processors in two years, you are generally looking at new hardware, not a reconfiguration. That is not a Phase 3 policy and it is not a scandal. It is simply how the platform works. What is unreasonable is that plenty of people find out about it in year two.

Practical consequence: the switching cost on a Clover is real, and you should factor it into the decision now rather than discover it later.

2. The software plan is separate from processing

Clover devices carry a monthly software plan, tiered by what the system does. Add-on apps stack on top of that. A quote that mentions only a processing rate is not describing your actual monthly cost.

Ask any rep, including ours, for the full monthly number: processing, software plan, apps, and hardware financing if you are not buying outright. If they will not put all four in writing, that tells you something.

When Clover is the right call

• You want a deep app ecosystem for scheduling, loyalty, payroll or inventory
• Your staff turn over often and you need something people learn quickly
• You are running a café, quick service, retail, or a salon with fairly standard needs
• You want one vendor for hardware, software and support
• You are settled on a processor and not planning to move

When it is probably not

• You need one specific piece of industry software that Clover does not integrate with well
• Your operation is genuinely complex, multi-location, deep coursing, unusual inventory
• You want to preserve the option to move processors cheaply
• You already own working hardware that could simply be reprogrammed
• You need something a general-purpose system just is not built for

What we do

We ask what goes wrong on your busiest day before we mention a brand. Sometimes the answer is Clover. Sometimes it is a different system. Sometimes it is that your existing terminal is fine and you should keep it.

We would rather you keep a system for six years than replace it in nine months, because the second one costs us a customer.

How we choose hardware →