Retail POS: single-store and multi-location
Retail POS prioritises inventory management, multi-location reporting, and increasingly omnichannel integration with ecommerce. Per-transaction processing matters but is typically less dominant than restaurant TCO because retail transactions are higher-value and lower-volume.
The reasoning.
Square is the cheapest first POS for a single-store boutique: the Free plan is $0 a month and the card rate is published rather than quoted. Lightspeed Retail is the mid-market multi-location leader, with Basic at $89/mo rising to $289 for the full multi-site feature set. Shopify POS dominates omnichannel retail, but budget the POS Pro add-on at $89 per location per month on top of the plan, because the plan alone only covers casual in-person selling. Clover's retail Standard system suits a single mid-tier store, at $180/mo for 36 months or $1,899 plus $84.95/mo to buy the hardware outright, and it carries the lowest published card rate here at 2.3% + 10c.
Vendors that don't fit this vertical.
Toast (restaurant-only), TouchBistro (restaurant-only), NCR Aloha (enterprise restaurant), SpotOn (restaurant-focused), Heartland (restaurant-focused).
The cost most buyers underestimate here.
The per-location software add-on, not the peripherals. Shopify charges $89 per location per month for POS Pro on top of the plan, and the plan alone gives you only casual in-person selling, so a two-store retailer is $178 a month before the plan fee. Lightspeed gates full multi-location capability behind Plus at $289/mo against Basic at $89. Both are published, both scale with sites, and both are routinely left out of a budget built from the headline plan price. Peripherals matter less: Clover and Square include a cash drawer and receipt printer in their mid-tier retail bundles, and a scanner is cheap next to a recurring per-site fee.