Hike POS Review

Pros

• Highly customizable
• Designed for mobility
• Excellent reporting and analytics
• All-in-one product

Cons

• The purchase ordering process can be clunky
• Occasionally crashes

Overview

With a competitive price point and responsive and knowledgeable customer support, Hike is a solid POS system and offers a free trial so that you can see if you like the software before committing. If you’re looking for an all-in-one program, Hike should have you covered with things such as built-in loyalty, eCommerce, and a solid list of integrations.

Hike POS Pricing

You can take advantage of a free 14-day trial. Afterward, if you want to proceed, Hike offers three basic pricing systems along with some available add-ons.

Essential Plan

• $59/month (when paid yearly)
• One outlet
• Unlimited products
• One register license included (additional registers are $29 per month)
• Inventory control
• Customer profiles
• Integrations
• Standard reporting
• Secure cloud back-up
• Discounts
• Gift receipts
• Product management
• 24/7 email and chat

Plus Plan

• $99/month
• Includes everything from the Essential plan, plus:
• Gift cards
• Loyalty
• Marketplace integrations
• Custom reports
• Detailed analytics
• Advanced user permissions
• API access
• eCommerce integrations
• Inventory integrations
• Mailchimp
• Integrated label printing
• Details analytics
• Bulk payments

Enterprise Plan

• Custom rate
• Includes everything in the Plus Plan, plus:
• Two register licenses (additional registers are $29 per month)
• Central dashboard
• Central products and customers list
• Multilocation inventory
• Consolidated business reporting
• Detailed account manager
• Customized onboarding

Hike Is Best Suited For…

With its mobility and ultra-modern layout, Hike can fit in with virtually any retail store. I could see it working ideally in a clothing or furniture store format with its solid and intuitive inventory system, but it’s versatile enough to handle the food industry as well.

It would not be a good fit for a large-scale, multistore restaurant. For cafes, food trucks, or smaller, independent restaurants where employees interact with customers, being able to bring the Hike POS directly to the table for easy ordering and payments is a very nice option.

Hike POS Features

As a newer and continually evolving program, Hike offers all of the features you would expect in a strong POS.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Mobility: While it’s not unique, the ability to move with your POS around your establishment is a nice option and helps employees interact with customers. Hike allows employees to easily display inventory and options on the floor of a business or, with a restaurant, allows for tableside ordering and payment.
• Loyalty Rewards: Hike offers a custom loyalty setup. Customers can gain loyalty points by signing up for mailing lists or reaching preset spending goals. Hike’s loyalty program is highly customizable, allowing certain products to have different point values for promotions. It takes just seconds to make adjustments to how many points can be earned on the dollar. Customers can easily see their loyalty points and rewards, and these points can be immediately redeemed either in-store or online. It is also easy to track customers and their preferences.
• Employees: Employee management is relatively simplistic with Hike but easy to understand and operate. Hours are easily tracked and can be revised with the click of a button by a manager. It’s also possible to access the schedules around the clock. You can click on an individual employee and instantly see how many hours they worked in a variety of ranges.
• Customer Management: It’s easy to track customers through a simple search system. If you click on a customer’s name, their profile will appear. You can see how often they visit, what they routinely purchase, and how many loyalty points they have accrued. All customer records are stored in one system.
• Marketing: Hike has its Mailchimp integration built into its system, making email and marketing campaigns efficient and effective. Customers can be grouped and targeted (without excessively trolling them with offers and promotions that don’t apply). It’s also easy to import and/or export a customer database.
• Reporting: Hike’s dashboard for reporting is a highlight of the product. The basic analytics for your store are all shown on one screen and updated in real time. Hike offers a wide variety of reports that can analyze customer trends, displaying sales ratios by age, gender, and so forth. Sales reports are customizable, and tracking top employees by week, month, or year can be done with a click. It’s also easy to see which individual products or groups of products are top sellers for a given time.

• Inventory: Hike offers a fairly robust inventory management system. The software can handle an unlimited number of products that you can sort based on virtually any number of variants (size/color/cost, etc.). Hike also offers custom barcode creation for receipts. It’s easy to make adjustments to product lines by simply sorting them and adding pricing changes or promotional information. It’s also easy to track inventory over multiple locations. Tracking and stocking products are also convenient, as counts can be scheduled in advance. Hike allows for automatic re-ordering based on inventory levels and shows items that are selling quickly. There is also an option to set up automated reminders and updates. If you need to send items between stores, that information is automatically updated and reported.
• Purchase Orders: This took a few minutes to get the hang of, but the POS system is pretty intuitive once you’ve used it once or twice. You can select suppliers to email and also print the orders to mail out copies if necessary. It’s also easy to track orders online.
• Offline Mode: You can continue to use Hike almost like normal during an internet outage. Transactions are automatically synced and stored securely in the cloud and can be processed once service is restored.
• eCommerce: Hike offers an integrated eCommerce platform that makes it easy to go live with a few clicks. All of your inventory syncs automatically as well as your customer information, making it easy to transition from a small retail operation to a bustling online presence.
• Multistore: When your business is ready to expand into multiple locations, Hike is scalable. You can access reports that break down transactions across stores, and there are advanced inventory options, helping you transfer and track products across locations.
• Integrations & Add-Ons: Hike has a number of popular integrations including:
  • QuickBooks
  • Xero
  • Mailchimp
  • Magento 2.0
  • BigCommerce
  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
  • ePages

Ease Of Use

Setting up your store through Hike is a snap. In just minutes after submitting your email address and the type of business you are operating, you will get to the dashboard where you can start to add products or access your preloaded inventory. You can select your language and time zone here as well as the currency you’re using. Drag and drop your logo, and you’re good to go.

On the same screen, you can add your social media links, add multiple registers, and edit hours of operation. Click on ‘Sale,’ and you can easily search and select a product or scan the barcode. Then select ‘Open Drawer’ and the payment type on the intuitive screen. Here, you also have the option to put the item on a customer’s account or select it as a layaway.

The back end is easy to pick up as well. The inventory has simple-to-view tabs for purchase orders, deliveries, and items that may be running low. There is also a convenient tab on the left where customers can be searched or added and then grouped for marketing campaigns.

Payment Processing With Hike

Hike POS is integrated with multiple processors, including Tyro, iZettle, and PayPal. It also offers a unique custom payment setting that allows clients to sync with nearly any existing card system they might have.

Hike Contract & Commitment

Hike POS makes it easy, allowing you purchase its software on a month-t0-month basis but you do get a discounted rate if you sign up for an annual plan.

Hike POS Customer Service & Support

Hike provides a number of support avenues.

• Customer Support Channels: Hike has a strong customer support team that’s easily reached by phone, email, or 24/7 live chat. The LiveChat reps were responsive within a few minutes each time I pestered them with questions. The company also has a blog with some useful articles, although it doesn’t appear to have been updated in over a year.
• Social Media: Hike is active across all forms of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The company appears to be most current on Facebook, offering a few videos and links to articles. There are multiple videos on YouTube (generally under three minutes) that plow through some of the POS’s basic features with an extremely friendly narrator.
• Free Trial: Hike offers a 14-day free trial, which is easy to set up. Under “What kind of business do you operate?” there is an option to select “I’m just playing around,” which I appreciate. A sales rep will also personally call a client who has signed up for the free trial at the beginning and the end of the period to answer any questions and walk you through the setup.
• Videos: The website also features video tutorials that can help you get up and running and assist with training for employees.

Hike POS Reviews, Complaints & Testimonials

Negative Hike Reviews & Complaints

Overall, Hike has generally positive reviews but here are a few issues that reviewers mentioned:

• Clunky App: A few people reported that the layout, particularly in the back end, was a bit confusing and led to user mistakes. There were also reports of the app repeatedly losing connectivity.
• Doesn’t Function As Advertised: Multiple customers talked about Hike promising them it offered a particular feature, only to find out it didn’t work as promised or didn’t exist altogether, and, in these instances, customer service was slow to respond.
• Reporting Issues: A handful of reviewers noted issues with glitches when trying to run reports in Hike, while others found that the reports were not robust enough for their needs.

Positive Hike Reviews & Testimonials

Among other things, here is a list of a few areas where Hike scored well with users:

• Breadth of features
• Inventory functions
• Functionality
• Customer service (a common comment was how willing Hike employees were to answer questions via the phone and chat, which is something that I would echo in my own experience)
• Appointment booking
• Reasonable pricing

Alternatives To Hike

Hike Vs Square:

Hike and Square both boast simple, no-frills interfaces that are easy to set up and use. While Square’s free app is somewhat limited in how many features it offers, it is just that… free. Hike offers an all-in-one software options that is versatile enough to use in both the restaurant and retail industry and does have more advanced inventory and reporting than Square’s free offering. But Square is scalable, allowing you to upgrade to one of its paid plans if you outgrow its free version.

Final Verdict

The beauty of Hike is that the company is not only expanding rapidly but also evolving at a similar rate. Hike claims it is committed to staying on top of the latest trends in the industry and is routinely updating its product. The app is competitively priced, easy to set up, and checks all of the boxes you would expect from a top-line POS product.

Hike’s customer service representatives are quick to respond, knowledgeable, and can make sure each customer is using the product efficiently. I found Hike’s layout to be sleek and uncomplicated. While its inventory and reporting capacities are about as robust as those of most other POS systems I’ve seen, they are also very easy to navigate. With this in mind, Hike could emerge as a top contender in a very competitive market.

If Hike, or any other paid POS system, isn’t right for your budget, check out our article on the best free POS options and give one of them a try!

Retail POS Review Methodology

We evaluate and test each software system that we review at Merchant Maverick, placing special emphasis on certain key software characteristics in order to generate our granular product ratings.

For retail POS software in particular, we have a 62-point rubric we use to evaluate the system in terms of its pricing, ease of use, features, and user reviews. These points are based on attributes relevant to the retail POS niche—such as the availability of features like purchase ordering, customer-facing displays, BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store), and others.

Our rating system also takes into account attributes that are desirable for POS systems and cloud-based software in general, such as the availability of monthly pricing plans, free trials, and transparent software contracts.

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