Hike POS Review
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- Date Established
- 2014
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
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
It’s a testament to how far we’ve progressed as a society that many of us, in the comfortable first world, actively seek out things that challenge us for enjoyment. We pretend to enjoy the taste of black coffee or bitter IPAs as opposed to simply enjoying the feeling that comes after consuming them. We fawn over dissonant indie rock music and argue about the artistic value of acclaimed films.
And we hike. We deliberately take long ventures over difficult terrain to look at something for 10 minutes before turning around or simply fill up an otherwise idle Saturday. A hike is never something I’ve appreciated as much as I’ve felt I should — until now, that is. Hike, a relatively new POS on the market, is a terrific and ultra-modern program that can function as well for your single-location food cart as it can for an extensively franchised clothing operation.
Hike was founded just a few years ago out of Australia (which, for whatever reason, has become somewhat of a POS hotbed). In a short amount of time, the company has expanded its customer base to more than 75 countries and is used by a variety of big brands around the globe. The cloud-based system is quick to set up and simple to get the hang of all while offering some extensive inventory and reporting features to aid larger companies. 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.
Table of Contents
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.
Start-Up 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
One Store Plan
- $79/month
- Includes everything from the Start-up plan, plus:
- Gift cards
- Loyalty
- Marketplace integrations
- Custom reports
- Detailed analytics
- Advanced user permissions
Multistore Plan
- $129/month
- Includes everything in the One Store plan, plus:
- Multiple outlets
- Two register licenses (additional registers are $29 per month)
- Central dashboard
- Central products and customers list
- Multilocation inventory
- Consolidated business reporting
Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed
Hike is entirely cloud-based and is compatible with iPads, Macs, or PCs. This POS can function online and offline. Offline transactions are synced in the cloud and stored securely.
Specific Industry
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 a 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.
Specific Size Of Business
Small to mid-sized businesses would probably be best suited for Hike. The website claims that the POS can handle up to 100 locations, but I think Hike would thrive in slightly more intimate locations. That said, while it is an affordable option for a single-register small business, it could certainly handle franchises, especially given how easily its data and reporting sync in the cloud.
Hardware & Operating System Requirements
Hike can be used on any iPad (via the Hike app) or any Mac or PC (through a web browser). Hike offers some convenient hardware bundles through its website. These come with printers, cash drawers, iPad stands, scanners, etc., depending on what your business needs. You can also purchase individual hardware that integrates with Hike directly through the site.
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 an intuitive screen. Here, you also have the option to put the item on a customer’s account or select it as 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.
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 by 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 on the screen, 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 simple 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 the name of an individual customer, their profile will appear. You can easily 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 update 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 group 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 and can be sorted 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
With as modern as Hike is, it offers most of the integrations you could come to expect from a strong POS, including:
There is no additional charge for these integrations.
Compatible Credit Card Processors
Hike 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.
Customer Service & Support
- Customer Support Channels: Hike has a strong customer support team that’s easily reached by phone, email, or the 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. It also tells you, “You’re Awesome!” every time you complete a function. 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.
User Reviews
Negative Reviews & Complaints
With just a few years under its belt, there hasn’t been a lot of time for negative reviews to rack up. Some of the less than glowing reviews seem to have more to do with some of the other companies that Hike integrates with, but there were a couple of issues that popped up in more than just one review.
- 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.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
Along those same lines, while there aren’t scores of reviews online, the ones I found were effusively positive, with clients appreciating:
- 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
There are also a handful of testimonials on Hike’s website from John Pavlakos, Greg Hills, and Darren Clarke, respectively:
I set up Hike in five retail locations for my client Mattress Barn. After spending a year struggling with a well-known but overly complicated POS software, we luckily found Hike. Hike is intuitive, simple to set up, easy and their customer service is second to none.
I would recommend Hike POS to anyone who is looking for an effective inventory and point of sale software that integrates seamlessly with Xero. When I chat with the staff at Hike, they always respond promptly and courteously.
Really like Hike POS. Looked at several systems before deciding and Hike stood out as the best mix of features and simplicity.
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.
Matt Sherman
Point of sale writer at Merchant Maverick
Matt Sherman has been immersed in point of sale systems for over a year now. Previously, he spent 14 years in the newspaper industry, the majority of which was as the sports editor for a pair of weekly newspapers in suburban Portland, Oregon. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon where he majored in English because he knows where the money is. Matt is the father to a pair of energetic boys and can easily be distracted by Netflix, Amazon and HBO Go.
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Organization Name: Tool Shed
This POS is an absolute disaster. We have been using this system for a year now, and it has been a constant struggle. Here is a list of just some of the things we’ve had to deal with from this terrible, terrible system:1. The system does not track cost of goods sold properly. It treats the most recent purchase price of a SKU as the COGS for the entire stock of that item. 2.It is also extremely touchy, and if integrated with QBO will constantly fail to send info to Quickbooks. 3. The developers once rolled out an update that changed some of our settings. There was no notice of this update or the change in settings. This caused the purchase cost of hundreds of our SKUs to change to be tax-inclusive. These items had to be manually identified and fixed, and we are still finding stray SKUs affected by this error months afterwards.Do not under any circumstances use Hike. It is awful.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Reservoir Party Catering
We’ve been using Hike for a while now at our Bakery business in Reservoir. After 12 successful years as a bakery, we recently opened our catering business next door. So the Hike was our obvious choice and I must say their onboarding services are still the best. We obviously love the software as you can say from this review but their service is comparatively good.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Rodwell and Astor
I have been using Hike for the last 6 weeks now and am totally frustrated with this POS system. Although promoted to me a Melbourne based Company, you can only ever resolve issued on live chat and in my case 60% of these issues were not able to be resolved. If you want to run a bricks and mortar store with shopify integration for online sales, I do not recommend Hike.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Hike
Hi Janine,
Sorry to hear that you are having difficulty with your Hike account. Frustration is the last thing we would like to cause for our clients.
I have gone through your chat history and items you are after is a new feature request which Hike does not have. Given we offer free trial period and phone consultation it seems you did not have a chance to try out Hike. We have many clients using Hike + Shopify together. Our support team is here to help and happy to answer any tech questions through our live chat or email support.
We certainly have many new feature you requested already in the pipeline to be developed in our future versions.
Hope this helps
Hike Community
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Dargo General Store
I was responsible for researching the right point of sale system for our business. I was also the one responsible for its set up and maintenance. It’s been under six months now and I too am completely frustrated with this system. I unfortunately purchased a year’s subscription. The sooner that subscription ends, the happier me and the rest of the team here will be.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
hi Kerry, what pos system did you change to?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Everything Special
I signed up for the 14 day trial and had my web developer integrate Hike Up into my website. No support. Poor customer service and communication. . I was assigned an account manager who outside of selling me hardware did not provide me any support. When my hardware arrived I was sent a link and told to use their chat facility if I needed help. When I contacted the chat support they were not helpful at all. I have cancelled Hike Up and am stuck with the hardware as I will need to pay freight and a restocking fee of 20%. Apparently Hike Up do not sell hardware they just reccomend it. Could have fooled me when the Account Manager was pushing it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Tarinika Inc
The iPad app is very unreliable and unstable. We are facing multiple issues and the experience has been extremely frustrating. To name a few, the app keeps on hanging, connection to printer is frequently lost, the sales history under POS section shows incorrect values, currency keeps changing from store currency and settings section keeps dissapearing. Customer support keeps asking us to reinstall app and do data sync for every issue and we are having to do that multiple times a day. The software/app is designed well, very intuitive and easy to use. If only the app is stable and more reliable and functions like it is intended this can be a stellar product. For people considering this software, my recommendation would be to anticipate that a lot of things can go wrong. Dont make the complete transition to this software thinking that what you experience during the trial version is what you get and everything would work seamlessly. Be slow with your implementation and have a backup or manual alternative process in place. We were told by hike support that ours was an exception and that other customers have had better experiences. I can only detail our experience. We have decided to evaluate other alternatives like Vendhq.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: i-Blossom Florist
Hi Matt, just wondering if you can advise or help me. My wife and I have just bought this florist in Maroochydore Qld. We have not been in business before and have found the whole thing a bit daunting. I have never used a POS before but the lady who owned the shop had myob kounta and essentials. I found myob extremly difficult to get to talk to me. 16 emails and several hours on the phone and still could not get anyone to respond until a couple of weeks ago by which time I decided to move to Hikeup. At least they would communicate with me. My question is do you know anyone on the Sunshine Coast who can come to our shop and set up our POS properly. I have tried to get it all going but I need someone with the technical capability to make sure Hikeup is linked to our Xero and the cash register and it is all talking to each other to run properly. I have tried several IT companies here on the Coast but they are unable to help. Can you assist?
Best regards
Brian P Harvey
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Brian! Sorry to hear you’re having difficulties. Unfortunately I’m not much of an expert on IT companies in Australia but I have found Hike to be pretty intuitive in its set-up and, once you’ve created your account, it should sync to Xero automatically. If you contact Hike’s customer service someone should be able to walk you through it to make sure you’re up and running and here is a link to their support page that answers some questions. https://support.hikeup.com/hc/en-us/categories/204644027-Getting-Started
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Reservoir Bakery
I have many young casual staff members who work with our organization so I had to take that into consideration when shopping for a new POS system for our store. I looked and compared about 8 different systems until I finally chose HIKE for it’s simplicity of use in the front of the house. Now with that being said, it still has all the powerful inventory management and other features I need in the back of the house and is still easy to use.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hike is the biggest business mistake. Constantly breaking down
Nobody returns calls or offers to help. I strongly recommend not to
go with hike
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Mary,
Thank you for your feedback.
I tried looking for your details on our client database and unfortunately could not locate any details with name ‘Mary Smith’
If you could email us or contact our 24/7 live chat support – we would certainly love to help you. also, we do not have any record of phone messages which are not actioned.
Happy to help if you provide further details.
Regards
Emma
Hike Support
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.