How to choose the best POS for your restaurant.

Seven things worth testing before you buy

• Speed to send an order: how many taps from a seated guest to a ticket printing in the kitchen?
• Modifiers and special requests: can staff handle 'no peanuts, extra spicy, sauce on the side' without leaving the ticket?
• Offline behaviour: unplug the internet during the demo and keep ringing sales. If the demo stops, the restaurant will too.
• Delivery platforms: do orders land directly on the POS and the kitchen screen, or does someone re-key them from a tablet?
• Bill splitting and tips: split by seat, by item and by amount, with tip prompts that match how your staff are paid.
• Reporting you'll actually open: product mix, hourly sales, labour cost against sales, void and discount tracking by staff member.
• Support response: who answers at 9pm on a Saturday, and how long until a replacement terminal is in your hands?

Quick service, full service and beverage shops need different things

Quick service lives or dies on throughput — kiosks, fast modifiers, order-ready screens and a counter layout staff can learn in a shift.

Full service needs table maps, course firing, seat-level ordering on handhelds, shared tabs and clean split billing.

Bubble tea and coffee shops need deep customisation (sugar, ice, toppings, cup size) plus loyalty and stored value, because repeat frequency is the whole business model.

If you run more than one format under one company, check that they can share a backend and still report separately.

Where restaurants usually get burned

• A cheap monthly fee paired with a high payment processing rate — the total is what matters.
• Locked contracts with painful exit terms when a location closes or moves.
• Support that is offshore, ticket-only, or business hours in a different time zone than your dinner service.
• Data you cannot export, so switching later means retyping your entire menu and customer list.
• Hardware sold by one company and software by another, so every fault becomes a finger-pointing exercise.

How POS KING approaches it

We build the menu with you before go-live, install the hardware ourselves, train the staff on the floor and stay reachable 24/7 in English, Chinese, Japanese and Hindi. Kiosks, kitchen displays, online ordering, loyalty and service robots all run off the same POS record, so there is one vendor to call and one set of numbers to trust.

Restaurants that have deployed with us range from single bubble tea counters to multi-location full-service groups — the customer stories page shows how the setups differ.