5 Top Garden Center POS Solutions [FEATURES + PRICING]

Running a successful garden center requires more than just a green thumb.

If you want your garden store to thrive, you need a point of sale (POS) solution that simplifies your daily operations but also helps you manage your inventory, track customer purchases, and generate insightful reports. 

With the right tools, you can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time helping your customers create the gardens of their dreams.

This post compares the five top garden center POS solutions, including features and pricing, to give you all the information you need to make the right choice for your business. 

Garden Center POS Basics: Advantages and Key Features 

Any business has its unique challenges, and running a garden center is no different. From managing seasonal inventory fluctuations to handling perishable and living products, garden center owners have to juggle many metaphorical balls to ensure their business thrives. 

Let’s look at each of these challenges in more detail and explore how the right garden center POS can help. 

Related Read: 5 Essential Inventory Management Software Features

One of the most significant challenges is dealing with seasonal inventory fluctuations. Garden centers often experience a surge in demand during the spring and summer months and struggle with lulls during the colder seasons. These dramatic shifts in sales require careful planning and inventory management processes. 

Overstocking can result in waste in any industry, but this is doubly true in the lawn and garden center business. Much of your inventory is perishable or living, including plants, flowers, and seeds that truly cannot wait until next season if they don’t sell fast enough. As a result, you must be extra careful to avoid ordering too much safety stock of your top sellers.  

Another challenge is the diverse product mix found in garden centers. From small items like gardening gloves and hand tools to large, bulky items like lawnmowers and outdoor furniture, garden centers must be equipped to handle a wide range of products with varying sizes and storage requirements. 

Pro tip: To manage the volume of different products and categories in your store, you’ll need a POS solution with a portable scanner and unlimited SKUs. 

Lastly, most garden centers operate, at least in part, outdoors or in greenhouses. The climate, humidity, and other elements present in these environments mean you need a hardy, durable POS solution capable of handling transactions and inventory management in these outdoor environments. 

To overcome the challenges associated with operating a garden center, you’ll want to look for a POS system with specific features tailored to your unique needs. 

Mobile inventory management and scanning capabilities are essential, allowing staff to manage and update inventory on the go using smartphones or tablets. A POS system with an inventory menu offering both image and text views, along with multi-touch scrolling, makes it easier to navigate through large product catalogs.

Related Read: 6 Garden Center Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business ASAP

Finally, a garden center POS system should offer advanced payment support, including EMV (chip card) and NFC (contactless) transactions. This provides customers with a range of secure payment options, helps garden centers stay compliant with industry standards, and protects against fraud.

With these key features and challenges in mind, let's take a closer look at the top options for garden center POS solutions that can help your business thrive. 

1. Retail Control Systems 

Best for: Garden and sporting goods centers

Retail Control Systems (RCS) offers a custom POS solution designed to streamline operations, improve checkout efficiency, and provide meticulous inventory tracking for businesses like garden centers and sporting goods businesses. 

Key features for garden centers include:

• Advanced inventory management: RCS enables garden centers to sell mixed flats and multiple units while providing automated, customizable reporting. 
• E-commerce integration: RCS integrates with e-commerce platforms and their cloud-based RCS Aero data center, providing a comprehensive solution that meets the unique needs of garden centers. 
• Customizable dashboards and reporting: Garden centers can tailor the RCS system to their needs, enabling unique payment tenders, validated returns, and personalized customer information. The system also supports multiple units of measure and offers user-friendly interfaces for efficient order placement.

Pricing:

Retail Control Systems’ pricing is only available through a conversation with sales. 

2. Comcash 

Best for: Independent lawn and garden centers

Comcash offers a cutting-edge point of sale system designed to streamline operations for independent lawn and garden centers. Our user-friendly solution combines high-quality hardware with easy-to-navigate POS software, providing a modern, efficient, all-in-one platform.

Key features for garden centers include:

• Streamlined scanning and checkout: Comcash's solution utilizes a modern Android handheld terminal with a 2D scanner and a Bluetooth or integrated payment module.
• Modern touchscreen menu: Our touchscreen interface allows users to easily search and select non-barcoded items. Users can toggle between image and text menu views, and for large menus, the built-in multi-touch feature enables easy scrolling across multiple pages.
• Flexible POS mounting options: Comcash offers a range of POS mounting options, allowing garden centers to adapt the system to their specific needs. For example, a tablet can be mounted over a scale for weighing bulk items, or a wall-mounted POS can be used for added convenience and space savings.
• Advanced EMV and NFC payment support: Comcash supports a modern range of signature capture terminals, ensuring that garden centers can accept all forms of payment and keep up with customer demand. For businesses that don't require signature capture capabilities, Comcash also supports lower-cost terminals that still accept EMV and NFC payments.
• Powerful administration: Comcash's mPOS system offers advanced back-office administrative capabilities. Garden center managers can access all their back office data from a mobile device.

Pricing:

Get a custom price using our transparent build and price tool. 

3. POS Nation 

Best for: Small- to mid-sized retailers

POS Nation offers an all-in-one POS solution tailored to lawn care stores, garden centers, and nurseries. This provider also offers solutions for other types of small retailers, like liquor and grocery stores, and focuses on hardware variety, software features, 24/7 support, and payment processing.

Key features for garden centers include:

• Weather-resistant barcodes: POS Nation provides weather-resistant labels for plants kept outdoors, ensuring that barcodes remain readable despite exposure to sun and rain. 
• Real-time inventory control and custom metrics: POS Nation offers real-time inventory control and tracking, even across multiple nurseries or hardware stores. The system allows garden centers to track different units of measurement, such as gravel by the pound or chain by the foot.
• Personalized hotkeys for non-scannable items: POS Nation's software allows garden centers to create personalized hotkeys for non-scannable items, services, and fees, such as bales of pine straw, bags of mulch, or delivery fees. 

Pricing:

Get a custom quote using their online pricing tool. 

4. AMS Retail 

Best for: Farmers markets and nurseries

AMS Retail offers a powerful and feature-rich garden center POS solution that caters to the unique needs of green businesses. Built on the NCR Counterpoint software, this solution is designed to keep customers moving with seamless barcode scanning, card payments, and more. 

Key features for garden centers include:

• Customizable reporting: AMS Retail's nursery POS provides real-time, customizable reporting, enabling better inventory management and timely purchasing decisions. 
• Rugged hardware: AMS Retail's equipment is built to withstand the harsh environment of garden centers. The hardware and peripherals are designed to support customers and manage inventory throughout the store, greenhouses, and grow sites.
• Customer management: AMS Retail's POS system provides automatic customer pricing for different customer types, such as retail, landscaper, and government. It also supports customer loyalty programs, special order processing, integrated targeted emails based on customer purchase history, and trackable coupons with reporting.

Pricing:

AMS Retail’s pricing is only available through a conversation with sales. 

5. Rapid Garden POS 

Best for: Landscapers

Rapid Garden POS is a custom-built solution designed specifically for the green industry, including nurseries, greenhouses, florists, and landscaping businesses. This POS system is tailored to address the unique challenges faced by garden centers.

Key features for garden centers include:

• Customer management and loyalty programs: Rapid Garden POS allows for the creation of customized garden center loyalty programs, tracking valuable customer information, purchase patterns, and preferences.
• Landscaping, work orders, and services: This POS system efficiently manages a wide range of services, including delivery, installation, recycling, quoting, and fulfillment. Rapid Garden tracks and controls items and labor, ensuring optimal resource allocation and cost management. 
• Sales history and reporting: Rapid Garden POS provides pre-built reports that offer valuable insights into business performance and sales trends. 

Pricing:

Pricing for Rapid Garden POS is only available through a conversation with sales. 

The Best Garden Center POS for Your Business

Selecting the right point of sale system for your garden center is crucial to your store’s success. Your POS will impact your daily operations, customer experience, and business growth. The five options discussed in this post all offer strong features that lawn and garden centers like yours can benefit from, but no solution is the right fit for every business. 

As an independent lawn and garden business owner, you need a flexible point of sale solution custom-built to address your specific challenges and goals. A one-size-fits-all approach simply won't cut it. That's where Comcash comes in, offering a tailored solution that combines advanced inventory management, comprehensive reporting and analytics, and the exact hardware and features you need for your store. 

Don't settle for a generic POS system! Take the first step towards unlocking your business' full potential by scheduling a demo of Comcash today.