Revel Systems Review
- Date Established
- 2010
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
Overview:
Revel’s point of sale system was birthed in 2010 by CEO Lisa Falzone and CTO Chris Ciabarra. The result of their efforts was a groundbreaking Apple iPad POS. In the fall of 2011, Revel began beta testing with several Bay Area businesses and was successful enough to capture the attention of early-stage venture capital fund DCM, which offered $3.7 million in Series A funding. By October of 2012, Revel announced it had reached profitability in just one short year. Since then, Revel POS has garnered support from investors such as Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, received a whopping $100 million in Series C funding. In January 2012 Revel was announced as the winner of the Best iPad Business App of the Year Award at the Macworld/iWorld event, beating out the popular Square mobile POS system. More recently, the system received SFBT Tech Awards’ “Best Enterprise Technology” and Business News Daily’s “Gold Award for Top iPad POS Systems.”
Revel currently has over 700 employees and international offices in Australia, Italy, Lithuania, and London. The company has over 25,000 terminals in active use and a solid reputation as a reliable POS provider. Some of Revel’s clients include Goodwill, Smoothie King, and Cinnabon. What has set Revel apart and made the system so appealing to these big-name franchises are its ever-expanding features, services, and integrations. Some highlights include: “Always On” mode (for offline functionality), a partnership and integration with QuickBooks Integration, remote support, and an intelligent reporting suite.
Pricing:
Revel offers industry-specific software packages for a monthly subscription fee. The software license, which used to be an upfront cost, is now built into the subscription. Industries range from restaurants and retail to smaller scale food trucks and yogurt shops. Pricing is flexible (depending on your industry and set-up) and is broken down per terminal.
The company has also started offering Revel as a Service (RaaS) pricing, which includes little to no upfront costs. With RaaS, customers pay a monthly fee encompassing monthly hosting charges and replacement of defective or malfunctioning hardware at no additional cost.
Each subscription includes 24/7 live support, unlimited data storage and security, unlimited software updates, and a QuickBooks integration.
Web-Based or Locally-Installed:
Hybrid. The Revel POS is run locally through your Apple iPad and syncs all data to the cloud. “Always On” mode ensures that your POS will continue to function if your internet connection is lost or experiencing a slowdown. Payment authorization for credit cards may not occur while the Internet is down, so while accepting cards without an Internet connection is an option, it’s also a risk. You can read more about the “Always On” mode on the Revel website.
Specific Industry:
Revel works well with Restaurant and Quick Service businesses, and many of their add-on products target these two industries. The software has expanded considerably lately and is now a viable option for retail businesses, grocery stores, pizza and coffee shops, salons, niche shops, and food trucks or mobile businesses. Revel has adapted its software to fit almost any type of sales environment out there, but adapting that software to your business’s specific needs will take some work.
Specific Size of Business:
Revel Systems is suited to large businesses since it can manage multiple locations and up to 500,000 SKUs. I’d also say that it is optimized for mid-sized businesses, especially those trying to keep up with their larger competitors, since it offers a plethora of applications and modular software that allows you to customize the system to your needs.
On the other hand, though it might work for some small businesses, I wouldn’t recommend it to your average mom and pop shop. Because it is so robust and customizable, it also takes a considerable amount of time and energy to set up. I have a sneaking suspicion that most small businesses would never have a use for most of the advanced features. Revel is certainly worth a look if you are operating a relatively small business, but make sure you explore your other options as well.
Ease of Use:
Once set-up, the software is relatively easy to use. The front end is especially intuitive and easy to navigate, and the back end is set up with training videos. To see Revel in multiple environments (restaurant, quick service, retail, etc.) check out some of their training videos.
Front End. Revel requires staff to login with a pin number to access unique settings and permissions. A touch screen displays a product matrix (with optional descriptions) on one side with order tallies on the opposite side. Quantities and modifiers are easy to add, as are additional payment and discount options. The Revel POS can also be used as a kiosk, or customer-facing display.
Back End Management. Revel is designed for easy navigation through everything from inventory to employee management, but its user-friendliness is not apparent until you get the hang of the system. Performing advanced functions (or even achieving basic familiarity with how the system works) takes serious dedication, time, and training. The “so easy a child could do it” motto often advertised by cloud-based POS systems does not apply to Revel, nor should it. Owning and operating a business is not child’s play; you shouldn’t go in expecting to be able to set up this very robust business tool in a day. That said, most of the basic functions are pretty easy to navigate and use. Exporting data is simple, employee permissions are easily managed, and adding, modifying or removing items can be accomplished directly from your dashboard.
Hardware and Operating System Requirements:
Revel currently works exclusively with Apple iOS devices (including the iPad Air and iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 3 and 4, and the iPad Pro). Revel offers complete hardware bundles and will work with any standard barcode scanner. You can purchase hardware elsewhere, but you’ll want to double check Revel’s preconfigured hardware list to be sure you’re investing in peripherals that will actually work with the system.
Product Features:
To see an exhaustive list of Revel features, check out their website or some of their training videos. They’ve got some pretty cool industry-specific features. For a shorter list, just keep scrolling.
- Fully Functional POS – Revel POS works in a hotkey fashion; cashiers can tap on menu categories with drop-downs of items and modifiers to select. Or, if you prefer, barcode numbers can be entered into the system for scanning items. Multiple tax rates, discounts, service fees, and surcharges can be set to automatically add or manually add at the time of sale. In the “edit item” screen, cashiers can set orders to-go, for delivery, repeat items, remove items, enter discounts, enter special requests, and add quantities. And of course, the POS can also void payments, allow for tips, split bills, email receipts, print/reprint guest receipts, and enter rewards card numbers. If an order has already been sent to the kitchen you have the option of going back to it and adding additional items, sending only the newly added items to the kitchen. Obviously, items already sent cannot be edited or deleted, but they can be repeated, discounted, increased in quantity, or voided off the bill.
- Real-Time Inventory – Adding and managing inventory with Revel is simple, requiring only an item and price (though other fields, such as cost and SKU, are also available). A style matrix is available for easy mass entry of inventory items that are similar but differ by color, size, or style. Additionally, inventory can be imported using a template (like the one listed on their support page). Revel is capable of tracking inventory per ingredient, and food cost reports are also available on the ingredient level. Low stock items are listed in red on your inventory page with nifty reorder buttons. Revel can even handle retail fuel sales with wet stock management.
- Purchase Order Management – In addition to creating POs and associating inventory with vendors, Revel helps you manage when stock items arrive and are added to your inventory. You can notate partial orders when vendors only send you a portion of your stock and finalize orders once the order is complete.
- QuickBooks Integration – The Revel QuickBooks Integration automatically transfers data from your POS to your QuickBooks accounts to streamline the bookkeeping process, syncing sales, inventory, purchase order and accounting data into QuickBooks Online. Sales summary information is pushed into QuickBooks each day, allowing users the ability to view total sales, discounts, and refunds created on the Revel POS. The integration also sends employee schedule and payroll information to QuickBooks, as well as purchase order and inventory adjustments. Any updates in Revel sync automatically. Note: For the initial setup, Revel will need to do some mapping to synchronize your data. Some users have complained about issues with the integration, but more on that later.
- Till Management – All cash management functions are located under the manager selection of the settings tab: batch processing, over/under till, and printable quick-view reports like total cash/credit/check/gift certificate for the night, items sold, and time management.
- Customer Management – Revel tracks customer purchases as well as all necessary customer information such as name, address, phone number, and email. This information can be exported and used to create mass marketing campaigns or used to cross-sell other items. You can even customize table reservations by adding customer preferences and send text notifications when the customer’s table is ready.
- Employee Management – Each employee can have their own unique and secure PIN-activated login or swipe card in order to track time, employee performance, and employee activity within the system. Employee reports can be created based on number of voids, number of discounts, sales volume, and productivity. Access parameters can be customized per employee responsibilities. The system can also handle employee time scheduling.
- Flexible Ordering – Revel systems has designed creative ways to make ordering easier, including features like Tableside ordering, mobile and online ordering, and customer facing displays. Most recently, Revel has added the ability to play a video on the customer facing display whenever it is idle.
- Kiosk POS – Using the iPad POS as a kiosk, customers can place their order and pay all on their own. They can browse menus, select or edit items and quantities, and place orders with their name. Orders can be completed by paying with credit, debit, or gift card, or cash.
- Kitchen Display System – In kitchen view, sending an order or entering payment over iPad sends the information to the kitchen display system. The expedite view allows servers to see if an order is in progress or completed. The kitchen view (a.k.a. cook view) will display the order plus any modifiers, the time the order came in, the server name, the customer name, and of course, the status of the order (completed or not). Once the food is taken out, the server touches “completed” in expedite view and clears the order off the screen.
- Digital Menu Board – Revel is integrated with digital menu boards. This means the Revel system and your menu displays can talk to each other and exchange data. Whenever you update your menu in the Revel POS, your digital display will update as well. Read more about Menu Boards on their website.
- Intelligent Reporting Suite – Revel reports are pretty extensive, and they’re easy to read. Some of the dozens of reports available include transaction details, sales summaries, ingredients sold, PLU report, available/used gift cards, total voids, total credit transactions, refunded/exchanged items, percentage of labor against sales, and employee check out report. Real-time tracking provides instant visibility to sales, staff, and location data. All data can be exported as you need it.
- Safe and Secure Servers – Revel’s hardware, software, and network are PCI-DSS compliant. Sensitive credit card information is encrypted and never stored. Revel’s Data centers are PCI compliant and SAS 70 Type II certified. All data is encrypted and backed up on a regular basis, and single location businesses operate on their own database.
- Multi-Store Functionality – Revel is built to handle a single store or a chain of stores.
- Loyalty Program – The Revel POS offers a cardless loyalty program as well as other third party integrations. They plan on expanding their loyalty offerings in the future.
Integrations and Add-Ons:
Revel has an open API and a whole slew of third party integrations. Below is a listing of some of the major integrations, all of which can be located in the Revel marketplace.
Add-ons
eCommerce/Online/Mobile Ordering
Employee Management
Mobile Payment Processors/Forms of Payment
Loyalty Programs
Accounting
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero (not available in the US)
Compatible Credit Card Processors:
Third party integrations for gateway payment processors and payment processors are listed in the marketplace section of the company website. Revel uses the gateway payment processor USAePay as well as FreedomPay, and NewTek. The list of payment processors includes Mercury Payment Systems, Moneris, Adyen, Tyro, WorldPay, FirstData, and others.
If you don’t know the difference between a payment gateway and a merchant account, or if you’re just overwhelmed by the idea of trying to find the right merchant account with the lowest rates, then please let us know. We offer consulting services for merchant accounts—it’s our area of expertise.
Customer Service and Technical Support:
Revel offers 24/7 support to all customers, and the ways they offer support are pretty broad.
- Phone– Revel sales, technical support, and billing staff are available through their main line at (415) 744-1433.
- Email– You can email support directly at support@revelsystems.com, or submit a request with their customer support form.
- Remote Support – To troubleshoot issues directly without all the extra confusion (such as describing the thingy that keeps blinking), a technician can access your POS remotely to diagnose issues.
- Web Support– You can check out Revel’s support page for commonly reported issues. You can search for what you’re looking for or submit a request for support.
- Onsite Support– For onsite technical support you’ll need to contact Revel. There are additional fees involved, which you can view here.
- Revel University– This is Revel’s website for training and videos.
- Social Media – Revel does have a blog; if you’re interested in what they’re working on, it’s worth taking a look. There are also various social media accounts you can take a look at, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Negative Reviews and Complaints:
Hundreds of merchants have tried Revel POS, and reviews of their experiences can be found right here on the Merchant Maverick site (in the comments section below). Here are some of the more recent issues and complaints with the system.
- Issues with QuickBooks Integration. There have been some negative reviews about Revel POS, particularly with the QuickBooks integration. While I’m not too worried about the integration itself, what needs improvement is the technical support for QuickBooks issues. Technicians should be better prepared to assist merchants with issues that arise, especially for such a crucial part of their business. Jeffrey from Great Neck Pools wrote:
“The troubleshooters don’t seem to have a clear understanding of how the integration is supposed to work as evidenced by conflicting information I received regarding the inability of Revel to push inventory data to QBO. In the end, one of their reps simply admitted to me that it doesn’t work and that they need to do some rework on the entire system.”
- Initial setup can be long. The initial setup of menus, products, and inventory can be long and tedious, especially for businesses with unique processes. Though this is a fairly common complaint, I will defend Revel by saying that systems like this are complex pieces of software designed to meet the needs of many different types and sizes of businesses. That means there are going to be a lot of options and settings to wade through. Many of the problems I’ve seen described by users (aside from the lack of technical support) largely have to do with the user not taking the time to familiarize themselves with the product before diving into operation. In order to get the most out of a product designed to be highly customizable to your specific business, you’re going to need to spend plenty of time familiarizing yourself with the system and the various technical support options available to you, because you’re probably going to need to use them regularly (at least at first).
- Glitches. This is a particularly common problem, especially concerning system updates. A couple people have complained that Revel pushes out updates before they’ve been fully aired out and tested for glitches. I didn’t experience too many problems with the system. It did crash once when I was trying log out, but I was trying to get out of the system anyway, and it opened back up right away with a window recognizing that the system had just crashed and asking me to describe what I was doing when it happened.
Positive Reviews and Testimonials:
Revel has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and is BBB accredited. You can check out some of the testimonials for Revel, but here’s what merchants have to say about Revel.
- “Always On” Mode. Formerly known as offline mode, this feature allows you to continue to do business as usual even if your Internet is down (or experiencing a slowdown). This feature is still pretty unique among POS providers, and allows you to continue to accept cash and card payments
- Versatile POS. Revel is thoughtfully designed and works well for many merchants. Its cloud-based functionality is also a huge contrast to the more rigid functionality of computer based POS systems, making it versatile and adaptable to fast-paced businesses with ever-changing needs.
- Constant Improvements. Since our initial review of this software, there have been some pretty significant improvements, and Revel shows no sign of stopping. Upfront software license fee? Gone. In its place is a manageable monthly subscription model with the license costs built in. Inventory options? Expanded and improved with room to grow. Slow-responding technical support? That I’ll leave you to judge.
- Customer Service. Revel reports a Customer Satisfaction Rating of over 93% for software, hardware, and logistical issues. Though it hasn’t always had a great technical support reputation, Revel has recently stepped up its game in this arena, taking steps to improve customer relations including the recent revamping of their suite of training videos.
Final Verdict:
If you’re looking for a cloud-based POS for a restaurant or hospitality business then Revel is definitely on par with systems like ERPLY – systems that provide high functionality without being prohibitive to anyone without a computer engineering degree. No other comparable system has a kiosk mode, kitchen view, expedite view, and table listing functions. For regular retail businesses, Revel has definitely improved its offerings and is a solid option, but I’d shop around and read more Revel POS reviews (and reviews of other POS systems) before making a decision.
If you’re a small business, Revel is certainly scalable for virtually any size; however, depending on the revenue you generate, the monthly subscription may still be too high. You also may be overwhelmed by the amount of work required to set up a bunch of features and settings you may never use. However, if you’re planning on quick growth, it would be nice to not have to transition from a system like ShopKeep to a one designed for larger businesses. In the end, if you’ve got the revenue for one of the more expensive cloud-based solutions, Revel should have everything you need to run your business.
Jordan Nelson
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210 Comments
We have been a full year trying to implement this system. My company is not new to POS. We have been using POS inventory control systems for our businesses since 1998. When we purchased Revel we asked VERY specific questions about its retail inventory management capability and functionality, as our stores operates using thousands of SKUs with hundreds reordered every week. ALL questions were detailed and carefully worded, and Sales assured us that the Revel system would positively be able to handle all of our requirements.We have had a full year of nothing but problems. In a nutshell, we were sold a system that does not do what the sales person claimed.I have hundreds of emails showing the lack of training of the support staff, and the conflicting answers we have received on nearly every subject. At this time, we are coming into our busy season with a system that we are trying to work around by doing much of our work manually - ie: handwriting barcode numbers on every product or printing them from our previous POS system, because even this basic function is unresolved by a support team that gives us a host of different stories such as: "the printer may not print these bar codes" (it does!). “The printer is not set up correctly.” "We can’t set it up, there is no template". Then, “We can make a template for an additional monthly fee." "No wait, it prints these labels as of the last update”. "No, it does not print these labels.” and now we are back to “The printer needs to be set up correctly.” I have spent thousands of dollars having one very capable staff member try to solve our issues with Revel support over the past year. Each issue has wasted weeks of my employee’s time and therefore, my money.At this point, I see no option but to buy a new POS. I think it is important that this doesn't not happen to any other retailer looking for a POS with basic retail (not food service!) functionality.My intention is to document every issue we have had, back that up with the corresponding email records from Revel Support, and share it with anyone who is interested in a retail POS. I do not make that statement lightly, as it will require an enormous amount of my time to properly record every name, date and response, and I am not one who looks for conflict. I would MUCH prefer to have this system simply function as it was represented and get on with my business, but I am out of time and patience with the support we have been offered. If you have anything up your sleeve that would help this situation, Revel, please let me know.
I would never recommend Revel to anyone. They sold us on the fact that they could do full inventory tracking and quick and easy checkouts. We were also told that they would input all information needed in “just a few weeks” after we signed the papers. After we signed, the nightmares started. We found out that the system really was not built for inventory control and that they were not going to build out our inventory. All of this was happening while their “launching team” was emailing us twice a week to make sure we were ready to launch, all while we barely had a menu or inventory built out. After about 200 hours of building our own inventory and menu, we still never got it to work. Next, we were told that our labels would all include 4 types of information but when we were in the middle of building out our system, we were told we would need to pay an additional montly fee per location if we wanted the information we were promised we would have on the label. In the middle of this, their sales person even called one of our employees that was managing the implemenation of Revel and screamed at them. Now, with thousands of dollars of equipment we purchased, we told them we would just like to cancel and willing to take the purchase of the products as a loss. But no, they made it all better by charging us $1000 to our credit card. I would NEVER wish working with Revel to my worst enemy.
Revel has been a blessing to us since the day we put it in our stores. The best thing about this system is that it always just works! No complicated programming, no trying to find workarounds, and not even delayed responses from the system due to power outage or network failure in our area (it's Florida, we lose power often). Also, having the ability to service all of my establishments from one location is the best thing ever. I would tell anyone that is looking to invest in a top notch POS that Revel is the absolute one to consider.
We use Revel at my retail business and we recently had a problem with our inventory not showing the correct quantities in stock. We contacted Revel and after countless hours on the phone with tech and customer support representatives the best response that we got was that the developers were working on a fix but it may be several weeks before it's ready. Meanwhile we're stuck operating with a POS system that can't accurately manage our inventory.
Revel is a terrific product, its integration to QBO is terrible. I am a CPA and I have a client and we have been fighting a problem with deposits showing up on the debit and credit side in QBO since October. My client and I have at least 100 hours in calls to Revel and Intuit and no solution just finger pointing its the other softwares problem. This client is opening another business and not going to use Revel.That is the bad news good news Revel by itself is a good product great reports but we have to find a work around for monthly bank reconciliations.
Hi Bill,
I am sorry to hear you have been experiencing frustration with the QuickBooks Integration.
This may clear some things up: Revel doesn’t create the deposit transactions in QuickBooks. These are created by the payment processor. Quickbooks then uploads those deposits onto your bank feed. If there are deposits showing incorrectly, the first place to start is with the payments processor who is parsing the batches and placing them in your bank.
You are more than welcome to work directly with Intuit Support, as well, to resolve your issues.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager at Revel
OK, so I have 15 minutes of free time before I need to go, here is my quick opinion on Revel. I have had Revel for 2+ years and have enjoyed my experience with them. -The iPad software is laid out well, is fast, and easy to use.-The web interface is quick and well designed and intuitive. -There is no waiting for reports; you click, they load. -I LOVE that you can export and import your product and modifiers. Making adjustments in excel and then importing them is way faster and easier than any web interface. -If you do need to use their interface, it’s super helpful too.-If you all you use is basic features great. If you need more, like a volume knob, turn up the advanced features as you need them. -The web interface is fully customizable! You’ll need a web developer’s help, but this is huge! I work hard to have a great branding and image, and now I can reflect that in our online ordering. -Credit card payments. You’re welcome to keep your current processor, it will probably work, and there might be fees involved, and mismatched hardware. Been there done that. I switched to inuit/QuickBooks payments, and it’s so smooth isn’t unreal. First I saved a ton of money on fees. The rates are stellar. 2. The equipment integrates swimmingly. 3. And the more important is the integration with Quickbooks online. Every night it automatically pushes my sales to my Quickbooks and places them into the right sales accounts and payments automatically reconcile. It’s AMAZING. As a small business owner saving time in huge, and this is one of the biggest time savers I gave seen. Even my accountant was blown away, less work for them too!-Tech support, always available 24x7, and always on point. I have yet to have issues with them. Friendly and knowledgeable. - Need something changed to the system? I have requested multiple new features, and a few of them have been implanted within the next software release or two after my request. They listen and value their customer’s feedback.-Hardware, Get a good internet connection, follow their instructions keeping Revel devices separate from your other equipment, and position your Wifi in a central place and you’ll have no issues. It all talks and works great together. - I have been to their Revelry event in San Francisco twice. They care about their customers and are always trying to make our lives easier and smoother. They are always innovating and always integrating the last available tech.Come see it in person. Patty's Cakes and Dessert's in Fullerton, CA.In summary, they are easy to use, they work, they helped me be faster, more effective, increase sales, track sales, save me money, and reduce my workload!Time is up, gotta go. Get Revel already!
Hi Philip,
Well isn’t this lovely feedback. Thank you for sharing on Merchant Maverick! Much appreciated.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager at Revel
Revel POS works well, and is highly customizable.
However, the integration with QuickBooks, and with QuickBooks Merchant Services for card payments, is unforgivably lacking. Less than F.
Problems:
1) extreme difficulty in doing bank reconciliation. It used to take me 1/2 hour each month and would always balance. Now it takes 5-20 hours, and it has NEVER balanced. It’s Kafka-esque. On this issue alone, you should NOT use these 3 services together.
2) you do not get customer invoices fed to QB. So you know have all your normal QB invoices, and POS lumped invoices in QB. Who bought what? No way to know.
3) you get a separate database of customer information in the POS that is not received in QB.
To be clear: the POS works well, but the integration with QB and QB Merchant Services does not.
Had I known all this when I purchased last year, I would not have purchased this solution.
By way of background, I own a small business and have been using QB for it since inception 14 years ago.
Like Jordan, I live in a small town south of Portland, OR.
Hello,
This is Sarah, the Revel Community Manager. I would be happy to hear more about your experience and take your feedback to our product team if you’d like to email me at community@revelsystems.com.
Regards,
Sarah
Unlike other reviews, this one will disclose pricing and fees. This review is the culmination of 100+ hours of researching the industry for the best POS and the best solution for e-commerce + brick-and-mortar. All POS's seem to have a trade-off. The Revel is the only one that seems to truly be free of any payment processor.Pros: Robust POS which doesn't tie you down to any particular payment processor. This is one of the few POS's that gives you almost 100% freedom to choose and pick your own processor. This is a critical feature, as high fees will eat up your profits in the long run.Cons: Many.1. Revel's own e-commerce platform is hideously slow. I timed it multiple times and it took 20 seconds to go from your website to their e-commerce store. We're talking about 20 seconds to load your shopping page. 20 seconds is an eternity for consumers and for business. Even 5 seconds is questionable.2. Hidden fees: The first fee is $119 monthly just to use the Revel. HOWEVER, there is also a $500 + $299 API fee (per month) w/only 500 API calls per day. You can ask them to forego the $500 upfront fee and possibly negotiate the $299 API fee.3. In order to take advantage of the Always On feature and additional PCI compliance, you need their Meraki security hardware (sort of like an additional router), which is probably worth it. But it costs an additional $29 a month + the cost of the Meraki (50(?)). The Meraki will keep your business "live" even if your personal network goes down.4. Major syncing flaws. The Revel POS is not e-commerce-friendly. The only open source it is compatible with is Magento. Otherwise you'll have to use a third-party e-sync company that will charge you an additional $150-$250 a month + $750 upfront boarding fee (see Kosmos Central).5. You will need a top developer, or use Kosmos Central (or another such service), in order to integrate with Shopify or BigCommerce, both of whom have their own inherent problems, such as high monthly fees and/or own payment processing fees.6. They are not transparent in their pricing. Revel HQ will charge you almost 1k more than a reseller, at least in my case. They will gouge you if they can.7. In the bundle package, the scanner and barcode printer are not included. Together, both will cost an additional $700.8. Again, there are only a handful of e-commerce platforms the Revel will integrate with.Bottom line: My reasoning for going with the Revel is its durability, being ios-based, and the ability to "shop" for best processing fees. I will be building a Magento site, but this has its own inherent problems. I am now married to the developer I pick and Magento 2 has some bugs.In an imperfect industry with imperfect all-in-one solutions, the Revel is the lesser of several evils. Though Shopify has it's all-in-one solution with Shopify Payments (includes POS), what happens if Shopify decides to up their processing fees or its monthly fees? Then you're stuck, even if the higher fees/rates eats up all your profits.Major reason to use Revel is autonomy. If Magento fails, then you can always seek another e-commerce solution. If your processor increases fees or won't lower them, should you significantly increase your revenues, you can always shop for another.Personally, I feel Revel is shooting its own feet with the API fees and the API Call limits. Please consider why you want the Revel. In the end, Revel is not the simpler solution, but more of a necessary one if you don't want to be stuck or married to any one payment processing entity. Yet, again, you will always be stuck with Revel's fees. I'm thinking should Revel up their fees, then I can still use the Revel POS and reprogram it. I hope I am not incorrect in this, as some of the hardware/components may be proprietary.ALWAYS DO YOUR OWN DILIGENCE! Hope this helps.
Warning -- this is a long review. I do everything I set my hand to do well and completely, or not at all.Let me start with this. I never buy a POS (or any other software) based upon customer reviews. Why not? Because just as with Yelp reviewers, most software reviewers only tell the half of the story that makes them look good or look like the victim. Reviewers are never to blame. They are perfect. They are the smartest people on the planet, because their mothers told them so. And if something actually takes some thought and education to do right, then people believe it must be badly designed because everything should be simple and easy. (Ok, enough sarcasm, Chip. Even when it is the truth!)There is only ONE WAY to evaluate and purchase such critical software as a POS system -- get the demo and work it out like crazy. Don't rely on anyone else's review, even mine. It is my belief that most people today are too undereducated to understand fully functional POS systems. This is why most restaurants fail quickly and spectacularly -- restaurant owners who shouldn't own restaurants. If POS systems aren't somewhat complicated then they probably don't offer all of the features and flexibility that POS systems should have in order to work across a wide range of business types and practices. Nothing -- even the best tech support on the planet -- will make up for taking short cuts in the beginning. Demo. Test. Read. Experiment. Take responsibility for your business, all of it.I spent a month setting up and putting Revel through its paces before I went live with it. And I don't mean I spent one hour each day for a month, either. I spent 4-5 hours each day for a month. No matter the POS system, taking less than a month to do this is the biggest mistake anyone will ever make. Here are the things I love about Revel.1) It is extremely flexible and highly configurable. I can set it up to work the way my cafe works, not the way some software engineer things all restaurants should work. Bear in mind that this flexibility comes at a price. One must actually learn how to use Revel to their best advantage. One must test, test, test. But that time and effort spent up front will be well worth it.2) Revel is reliable, at least for me. Understand that I am currently not using their integrated payment processing, at least not yet. I use a third-party card processor because my bank gives me a killer deal on processing rates -- ie - a bundled rate for all cards with no other charges other than my flat processing percentage. So, I can not speak to the reliability of their payment processing. I will say this though from past experience with other POS systems. If your card processor requires a gateway between the POS and your merchant account, that is where problems usually occur. The less people involved in the payment processing the better. Most POS systems limit you to one or two processors. Revel tries to work with as many payment processors and gateways as they can in order to give their customers choices. Revel's attempts at openness comes with its own problems and issues always arise, most of which are not really issues with the POS.3) I have had nothing but great customer service experiences. Onboarding was smooth. However, I did not rely on the onboarding specialist to completely understand MY business or how to configure Revel for MY business. I learned from themm read a lot of help articles and watched a lot of videos. Onboarding specialists did help me get a good feel for the basics of Revel and its potential. The rest was on me.4) I've dealt with their tech support on 3 occasions. Overall my experiences were satisfactory. One of my issues was highly technical and involved in-house procedures that are not common to all restaurants. That one took a while, but I expected it to take a while. In the end, I got the answers I needed and was able to do what I wanted to do. Revel is the first, and only, POS that could actually do what I needed, though I'm hoping that in the future it can be done much more easily and quickly. Still, at least I was able to get rid of a spreadsheet or two... or three.5) The basic POS software works and works well. I use the scheduling tool, most of the reports (including report downloads for use in my analysis spreadsheets), till management and inventory control. I will soon be phasing in the CRM (customer relationship management) tool. While I would love to see some user-interface improvements, especially on the back end, Revel works so I have no complaints.6) Inventory control/recipes/costing is probably the most complicated part of setting up Revel, especially for restaurants. But it is also the most robust one I've ever seen. It took me a while to tweak it and get it to where it works for me. But having done so I can say that I can now tell at a glance what is going on with my inventory, ordering and prep management. I spent a month AFTER going live getting that piece working. But it works and it works well once you understand how it works.A few things I wish Revel did better:1) I think that they need to completely revamp their fee structure. The basic monthly price includes the necessary bells and whistles. But prices for add-ons are often too prohibitive for small shops such as mine. I know they need to make more money, but there are ways to make money and ways to price yourself out of the market. Having said this, I have yet to find a POS that I did not have this problem with.2) Inventory control and costing, including recipe management, needs a complete interface and usability overhaul soon. Don't get me wrong. It works. It does what I need it to do. But even a tech-savvy, former systems analyst such as myself has to go back to the documentation and retrain myself too much. It could definitely make use of simplification and better integration between its parts.3) They have a new app called Insights. It is ok but needs quite a bit of improvement. In my mind they need to go back to the drawing board for lots of reasons. Also, that app needs to be part of the base price, in my opinion. Charging us for simple and intuitive access to our data borders on absurd to me, especially when I can get that same information from the backend web portal with a modicum of digging.Overall after nearly 6 months on Revel I give it an B+ to an A-. I'm looking forward to changing that to a solid A some day. And, for reference, I give most POS systems that I've used and/or tested nothing more than a B-. So consider this high praise.
We are a small grocery store on Lopez Island in Washington State and after searching for an upgrade to our key-in register, I came across Revel. This was at the time of the birth of their grocery/convenience store version of their software and at first it was a challenge to get it all up and running but since then its been amazing. I can check inventory, sales, adjust time cards, etc from anywhere! The backend of the system has only improved over the 3 years we have had this system. It is both very affordable and incredibly user friendly. The few issues we came across in the beginning more had to do with the lack of high speed internet but now that we have it, we have had no issues. Customer service is fast and very helpful. Their instructional videos and various training platforms are amazing! The reporting side of the backend has gone through some challenges over the years but they have certainly worked out many of the bugs. Below are some specifics of things we like about he system and things we wish they would improve upon:Things we like:-Backend accessibility and user-friendly platform.-Inventory Tracking, analysis, email alerts for low stock, ability to set ordering lists.-User-friendly platform for employees and ease of scanning, weighing, and paying.-Ease of employee time sheets, clocking in (especially the facial recognition software), etc.-Cloud based system with mass amounts of data storage crucial for over 20,000 different items in our store and growing each year.-Ease of adding new items.-Backend reportingThings we would like Revel to improve upon:-Credit Card Machine doesn't synch with EBT, and various issues with REI cards, and chip is not activated yet.-Sale options through the system is a bit tricky and doesn't show up as a line item on the receipt adding a bit of confusion for customers. -A better credit card machine and one that has customizable messages/questions.-The system doesn't support cash back currently and it is a constant frustration.-Just to name a few off the top of my head, I am sure there are a few other little quirks, but overall the system is amazing.We are about to expand and add another register and are inquiring about add a third for our small cafe as well. They have only improved over the years and we are excited to continue working with Revel. They have certainly made things more efficient at our store and we see the direct benefit of this system!
I researched pretty heavily before choosing Revel as our POS for our small fast casual restaurant. But I quickly found that it had all the features and ease of use that I needed compared to other options (which were plentiful). We have had Revel for about 8 months and I have to say I am thoroughly satisfied. The reports have really impressed me the most. My business partner can see everything going on from his location a state away from our location. I can see everything down to the smallest function and sale.The iPad register system is so easy that my 10 year old trained some of my staff on how to take orders and even to refund.
Revel is a good app if you are a small business. It struggles to keep up with updating the app when an IOS updates. This has caused numerous hours of calling support for help and all they can say is an update will be coming soon
We have been having great difficulty with our new system from Revel and even more difficulty with customer service. We have logged approximately 40 hours on the telephone and 60 emails. Our Grand Opening is tonight and just yesterday they offered to send a new printer to replace the faulty one. No one has come out to assist with our system and we are concerned that we may have made the wrong decision in going with Revel for this very important system. Can you advise how we can get some resolution to our problems with this system as quickly as possible? Thank you. 908-216-1235 The Grille at Westlake, Jackson, NJ
Hi im Jesson from Philippines .We are interested on your product and would like to inquire the price ofthe softwareand devices per terminal . And also How would you assist us for repairs andmaintenance ?We would appreciate it if you could send us details regarding your orderprocess.thank you ..
Hi Jesson,
Thank you so much for posting your inquiry. I am the Community Manager at Revel Systems. You can chat with an agent on our website: http://revelsystems.com/ or give us a call at (415) 744-1433 to speak with a product specialist who will be able to answer all of your questions and arrange for a demo.
Cheers!
Sarah
I was an 'early adopter' buying my Revel Systems POS in late 2012. My business has more than doubled and I credit Revel Systems as integral to that success. We started with one iPad, but within 6 months seamlessly added the second. I personally built the backend and found it intuitive and relatively easy once you commit to understanding the basics.I have felt some of Revels 'growing pains' over the years, however ultimately I always had my issue resolved, which all too often were a 'user error' situation. I also have experiences where Revel made changes to the system, which were not beneficial to me. I reached, complained, and ultimately they reintroduced the feature that I missed. For those looking to start with Revel today benefit from all the capital and advancements implemented in the last 4 years. If or when I expand beyond my original location, I will use Revel Systems again. I have experience with Aloha, Dinnerware, and Maitre D and much prefer Revel Systems.
Hi Jim,
Wow, thank you for leaving us feedback and for your loyalty! We appreciate your willingness to work with us and we value customer input highly.
Thank you, again!
Cheers,
Sarah, Revel Systems Community Manager
When Revel first came out it was fairly stable. Some very nice & needed new features came out. But for the last year the updates have made data disappear or lose synchronization between the Back End & the iPad. Also, to ability to add inventory is extremely tedious. Also getting a simple report of when a specific product was sold is beyond tedious. I have had constant days with support where instead of running my business I spend too much time dealing with support. Going through the steps of Level 1 then Level 2. The support people try their best. But I don't want to play with my POS system. I want to just have it work. And currently things work intermittently and each new update is not properly BETA tested. I don't know why we are paying to be BETA testers. That is how I feel. Updates should be optional.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Darren,
I’m sorry to hear you’ve experienced frustration with your POS recently. Revel has put a lot of attention on releases in the past several months and has significantly expanded our Beta program. That said, with a robust platform that allows for numerous customization possibilities, it’s impossible to catch every issue. I apologize that you’ve had to spend time with Support to get your issues resolved. I’m happy to discuss your feedback further and will share it with our Voice of the Customer team.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
As a current Revel user, perhaps this post will get someone at the heavily layered Revel Systems to contact me. We went live on July 1. We have had a barrage of problems and issues from the start. We chose the system based on it’s claims that it can integrate normal QSR transactions with catering (future transactions, invoicing, etc.) After months of slow and uncoordinated efforts of the multiple tiers of support to work through it, we have learned that our Revel reports do not reflect our daily sales. Small transactional errors have resulted in incorrect tax reporting, payments not being processed in a reasonable manner, and as of yesterday, Revel has admitted they cannot identify the source of the ongoing errors. IN OTHER WORDS, THE ONLY WAY TO FIND OUT IF YOU ARE GETTING THE CORRECT INFORMATION IS TO MANUALLY ADD UP EVERY SALE, APPLY EVERY FORMULA (DISCOUNT, VOID)TO FIND TRUE NET SALES, AND THEN APPLY YOUR APPROPRIATE SALES TAX.
Now it is holiday season and our time is even more precious. We are a 44 year old restaurant in danger of not having a functional POS in November and December. CAN ANYONE SUGGEST WHAT I SHOULD DO NEXT? WHO CAN I CONTACT TO RETAIN EXTERNAL SUPPORT WITH REGARDS TO THE NEGATIVE FINANCIAL REPERCUSSIONS WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING. I WOULD TRULY APPRECIATE ANY CONSTRUCTIVE ADVICE.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Lauran,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel. I’ve looked into your case and it appears that you are actively working on your tax issues with a senior Client Relations agent as well as an executive member of our leadership team. We’ve provided you with your agent’s direct contact information and you are welcome to voice any concerns or check the status of your support issues with them.
In terms of your tax issues, it looks like your original issue has been resolved by a senior support agent, and we are working with you to clarify how the taxes are calculated with Revel reporting. We’re definitely on the same page with you in handling accounting for your business and I’m confident that, with your support agent, you will be able to identify the process that works best for your business.
We’re also sending a Client Success Manager onsite to ensure you are receiving the best customer service. We appreciate your patience.
Your feedback is valuable to us and you are welcome to share your experience with me at any point at community@revelsystems.com.
Regards,
Sarah
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have had Revel for the past 1 1/2 year now.. My frustrations continue but I will say they do work on the problems. Any POS will have issues, I know as I have programed many things and still do.. My issues currently are the EMV switch. You company does not seem to care that you were required by law to switch to EMV over 1 year ago. I have called many times over the last year and now I have received 3 chargebacks and I can't dispute them because I did not take the EMV. This is not my fault and I don't believe I should be responsible for the $100 in chargebacks so far. This should come out of Revels pocket and you might get EMV really quick when you because responsible for all the charge backs. Please if anyone is in the same situation I am with Revel, contact me tim@shinramenhollywood.com and I will be glad to help you get your money back from Revel as well.. I have spoken to revel about this and all I get is the run around. Well I hate to be the one to break the news but legally Revel is responsible because you can not take the EMV chip yet. This is not the fault of all the users... It is REVEL'S problem. I even offered to have 1 month credited of my service for revel to make up for it and that was not done. It is sad for this reason that I have to leave this review.The other thing is the updates... PLEASE NOTIFIY YOUR CUSTOMERS ABOUT UPDATES BEFORE YOU HAVE TO DO IT. You tell us the day after it should have been done. there is no notification system and it sucks. There is nothing telling people of how to use the new features..... Have a sales person do something..... Just saying... you get my money each month but you do nothing to help grow your business or notify your customer of improvements or changes... communication sucks so bad it hurts. Try and email blast... I know you can do it.Well have a good one and I look forward to hearing from all the customers that read this and contact me so we can let Revel know we will not put up with it. Talk soon,Tim
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your feedback. I can definitely understand the frustration from having experienced those recent EMV chargebacks and am very sorry to hear it. One of the big advantages to working with Revel is that unlike many of our tablet-based POS competitors, we’re processor neutral. We want you as a business owner to be able to shop around for the best rates and switch at will if needed without compromising your POS. On top of that, we have intentionally have stayed out of the merchant processing industry so that we can focus strictly on providing the best point-of-sale product on the market.
In order to allow our customers to choose their own merchant processor, we integrate directly with several universal payment gateways. A payment gateway is essentially the middleman that connects the Revel platform to the end MSP, who actually processes the credit card transaction.
As in the case of maintaining PCI Compliance, the responsibility for engineering EMV certified hardware actually lies with these payment gateways. I see that you are currently using USAePay to connect to your MSP. Unfortunately, USAePay has not yet provided us with an EMV certified device. We do have another gateway option that supports EMV currently for certain processors, and I will absolutely have your Product Specialist reach out to see about helping you switch over!
Again, our goal in utilizing these payment gateway partners is to allow you the most flexibility possible in who you choose to partner with as a merchant processor. EMV certification is completely out of our control, and we’re very sorry that it’s been such a drawn out process. I can assure you this is at the top of our priority list and has been since the regulations were first introduced, we would never have anticipated that it would take this long either.
Apologies for the detailed and lengthy response. It is a complex process! In terms of Release Notes and notification, they are sent via email in advance and I will double-check that you haven’t unsubscribed from these.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
While Revel does offer many features, I am not sure the system itself is that great. There are a lot of extra steps for restaurants. The system is so complex, you need a year with support to get it working properly. My complaint is with processing. They don't work directly with a lot of processors. You can't just pick whichever processor you want. That means you have to pay gateway fees around 17 $ per month or 200 annually. They set me up with intuit who promised no swipe fees, 1200 credit to my account after processing 2k which we did the first day and 1.9 %with no monthly fees. The first month they charged me around 3.4%average between credit and debit. Intuit said that 2 accounts had been established which was true as I lost the original log in info. I asked them if the rates were the same on both and the said yes. When seeing my first statement they then told me that I was using the wrong account with higher rates. The credit and swipe fees are now being discussed. Since revel doesn't allow you to readers debit card transactions you have to run them as credit cards if you want your employees to get tips. I am waiting to get resolution on these issues so my rating is 1 star. It has not been the best experience on setup either but that story is even longer. I am hoping that revel will help me to get what their rep promised me originally. Great rates and a 1200$ credit for the 3 credit card machines they made me purchase at almost double the actual cost. My advice is to consider everything before deciding to go with any pos system. If you want to know how things worked out for me email Delijp28@gmail.com
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Charles,
Thank you for your feedback. I’m sorry to hear that you have had some issues with your payment processor. Here at Revel, we allow you to pick any processor you’d like. I will be more than happy to assist you with Intuit. I will put you in touch with our Intuit liaison that can help clear up your account. We definitely want to ensure you have the assistance you need.
To clarify, with Intuit payment processing you can definitely take debit cards. I hope this helps and I will be reaching out to you directly to work with Intuit.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Although it's an innovative product, the quality of customer service is horrible. Three of our restaurants in Europe run on Revel and we have seen significant decrease in stability / consistency. Frequent updates in recent months have caused complete service failure during lunch time (as updates seem to come in at exactly that time). Our account manager is basically helpless, and can only offer us to pay hefty fees to their consultants as well as VIP services in order for us to get support. Far behind NetPos which we use in our other outlets! We halted now the implementation of Revel across our 5 restaurants concepts with 70 outlets and are looking to switch to another provider. Further we tried to implement our mobile app with Revel's API, turned out it is basically unusable at this stage due to limitation of calls we can make to it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello Chris,
I’m very sorry to hear that you’re having a poor experience with your system and support. We definitely want to be sure to meet your customer service needs. I will be reaching out to you directly to learn more about how we can turn things around here. We’re also happy to work with partners to increase API calls. We do set a limit at the outset of our relationship with our partners but we are always available to increase limits if we realize there is a specific need for one of our valued merchants. Revel’s Business Development team will work with the partner providing you the integrated service to find an immediate solution. Thank you for sharing your feedback and for bringing it to our attention.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I've been using Revel for about a month and am pretty happy with it. Just wanted to write a positive comment for other people to read.Had an enterprise system before Revel, so moving to iPads was a big step. The Sales Team did a good job of explaining things, answering my questions, and setting up conferences to discuss and sample the system. Installation was really easy. It took a day to set up all the hardware, but it was pretty straightforward. I was able to get the relevant inventory/data from my old system formatted in a way to import it in to Revel. There were a few hurdles uploading the inventory, but the Revel Support and Onboarding teams were up to the task. From the day I signed the contract with Revel to using Revel live in my business was a tad over two weeks. Now that we've been live for the last few weeks, there have been some minor hiccups or snags, but the Support Team has been able to help me fix the problem in very reasonable times. I really have confidence that if something further goes amiss, I'll be able to get it fixed without extended down time. My older employees who don't use a tablet in their everyday lives are having some problems adjusting to the system, but I think those employees will have trouble with any change. The employees who have used iPads/tablets in their own lives, love the new system and didn't even have to watch the training videos to get proficient. I was really scared going into the process of finding a new POS system, but after a few weeks, I'm glad I did it. My life has become easier and Revel has so many features that I won't even use, but is nice to know they are available. No POS system is perfect unless you totally customize it to the way you want it which probably means having your own in house programming, but Revel is plenty good. It does take some time to keep refining the system to get it to do what you want (and I’m still not totally there yet), but that would be true for any POS system. The key is Revel Support is there to help you get where you need to go. Overall I’m very satisfied with Revel.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jay,
Thank you so much for sharing your experience and feedback on Merchant Maverick! We’re so glad that Revel is working well for you.
Cheers,
Sarah, Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
DO NOT TOUCH THIS SYSTEM
THIS IS MY second comment on here, and I honestly don’t want anyone to go near this system.
I am on THREE FROM THREE BAD installs
we are based in Australia and have watched as the people internally are lucky to last longer than 4 months. Management, support, anyone!
They have no idea, no care, are full of lies and are the most incompetent bunch of people I’ve ever dealt with.
Don’t ruin your business, time or let your stress levels endure this.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Lisa,
I’m sorry you continue to be frustrated with our system. I’ve looked into your account and our AU support is working with you to resolve your concerns.
Regards,
Sarah, Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
This company is absolutely terrible! Run away Fast. My salesman quit shortly after selling me and the customer service with this company is non existent. Unless you teach yourself how to use this POS good luck because even people that work for them don't know how it works. They wasted my time and money and have refused to tell me they are sorry or accept that they did anything wrong which leaves me no choice but to tell everyone the truth which is this company is very beginner. They had an investor invest into them big time so they grew so quick it was unhealthy and unnatural. They might look good but not all the glitters is gold.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Michael,
I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve had a poor experience so far. I’m the Community Manager at Revel and I’d love to have the opportunity to learn more if you’d like to contact me at community@revelsystems.com. I’m happy to collect your feedback and share it with our leadership team.
Regards,
Sarah
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
What I am going write will be short and simple. We recently opened a new restaurant in Texas and bought the system out right instead of leasing, big mistake. For The end user it’s very simple for servers to enter customers orders. But the truth of the matter is we are having technical issues with dollar amounts appearing on ticket, deposits and orders not sending to processor. Tech support can not help get it fixed, waste of hours of phone calls. Now it seems like it has hit a dead end with getting anything fixed or tech to have an idea of or what to fix. Do more research then what appears online good luck and beware.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Noel,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel. I’m sorry to hear that you are having network connectivity issues – I’ve looked into your tickets and it sounds like you’ve had issues with your router following a power outage.
Our apologies as it does take some time to pinpoint the exact issue, but it looks like your Client Success Manager and Sales Specialist are on it and in the process of getting things resolved for your restaurant as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience. We recommend that you allow for at least a month (sometimes it goes slightly over, as in your case – if there are unforeseen complications) before “going live.” Again, we apologize for the delay due to networking.
On a side note, we do offer a lease option, but it is subject to credit approval.
I’m sure we’ll be able to turn things around here and get them running smoothly.
Regards,
Sarah
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Despite being told by Revel that the system would do everything my 2013 Quickbooks POS does, we found that there are several things that are much more complicated and labor intensive to do through the Revel system than through our QB POS. We purchased the system in July however we are still working to get it correctly set up and operational. Even though they told us our inventory could be transferred into the Revel system, we have had to rebuild our entire inventory in order to properly manage and organize it in the Revel System.One of the major issues we've found is the ability to track an item using multiple units of measure. In the QB POS system this can be handled with one SKU and multiple UOM tied to that SKU (ex. can, 6 pack, case). However in the Revel System you have to create a whole separate SKU for each UOM and then build an ingredient formula to track them. We have also found that it does not manage taxes like we need it to, even though we were assured it would when speaking to the sales rep.If you're considering the Revel system for a retail based business, I would advise you to ask a lot of questions as well as have someone from Revel give a full demonstration of how everything works before deciding to move forward with the system. Make sure you know what functions are important to you and have them give a live demonstration first. I think this system could be very good, however I feel like it is missing some functions that are essential.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Josh,
I’m the Community Manager for Revel Systems. I’m sorry to hear that the transition from your old QB POS to QuickBooks POS Powered by Revel has been frustrating for you. You’ll find all of the same features as your former POS, but, of course, with an updated system, there are going to be some modifications.
It looks like you’ve been working with the onboarding team to learn how to build your menu and that a senior sales specialist is monitoring your case and actively assisting you to speed up the process. We typically recommend allowing for a month to transition to a new system – though fine-tuning the menu and settings on the Management Console can extend beyond that for sure.
We agree that anyone shopping for a new POS, as it is an investment, do their research and learn as much as possible about how the system will work for their unique business.
I’ve reached out to you directly and am happy to collect any further feedback on our side.
Regards,
Sarah
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Why after no training because the product barcodes had been entered incorrectly, am I being charged 750 to cancel. I replied to a webinar email and told the sender Jamie about the problems and constant tech failures and poor customer service and my desire to cancel my service. Unlike the info in the article there IS a fee to cancel ... $750! No training, no quality menu building and no truth to NO CANCELATION fees. If you are just trying to get the best quality product and service for your small business, good luck! I'm stuck with this company for a year.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Wendy,
I am the Community Manager at Revel Systems and I apologize for the experience you’ve had so far. Some of our pricing and contract terms have changed in the last year since the description was written. Apologies for any confusion. We are working with Merchant Maverick to update their information, but in the meantime, for a clear understanding of your contract details, please refer to your signed terms and conditions. I have asked your sales rep to reach out directly with the terms and conditions those details. Merchant Maverick does periodic updates to their reviews, however with ongoing changes to our services and variations within purchasing options, the Merchant Maverick site may not have the most current information specific to each client.
In terms of your inventory corrections, I can see from your ticket history that our Support and Client Relations teams are working with you to get you set up correctly. Thank you for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention.
Regards,
Sarah M.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
While this system does have numerous features it is very difficult to use most of them. I have spent countless hours on the phone with support to fix issue after issue. After hours and hours of tech support that don't know how their own product works I finally just hired my own tech guy. Luckily he has been able to fix most things but since I have to pay him per visit if would be ideal if the product just worked like it was supposed to. Just to be able to print barcodes I was recommended one printer by the company, then I was later told that printer wouldn't work. So I bought ANOTHER printer, just to have that one not work either. Then they told me I had to buy extra accessories to make the printer work so I bought that too. Still didn't work. Called back and the tech support suggested I buy a whole new computer. At this I just hung up on them, called my tech guy, and he had the FIRST printer up and running in about 10 minutes. Really wish I had not had to go through a month of purchasing more items that I didn't need. I would never recommend this system to anyone.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Angela,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel Systems and I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced so much frustration getting your printer set up. That’s not the experience we want for any of our customers. I’ve emailed you directly because I’d like to set up a time to hear your feedback. Hopefully, we can get things turned around for you.
Regards,
Sarah
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I only gave it three stars because of the support. We were with ShopKeep for 4 years and decided to go with this system as it offered us more, including images on the screen. As for the POS we love the system, we love the back end, we love everything about it. BUT I have been working with the support staff for over a month now to get it to sync with QB. And have not gotten anywhere. I send emails and told it takes time. Well how much time.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I wish I had never heard of Revel. For the amount of money we pay monthly for this service...it's CRAZY how bad it is. Sooooo many complaints I'm not sure where to begin:- You buy your iPads & card swipe from Revel but when there is an issue they refer you back to the manufacturer. We've had our system less than a year & just with normal usage our iPad stopped charging (we tried different cables and outlets before realizing it was the iPad itself). Luckily we had a secondary ipad but that one didn't have a card swipe so we had to manually input every credit card transaction until I could make an appointment with APPLE, drive there and get a new one. IMO - Revel should have overnighted us an iPad, had us send ours back, & dealt with Apple instead of making me do it. I told everyone at Revel I talked to that this was what they should do - we bought the iPad from THEM not from Apple. Luckily, APPLE has awesome support. That was a two weeks ago. Now our card swipe stopped working. Revel has referred me back to ID Tech who has referred me back to Revel. We are having to input credit cards manually in a very busy counter service restaurant. I am actually on hold with Revel right now trying to get them to send me a new card swipe ASAP but they are not wanting to help at all. Again, good customer service would be: overnight me a new card swipe at no charge since I am under warranty and this is affecting our business - it's hard to be "FAST casual" when you are MANUALLY INPUTTING CREDIT CARDS!! Which leads me to...Customer support is horrible. -Setting up the online ordering was a painfully hard process and even now that I am practically an expert it's not easy to make changes across products-Revel changes things on the backend without telling you: one example of many - they made a change and 1/2 of the pictures I had uploaded for our online ordering disappeared! I had to spend a ton of time reloading them (we have a LOT of items).- Rewards program is a complete pain to manage & input; does nothing that they said it would- Gift Cards; they restrict who you can buy from to ONE vendor and they are obscenely expensiveI've had so many issues...and our sales rep is NO HELP.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Emma,
I’m so sorry to hear that your experience has been so frustrating. This is definitely not the kind of experience we want for our customers. In seeing your ticket history, it looks like you are working with Support to get the card swipe issue resolved. I’ll be reaching out to you to be sure we’re able to collect your feedback.
Regards,
Sarah M., Community Manager, Revel Systems
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Sarah, i’m researching possibly purchasing your equipment but i’m concerned with all these negative reviews that the response time is not quicker. Are the issues with the system that drastic that they are not resolved in a timely manner? I haven’t purchased yet and i’m almost concerned that the responses to all these clients have been that they are currently working with someone else from your support specialists. Again, i’m not fully aware of each circumstance but as a possible future customer this is highly concerning.
Hello Dunia,
Thank you for your inquiry. While online reviews can be very helpful during POS selection process, I would also recommend talking with your Sales Representative and having them assist you with a reference who is actually using Revel and may be able to give you more in-depth feedback.
In terms of our Support, I am a bit biased because I work for Revel 🙂 I think we have amazing Support agents who work very hard to give our customers stellar, 24-7 customer service. I say this because I work with them every day. There are lots of ways to communicate with our Support team and response times usually vary depending on how the customer is utilizing Support channels.
Each case is different and online reviews often only tell one side of a story that may have many parts to it. Revel is a robust, customizable platform and we have LOTS of happy customers, but, sadly, they are not always the customers you hear from on review sites.
I am happy to chat with you about Revel and how we handle online reviews and feedback – you are welcome to shoot me an email at community@revelsystems.com.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Sarah, Community Manager
Can anyone confirm if this is true or not? Swipers do not hold any data. We changed processor and were told that even though the swipers were brand new they would only work with Mercury/Vantiv and that revel couldn't repurpose them like other processors do to discount the cost of new swipers. The email from Revel is below:"I have confirmed that you have been processing payments and unfortunately we can not take back your card swipe due to the fact that we are a PCI compliant company. PCI compliance does not allow us to take back used credit card swipers due to security issues. Once your swipe has processed a single transaction it means it has captured CC information and thus can not be taken back by Revel.Please confirm if you would like to proceed with purchasing Usaepay swipes."
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello Stephen,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel Systems and I hope to supply you with some additional info regarding credit card swipes and PCI Compliance.
1. One of the benefits of choosing Revel is that we allow you to choose which credit card processor and/or gateway you would like to go with. We do not force any specific processors for your system. You are welcome to switch payment processors whenever you like, but each payment processor works with determined credit card swipes, so in the event of a switch, the card swipe requires a swap, as well.
2. Compliance with PCI (Payment Card Industry) DSS (Data Security Standard) means that we’re held to their standards to maintain your business’ security. Revel takes your business’ security and that of your customers’ very seriously. Each time a customer swipes their credit card, their information is captured by the swipe. Since the swipe stores the information, the swipe must be wiped out by an Encryption Service Organization (ESO) to maintain PCI compliance. Revel has found that it is not cost effective for our customers to go through the tedious process of returning the swipe for re-injection. Instead, it is less expensive and quicker for our customers to simply purchase a new swipe.
I hope that this helps to clarify Revel’s policy on the process for switching payment processors. Your sales representative will be able to assist you with changing payment processors.
Thank you for sharing your concerns.
Regards, Sarah
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Really horrible organization. No one seems to know what they're doing. I get different information every department I'm transferred to. I was mislead to believe Revel was EMV compliant by the sales person and as it turns out, level 2 support says that "no one on Revel is EMV compliant. The latest batch report says that people with Mercury payment processors will be the first to receive EMV compliancy." Their website even says they are EMV compliant (http://revelsystems.com/blog/2015/07/09/get-ready-for-emv-chip-migration/). Someone is lying or someone doesn't know what the heck they're talking about. All information I've received has been contradictory. The whole reason I switched to Revel was to become EMV compliant in the most cost effective way, also because it was supposed to integrate with QB online. That was a lie as well. The QB online integration is fraught with bugs and it was a logistical nightmare trying to unkink everything. It's been a black hole time suck and I've lost thousands of dollars in the entire set up only to find out that I was nipped and jipped. I am so incredibly disappointed in this whole experience. The data doesn't migrate easily from QB desktop through a regular CSV file (I switched from QB desktop because they were requiring us to purchase the newest license along with the new EMV chip swipers. My current license is only 1 year old and they were still going to make me pay close to $2,000 per license and my business requires three different licenses. Also, because if they require me to purchase a new license every year, a cloud service seems more cost effective and sustainable). Any way, I would never wish this mess on anyone. I really hope that Revel is willing to rectify their fraudulent and dishonest behavior by way of exchanging the card swipers I was told were EMV compliant for legitimate and bonafide EMV card swipers.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
You can use the Verifone EMV units with Revel but if recommend against that. Verifone requires you to sign a 3 year contract and has a monthly fee per terminal.
Avoid Mercury at all costs. They are absolutely horrible. They arent even a real merchant provider. They are a reseller for Global which is also horrible.
Do what I do and get your own EMV swipers from your current merchant provider. I use Heartland and have the Ingenico unit’s which are excellent. You can then use the Credit+ button on the Revel system and avoid thr hassel.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Corey,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel. A few things here. While many of the statements regarding EMV compliance may seem opposing, they are, however, correct. Revel offers EMV compliance within our software. That said, we are dependent on our partners to obtain certifications which make them EMV compliant. We appreciate your patience while these very new laws take effect. In looking over your account, it looks like you are using an Infinea Tab card swipe via Intuit Payments. I believe that there is info regarding the status on the Intuit site here: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/payments/emv-reader/
I hope this helps in the meantime.
Regarding your QB Integration, I see that you’ve worked with our QB expert and that we were able to connect you and sync your data. I also see that you are working with Josh on our onboarding team. He’s happy to continue assisting you with your business’s POS needs.
Regards,
Sarah
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I have been using revel for just under two years in a brewery that I own and like any POS system they always have there flaws but overall it works and I am happy with it. However it’s not ideal for what I’m using it for, for instance you can’t split tabs on it for the tavern setting. But, what I’m doing is rather simple, and it works for me; when I’ve had issues they’ve been able to walk me through them, yes it often takes awhile but it gets fixed.
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They have cost us so much money, time, and headaches. We have had over 200 support tickets in less than a year and all about the same things. Payments disappear, items don't print, terminals go off line daily. There are so many better options out there. Check out the reviews on their facebook page as well
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I am writing to review Matthew Binning of Revel. Matthew is the Sales Executive assigned to our support/account. He has gone above and beyond closing the sale and has been super supportive during a bumpy install/set-up. He always answers the phone, is knowledgable and patient. If he doesn't know the answer, he does the proper amount of diligence to get back to us with the right answer. It is a pleasure to work with him and we are looking forward to a long and healthy relationship!!
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We purchased Revel in Nov 2015 and have been super happy with our decision! The install was crucial and luckily we had a great tech and sales person to guide us thru proper wiring in our build out. This is extremely important to have the system operate at its full potential. The software is very clean and modern and extremely user friendly. I'm not a computer savvy person and this was intimidating at first but it truly didn't take much at all to completely master it. Tech support has always been extremely helpful and my sales person, Christina, continues to check on me and always asks if we need any help. This is unique, as we all know, the sales person hardly ever follows up once the sale is complete. We had a few small concerns in the beginning with over ordering equipment and they were so good with allowing us to return what we didn't need. And I can't express enough how valuable it is to work with a company that is local! Perhaps I should mention that we are fast casual and our set up was rather unique and once again, Revel spent extra time catering to our needs.
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Revel has been a mixed blessing from previous POS systems. There have been many frustrations with Revel, but what is most disappointing to me is their business practices. They have arbitrarily updated the back end several times without notice and it appears without testing, disrupting our operations and taken several weeks to address the issues. We are frustrated by the incessant number of redundant questions you have to answer to get a quick answer on the phone, but what I hate most is the limit of 25 hits on the API and then charge an outrageous amount for additional hits. I have never seen any other POS system charge to access your own data. It is for this reason primarily I am always shopping for the next iPad POS solution.
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Hello Alfredo,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel. I’d like the opportunity to discuss your experience with Revel as we appreciate feedback from our customers. Please email me at community@revelsystems.com to set up a time to talk.
In terms of Updates to the system, they are critical, as with most software updates. We’ve sent communication via email to alert our customers before the update to the Management Console will happen, so please do let us know if you are not receiving those emails, as well. We’d always love to hear your suggestions regarding updates.
Thanks for your review.
-Sarah
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We have had Revel for about four months and it has been great. Any problems we have had come up ,they have solved problem promptly . The inventory matrix set up takes a little getting used to ,but once learned is easy yo follow. Wish we were able to customize bar-codes to are needs ,but still works for us.
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Hello Ron,
Thank you so much for the positive feedback. I’ll reach out to you via email to set up a time to discuss your thoughts regarding customizing barcodes — we’d love to hear your input and suggestions.
Thanks again for sharing your experience.
– Sarah M., Community Manager, Revel Systems
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NOT READY FOR RETAIL
Has good points and bad points. The company is doing some things well, and others horribly. If you are a larger retailer, I’d advise Revel is NOT ready for that level. High marks for interface design, aesthetics, and overall appeal. Middle marks for setup, requires some technical ability, but not more than any other desktop system. Middle marks for backend usability, again takes some patience to learn. Low marks in retail functionality and power features. In our case, I give them very low marks for support, service, and general product knowledge. I give them beyond low marks for their handling of our case and our efforts to back away to a mutually beneficial ending of our relationship. For more details read below:
OUR SITUATION: We have retail business with 3,000+ separate SKU’s and receive on average 300 of those every week. It was with great anticipation that we purchased Revel after much research, a very positive demo, and a decision to try the cloud type POS systems. Our purchase experience was very positive, and our sales rep very personable and helpful. When it arrived and we unboxed it, we soon realized we were dealing with a system that had a solid hardware design, many powerful tools and a pretty interface, but one that lacked basic and advanced tools for retail. Nothing terribly fancy, just ones that have existed in other similarly priced systems (all things considered) for more than a decade. Through much back and forth with onboarding, sales, and support, we determined there were some rough work-arounds for some of our issues. This still meant we were taking a technological and functional step back from our last system, one over 7 years old. In my determination the system is well designed for a shop with less SKU’s and less receiving variables. If you are using just a register and a swipe, moving to Revel could indeed be a huge step forward. I give Revel credit for developing a cloud system that is probably way ahead of similar competitors, and our research supports that notion. However… this is one side of the coin.
Allow me to preface this portion by stating we told our sales rep that our number one requirement is that our new POS system MUST have inventory handling functionality, described our current process of handling of inventory, and asked that Revel tell us if they can do that or better. They said they could do it. He said, she said…. Read on….
GETTING GOING: Not long after purchase we began to figure that not only was the system woefully lacking in retail functionality, it suffered from hardware and software issues. Worse so, the company itself suffers greatly from support issues. Our first surprise was the optional VIP support service that was tacked on as an “opt out” service. I did not say I wanted it, but there it was on our first bill. I asked it be cancelled and voiced that “opt out” services are tried and true ways to annoy customers, and that they should stand behind their customer service for all. VIP service implies the current service levels are insufficient for customers who are already paying for the Revel SaaS model. It was cancelled and a credit issued against our account.
Second issue we ran into was we realized the default retail hardware package does not include a debit PIN pad. For retail a PIN pad is a fairly essential piece of hardware and should be covered in the sales process if one is needed. We soon discovered why. The PIN pad is provided by a different company (Verifone in this case) and a separate payment gateway had to be setup. This requires yet another user agreement and rental fee from Verifone for use of their hardware and gateway. The unit came with a software update glitch that took near a month and various Revel support people to finally conclude the unit should be replaced. That is correct, a month without a card swipe. Thankfully we had our existing POS system running and could run cards through it. A month without a card swipe is unacceptable. Processors overnight units if they at all exhibit failed behavior.
During the intervening weeks of waiting on the PIN pad issue, we discovered our cash drawer would not open on command, the label printer would not respond (fixed) and then would print text on top of text (not fixed). We also discovered software glitches where test PO’s wouldn’t transfer to the front end. Then we discovered a huge functional omission in Revel. Labels can only be printed for ONE product at a time, or a whole CATEGORY. I calculated this horrible lack of printing versatility would increase our receiving time by 2.5 person hours each week, if printing non-stop. We also couldn’t modify the format of the labels in any form, but that can be tolerated if the labels even printed correctly.
Other issues were encountered, some were worked through, some were not. During this time we discovered Revel’s support was reading the same support manual we could find online and didn’t know much about the software. They missed scheduled call backs, didn’t respond for days and weeks at others (if at all, requiring me to call or email), and couldn’t solve many problems without escalation… again, if at all. What was most distressing was that each new rep I talked, no matter the department, they seemed to have limited hands-on experience and knowledge of their product. I started to notice everyone had only worked there for “months”. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but when so many people lack depth, it starts to show (especially if internal training mechanisms are insufficient). I asked over and over if the system could be made to scan in inventory and no one fully grasped my question. It’s retail basics… can I use my scanner to scan in products for receiving, or end of year count, or search… etc?? Can it? You use your product, yes?
By the way, we never saw a way to cancel a ticket after going to the payment screen? Not even logged in at highest level. An approved user should be able to alter/delete anything prior to closing the ticket with a successfully completed payment. Another retail basic…
EXTRICATION: All these support and hardware/software issues piled on top of the lack of functionality resulted in our pulling the plug on the system. We could no longer trust the company despite their insisting they were going to put out a release that would solve all our functionality worries. I wasn’t allowed to talk to someone in authority or product development to put my concerns to rest. My case was moved to a separate group of personnel that deal in only handling customer retention and had to accept their word as final. Their dismal support and various bugs created a complete lack of faith in the product and company. New systems are pyramidal in problem resolution. We hadn’t even moved past the base level to testing more advanced business functions like Quickbooks integration.
RETURNS? After some back and forth (including our conclusion they had broken their warranty) Revel decided we could receive NO return or refund whatsoever unless I could produce written documentation I was mislead by Revel. They stuck to their guns on the contract and we are left holding the tab on all the hardware and monthly fees. It took months to finally come to this end. Revel became a four letter word around our establishment and caused numerous arguments. It is a pity they could not recognize a situation that just didn’t work out and make efforts to maintain their integrity as company.
FINAL THOUGHTS: Revel has come a long way in such a short time. Perhaps that is the problem. Any company that grows too fast can become disjointed. It seems apparent in the general company culture, shared knowledge, and depth of experience. Receiving a massive injection of investor money can do strange things to senior management priorities as well. When money is no longer a concern, a general disregard for running as expertly and efficiently as possible can arise. Perhaps executive leadership spent too much time selling their shiny toy to the world than focusing on building a stronger core competence, educating their staff, and researching the market. Their alliance with Intuit seems to have only exacerbated their dysfunctions and conversations with Intuit show they may have received some blowback by reselling Revel to their customers. Intuit POS had four times the functionality years ago, and here they are pushing a product that can’t do all those things their desktop clients were accustomed to.
PS – Never saw the credit for the VIP services. Never applied to invoices or issue as refund.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jake,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel. Thank you for leaving such detailed feedback. We are committed to customer service and I would like the opportunity to hear about your experience if you are able to please email me at community@revelsystems.com.
Thank you again for the review. – Sarah M.
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Is this review for the Quickbooks Powered by Revel version – we spoke with a salesperson and he made it sound like we were getting Revel’s service through QBO and we almost signed up on the spot because the price and service sounded great! But now I’m reading all these reviews and I’m concerned that we need to continue our search. (We are a Kitchen & Home retail store, if it matters.)
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello Kristen,
QuickBooks Cloud POS (powered by Revel) and Revel Systems are separate POS systems. We are currently in the process of writing a review of QuickBooks Cloud POS so that will be available soon.
Best,
Jordan
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello Kristen,
I’m the Community Manager at Revel. It sounds like you’ve been working with an Intuit direct rep and may have read reviews about other integrations that are not fully under our control. We’d love to have the opportunity to talk to you about how the Intuit / Revel partnership works. I’m happy to put you in touch with the right person if you kindly respond with your business name or an email address that you are comfortable posting here.
Thanks much,
Sarah M., Community Manager, Revel Systems
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Everything easy to use it . No need training to cashier . Everything visually . Good inventory system . Low cost install . Good piece monthly fee . No internet still made transaction .
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
It is like there are 2 separate worlds that we live in. I switched to Revel in January from another company. The main reason I have done it is that it can do 1/2 pizza on orders and that it can work with mobile order takers.
What I have discovered was way much more and here are some important aspect:
– this POS creates it’s own private network independent of internet connection which means High Speed between the main POS and the mobile takers and Maximum Security.
– On Friday and Saturday where our fine dinning pizza place get completely packed we have 0 (zero) problems with the system and we use 4 mobile takers and 1 main unit. If you have never own a POS system you need to know you the POS is reliable, and it is.
– the support system was always there for me when I need it in the beginning
– the CSM fixed my problems in less than 1 hour when I was configuring the menu
– the system is easy to configure and to set up, especially if you have worked with other POS systems before
I strongly recommend to not be cheap and buy all the equipment they say just like you would not buy a car without one of the wheels and then write a review that the car does not work.
I also Highly recommend to pay for a CSM in the first 2 months until you figure out the menu just like you would not jump of an airplane without a parachute from the first time.
The only CONS you might consider is the price for the upfront equipment which might seem a bit expensive. Here is the thing: You should not expect from a Prius what you expect from a Lexus. And this is what you get with Revel, including over-night shipping of equipment in case of a problem.
PS: I bought my Ipads from Best Buy with a new credit card so I can have 0 interest for the first 6 months.
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Thank you for your input! I appreciate it very much! 🙂
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Marian,
I’m pleased to hear that Revel is working well for your pizzeria! And that you had a great experience with your CSM. Thank you for taking the time to share your advice and thoughts about Revel.
Many Thanks,
Sarah M., Community Manager, Revel Systems
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This is all you need to know about Revel:
Right next to the “Logout” button, is a button for “Process Credit Cards Offline.” Imagine, if you can, a work-weary and homeward bound employee mistakenly hitting the offline processing button instead of logging out. It’s easier than you think. And the reason for this? There isn’t one. Although this is obviously only one small feature, it is indicative of the nature of Revel as a whole: frustratingly unaccommodating and poorly designed. Numerous complaints by various customers fall on deaf ears, mainly because the customer service department is largely just damage control.
Revel: poorly designed, poorly built, inflexible and unwilling to adapt to even the most minor, but potentially significant, changes.
Lastly, in anticipation of the inevitable response telling me to reach out or that they’re working on making things better or any other generic statement meant to assuage, let it be known that I have at least a dozen other examples of inane Revel features that highlight its uselessness.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
The latest release of the POS moved the “Process Credit Cards Offline” into the Manager submenu. So this is no longer a problem as you describe it.
Release notes for latest version can be found here: http://revelsystems.com/release-notes/2_13/
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100% a nightmare! Do not get involved with this company or Kosmos Central. They boast a working system, yet I have had mine for 4 months and it does not work. It is a very hard system to set up, work with and/or get work arounds for retail. If I were a coffee shop and sold a single item-maybe, but not for retail and not for this price. They are good at pointing the finger to other companies as the problem. However, you will hear over and over it will be ready to sync Friday or the end of the month, month after month. I finally had to ask myself this question-what is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. I chose to stop the insanity and actually try to find a company that I can trust. One that stands behind their products and has a product that actually works! It’s good to learn from other’s mistakes. This will be an expensive mistake to learn if you don’t heed the many warnings. Buyer beware! I can’t even give them a 1 star-I wish there was a negative star option!
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I have had the system and entire year and have yet to “go live” due to an integration problem with Kosmos Central. Retail is foreign to Revel, they specialize in restaurants. Customer service is non-existent. Danger! Do not get involved with this company.
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Hi Tahnee,
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had such a difficult time with Kosmos. We have several customers who work with Kosmos very well and they are a valuable partner for Revel.
I see that you’ve been working with Margaret and our customer support team. I’m glad that they are getting your ticket issues resolved. We have a high level of commitment to customer service for our clients.
Revel does work well for retail businesses, but, again, I’m sorry that you’ve had a frustrating experience. Revel appreciates your feedback. I’ve reached out to you directly in the event that you’d like to share further detail about your experience.
Regards,
Sarah M., Community Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Revel is not good for restaurants or retail. It is good for people who are too helpless to solve problems on their own. Fortunately, most business owners are resourceful enough to figure things out on their own. I have to implement various work-arounds in order to get Revel to work on even a basic level. If you want the most minimal functionality coupled with horrendous customer service, then Revel is for you. If you require a POS system that actually helps you make money for your business, look elsewhere.
My offer stands: if you are considering Revel, drop me a line and if you have an extra hour or two I’d be happy to give you the real scoop on how truly useless this product is. Worst business decision I have ever made.
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Have you implemented a different system yet? If so what did you go with? I’m a new retail business and still trying to decide which system to use.
Thanks for your time
Durea
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We bought Revel – hated it before we even finished the onboarding. We switched to Lightspeed and couldn’t be happier, and we’re getting even happier with their web commerce.
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interested in your opinion on the right pos system. I just bought an existing pizza place with an archaic pos system and high processing fees. Looking to move forward with something better. Curious of what you did for your business.
Any help is greatly appreciated,
Ryan
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ryan,
No one else has chimed in here, so I will. I might be a bit biased because I work for Revel, but if you are taking over the Pizzeria, Revel has designed a Pizza-specific POS. Whether that’s half-and-half toppings or combo-specific orders, Revel has built an enterprise-level Pizza POS.
We have a built-in delivery management system that integrates with Google Maps. We have our own online ordering platform that connects directly to the Revel POS. Furthermore, we can even create a custom app for your business that will allow picking up and delivery orders.
Here’s an article that Merchant Maverick wrote about POS systems specific to Pizzerias, though, so you don’t only have to take my word for it 🙂
https://www.merchantmaverick.com/best-pos-systems-for-pizza-parlors/
From what I have heard from our customers, the best thing to do in searching for a new POS is to do several demos with your top 3 choices and really take your time making sure that you have all of the features to meet the demands of your business.
Cheers and happy POS hunting!
– Sarah M., Community Manager, Revel Systems
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Sara,
A major problem with Revel is the constant run-around you get from everyone in the company, failed delivery of promises, and bad customer service when dealing with refunds or mischarges. If you demand a refund for a monthly fee (or 5) because you have not completed the onboarding process you get tossed from one person to the next and nothing gets done despite promises for months. Believe me, I have done the insanity with Revel over the past 11(!) months. I am being passed from one person to the next in order to put a bandaid over every problem to buy time for Revel and Kosmos to get their act together. Can I get an amen for being patient, spending $14,000 and trying to work with Revel/Kosmos for 11 months?
As far as Kosmos Central is concerned, look at Deborah’s post. Need I say more? I have been promised “2-3 weeks” for an integration over the past 11 months by the CEO of Kosmos Central.
Deborah is also right about the backend system, it is VERY time intensive to import products. If you have a lot of inventory, say 10,000 sku’s, it will take an army to put them into the Revel backend. This confirms my previous statement of “Retail is foreign to Revel”.
Based on the fact I used Quickbooks POS for over 16 years and had a great experience, I bought Revel through Intuit. I did not know I would be doing business with Revel, I thought business would be conducted through Intuit. Intuit customers who are interested in an iPad system are shoved into a relationship with a company they do not know. One problem is the partnership between Intuit and Revel. Intuit is selling the Revel system but Intuit salesmen will misguide you in order to make a commission from the sale.
Finally, I truly wish I would have spent more time researching multi-system, multi-location POS systems before I wasted so much time, energy, and money on Revel. Just look at all the negative reviews!
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Should have listened to the reviews and never invested in this system. Their customer service is hands down the worst.
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I need to be honest and let everyone know the POS itself is wonderful when it works. Revel takes no responsibility when it messes up and I loose money. Credit cards don't work after midnight due to a glitch win revel, fixed now but I had months of problems and even proved I lost $$$ and they did nothing for me. I had defective equitptment less than 1 month after getting the new revel POS and they still have not taken it back for credit. The people are the problem. They do not know what customer service is. I want the owners of revel or at least the people in charge to come to my restaurant be run t for a day with the problems that We have to deal with due to revel. I bet it would be fixed really quick that way!!Just saying not the best customer service to say the least!!! Currently people can order online and get free food and they don't know how to fix it. But yet it is my problem loosing money, not theirs. Just done understand how they can't take responsibility!!!
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Update to my review. I have been contacted by Revel after this and they are making efforts to correct and address the issues I have been having. After it is all taken care of I will update everyone with the outcome.Tim
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I am going to be blunt and to the point. This is the worst system due to the people involved. I own a business in Australia and I am yet to meet a single person who has any idea about the product or returns phone calls or emails.I have installed revel into my second business on the weekend and Revel single handedly nearly shut my business down. We reverted to old fashioned calculators, cash and manual weighing.3 days later I am still yet to hear from anyone from Revel.For those who had great experience I am jealous. BUT if you are based in Australia I honestly believe Revel is not equipped with competent people who understand their system or more importantly absolutely do not care about anyone but taking home their own pay cheque.
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Hi Lisa,
Thanks for reaching out. We understand that the Australian team has been in touch with you each day this week and is working as hard as possible to resolve your issues. Revel is committed to providing the best experience to each and every one of their customers globally.
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Solid marks for Revel from support to customer service. I am unfortunately in a business that requires a few different systems, the others top notch in their own right but a perfect world would be REVEL all the way around... something I have been pushing for with all of my clients. The system works great, and is very well supported on the back end. The customer service and response time is the key, and the teams at REVEL deliver. I am very happy with REVEL.
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Thanks, David! We’re so glad to hear it! And thank you for taking the time to let us know!
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I would say have very good experience with revel after several other POS and iPad usage. Revel does delive the easy setup, easy training the staff, and reliable ontime. Support mostly good quick response, but sometime a bit too much follow up 🙂 but eventually solve the problem or configuration. Because several bad experience with othe POS, I was very cautious this time revel. Good thing revel was able provide a test environment for me before I did any purchase. After play around in the test environment to satisfy all my requirement of an POS system, I was glad I purchased revel for my tea shop and my cafe. I see revenenue increase by at least 20% even during the winter month. I am happy revel by my side. Jenna at Tea Talk teas and Cafe!
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Hi Jenna, Thank you for sharing your experience with us. We’re always working on improving our customer service support, so thank you for the feedback. And thanks for being a part of the REVELution!
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I have to say, after reading through some of the comments that I am baffled. Maybe the dates are old.. but I recently was turned on to Revel, based on some pretty thorough searches and readings ( Forbes!); and who doesn't love a female CEO with the brains to lead her way in a male dominated industry?I signed on for three iPad mini's AND the VIP service. Yes, you have to learn how to use the system; frankly, if I didn't, I would be worried. Ive worked with Legacy systems for YEARS now and know that it took plenty of time to train myself and my staff... likewise you are going to have to learn and train and not take too much advantage of the customer support. Every business owner HAS to train. Period. That said, I too, saw the bad posts on customer service online...and remember when Yelp came out and ruined my business over just being able to post what they wanted online. You learn to deal with the space and work with it to turn your image around. The POS does EVERYTHING you need it to, everything... and more. EVERY POS I looked into had customer service issues, so I am happy with my purchase. I definitely feel they are worth every penny and I recommend it to any business; especially those looking to expand.Happy hunting gang!
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I’m not a sponsored review. You can find my original review buried somewhere in this thread. I have had Revel probably longer than anyone here (September 2014).
Is it perfect? Of course not. I give it a C+. But it’s ‘good enough’ for my needs. I have two POS stations and also a mini iPad for each station setup as a customer display.
My biggest complaint is their reporting. The iPad sales report printout doesn’t match the back end. We have found the backend to be the most accurate and use that exclusively when inputting numbers into our accounting software.
Occasionally the software is buggy but that has gotten better since i started using it a year and a half ago.
The sales managers/executives are impossible to get a hold of once they have sold you the equipment. I give my sales manager an ‘F’ here. She is terrible. Quick to respond before I bought but totally non-existent now. Support on the other hand is easy to get a hold of. I don’t know why people are saying you can’t get support. This has never been an issue for the year and a half I have had Revel. I had to call them yesterday and was able to speak with someone within about 5 minutes.
I continue to keep on the lookout for better POS software as I always want it to be better than it currently is. But Revel certainly isn’t the dog that a lot of the posters here are making it out to be.
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Been operating with Revel for almost 2 months now. I was hesitant about the product mostly because of reviews however they promised me things have changed a lot. And they were right. My experience with Revel has been wonderful! I did a remote installation and they tech person that helped me install it was very knowledgeable and actually helped me with a couple menu questions too. Two months later I've only called support once and that was just to ask about chip and pin options. The POS is extremely powerful in what it can do, you just gotta know how to use it all. Not sure what "problems" other people were facing with, but everything works perfectly for me.
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To give an honest assessment, avoid this system at all costs. Here are just a few of the reasons:1)By far the most baffling of any customer service I have ever received in my life. I paid for the VIP customer service. It's $49 per month and my "dedicated" customer service rep is impossible to reach. When I finally COULD get him on the phone he belittled and berated me. If one of my employees treated a customer of mine in a similar fashion they would be fired. Revel should be ashamed to keep that man in their employ. 2) Voids and Comps come up in the same category with no way to change it. this makes no sense to me. A void means the product was not sold and therefore can be sold later. A comp means the product was given away as a token of good will and cannot be resold. I now have to have my employees manually enter a 100% discount if they are to comp an item. This makes the discount reporting pretty much useless3) the reporting is very thorough...but since it is not able to be customized, it is completely useless. You cannot delete old items, only add new ones. The whole system is built as if Revel doesn't trust the user enough to use it in the way that is most helpful to their business. 4) it took 5 full weeks from the time revel did their install for them to finally finish it. Things I asked to be completed on day one are still not done and my business suffers from it every day. 5) you can never get anyone on the phone or email. Its almost impossible. I could go on and on, but I won't. If you are thinking of getting Revel just please please please find someone who already uses it and ask to play around with the system and the back end for even 10 minutes. I guarantee you will opt not to waste your money on this poorly designed and inherently flawed POS.
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After a great deal of research and much deliberation, our restaurant company selected Revel Systems iPad POS because functions are cloud-based rather than based in our own server, and because the iPad interface is intuitive and user-friendly. Revel was the only POS system we evaluated that was able to handle all of the aspects of our diverse business: high-volume, fine dining restaurant plus complex retail operation. Some of the systems we looked at excelled in one or the other side of the business but appeared to be weak in the other category. We do have some depth in IT in-house and through our local, outside contractor; while I read some of the reviews in this very publication prior to making a decision we figured we could make a go of it, and we have been on the whole favorably impressed by the quality of support at Revel.Revel Systems is a dynamic company that is actively engaged in improving its product and support. Our company has been able to work with Revel’s engineers to develop features that will help make our business operate more efficiently--and which we anticipate will benefit other Revel clients as well. New versions of the Revel software are released at regular intervals, integrating many useful new features. I have rarely had to wait to speak to a tech support agent on the phone, and frequently my initial inquiry will resolve a problem I am working on. (If not, it is most likely because we are trying to do something the POS system was not designed to do. As I described above, the engineering team seems willing to work with us on developing features we need for our business.) For some reason, emails and chats with support do not seem to yield the same quality of result, so I have more or less ceased emailing or chatting…Our installer has been extremely helpful both during her time on site, but also with follow-up. She really cares about our business and puts great effort into helping us find solutions or putting us in touch with the appropriate tech at Revel if she is not able to help us with a particular issue. The same high level of service is true of our salesman, who has been of great assistance in helping us move toward a POS system that suits our needs as a business. We have been very fortunate to be able to continue to work with the two of them from the beginning of our research into the Revel system through a series of installations and up to the present. I would give them both the highest recommendation.
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Hi Phil, Thank you so much for the comprehensive feedback! We are so glad that you are having a great experience with the Revel team. We understand that choosing the right POS can be a difficult process, so we appreciate when that partnership yields positive results. We are, indeed, a dedicated bunch, but we love hearing that from our customers in particular.
Thanks again for being a part of the REVELution!
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I gave them one star only because none wasn't an option. We only bought Revel because we have been happy users of Intiuit's desktop POS and it seemed like a good "next step" for an upgrade. boy were we wrong. This system is most definitely geared toward the restaurant crowd. We were losing features that we have in our "outdated" desktop version of Intuit Quickbooks POS; like quick looks at customer history, the built in customer reward program and most importantly the end of year Physical inventory. Almost immediately we express concern over these issues. We tried working with them to explain what our issues were so they could try to see if there was a way around them using their system. I have explained the way our existing POS does end of year inventory proably about 6 times now, at least, and they still don't get it. But I'm supposed to be happy that I spent a fortune on equipment and monthly fees? There system doesn't deliver and now they won't refund our money AND they keep charging us the monthly billing fee even though the last 2 months that they have charged have been since we told them we wanted to return the system. Intuit should be ashamed for pushing this product as the next step in POS for them. We trusted Intuit and now we are out thousands of dollars with a system that doesn't do everything our old one did.
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Hi Gwen, In reviewing your ticket history, it looks like you are working with Josh who has offered to input all of your barcodes into the system for you and is in touch. Please feel free to contact him directly to finish that process.
We understand that it can be frustrating when implementing a new POS System and getting used to new features. It does take some time to set up and to add your products into the system to get up and running; but for any new POS one does have to enter the items into the system in order to take inventory.
I apologize for the confusion regarding our monthly hosting charges. Once you have signed up with Revel we start your monthly hosting charges. We do not charge based on usage, but have found a flat rate model works best for our customers. The monthly hosting charges cover your management console and all of Revel’s standard services.
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Our problem is not that we are unwilling to wait for help to load our inventory. This is the latest attempt by Revel to try to keep our business. Your system doesn’t easily allow us to complete our end of year inventory. I have had many conversation via phone & email with Josh and one with a tech to explain what are current Intuit product does. Your system will not do this. Your system is not really geared to retail. We trusted Intuit’s recommendation that you were the next step for us to upgrade to from Quickbooks POS. We asked to return the system well over a month ago but we keep getting billed. When I requested that the billing dept credit back the latest charge they emailed back and wanted to know if Josh or I had notified them to cancel. At NO time was I told that I needed to call billing. I assumed that through all the back and forth for over a month of requesting to return the product for a full refund, someone would have canceled the monthly fee. We never went live but have paid almost $900 in monthly fees while we attempt to return the product. I have explained the same thing over and over again to a few people, Josh being one, several times. I shouldn’t have to load an app onto a iphone inorder to be able to easily complete my end of year inventory. Revel is supposed to be an upgrade from the existing POS desktop version, it isn’t.
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Worst experience with a supplier since my opening!I saw the all the bad reviews about the support before signing up but my Sales represent based in UK told me that I will have a UK support and it will be very different. And as an IT, I told myself that I will succeed to setup the POS by myself with the documentation.You can’t.The documentation is not up to date, you have limited privilege on admin and the support UK or whatever is the most useless support I ever encounter. I have spent/wasted 20 days to try to setup the POS for nothing, spending hours with the ‘don’t care/don’t know support’. I just gave up at the end. RUN AWAY!!
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Pierre, we sincerely apologize that we weren’t able to provide better support for your setup. We value your feedback as we continue to improve our support teams.
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Of course, you're not! You just called me to finally respect the law and refund in exchange of removing all my reviews.
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We have used Revel in our Cafe for 7 months now, 7 painful months. I was recommended this product but what I should have done is do my own research, a quick Google of 'Revel POS problems' will tell you all you need to know.In fairness, there are one or two 'nice guys' you deal with during business hours, however on weekends in evenings don't even bother contacting 'customer support'...totally useless. And the 'nice guys' haven't fixed my long list of woes, so being nice just doesn't cut it anymore.Syncing issues, freezing issues, false information given when totalling the days takings, ghost orders popping up, orders taking up to 40 mins to reach the kitchen from the main POS...the list of woes goes on.As a business owner I know how much bad reviews hurt, and I don't write this lightly...but I feel it's important to warn others, this product does not work in Australia and the support is bad...really bad.
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We sincerely apologize for the continued issues and for any frustration caused. In reviewing your service-ticket history, we hope that the hardware replacements have resolved your issues. Thank you for your feedback; we are committed to improving our support at Revel Systems.
Community Manager | Revel Systems
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Lost over $4000 in credit card transactions and their customer service is horrible due to a software upgrade they said was not predictable. Stay away from this company and I'm currently looking to a new one to transfer to after this issue.
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We are sorry that you experienced so many problems with our system. We hope that we can solve the current problems you have and alleviate your frustration. Thank you for your honest review.
Matt Quintana | Revel Systems
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I can only say that my system has been running great since we switched to the Revel Ethernet cable. I did notice alot of issues before but now all works great. Thanks for helping us as I can see alot of people need this help also.
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Thank you so much for your review Samual! We are excited to hear that everything is running smoothly. Thank you for choosing Revel and we hope to continue working with you in the future.
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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I am the head of operations for a nightclub. I chose revel because of the systems inventory control capabilities and reporting. However, what they don't tell you is that you have to pretty much figure it out how to make it work for your business yourself. The set up for this system was a absolute nightmare, support was completely clueless and kept leading me in disasterous directions that would cause the system to not be able to deduct inventory properly, causing duplicates of everything that literally caused damage that could not be repaired. Through months of going through this, I had to start completely from scratch, The Only good thing that came out of this was that through trial and error and learning all that I could I was able to learn exactly how to set up this system and make the inventory work for a bar/restaurant/nightclub. If anyone needs any help, assistance, or questions I would love to help others. Feel free to email me at findyourphoria@gmail.com
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We are sorry for all the inconvenience that our product has put you through. We appreciate the sincere review as it helps us fix futures problems like this. We hope things are going well now!
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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Best Point of Sale in the market place. I have used a few really bad systems out there and maybe Revel is not perfect but they are way better then Micros and about 4 times less expensive. Thanks,Mark
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Thank you for your review Mark! We are glad that you have found so much success with Revel. We are excited to work with you in the future and will welcome any additional feedback you have.
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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I need to open up a Revel consulting business. I could make a fortune “fixing” people’s Revel system so that it is properly usable.
My business does over $500K a year and I have two Revel POS systems and I don’t have anywhere near the amount of problems these posters here are having.
I don’t know where the disconnect is. I’m not sure if people aren’t putting in enough time with testing and setup or if it is just general lack of technical knowledge. For instance I have seen a few posters complaining about credit card issues. Some say that they have been taking credit cards with Revel, yet the funds are not showing up in their bank account. Was this not tested BEFORE you put your system into production? I made sure I used my personal credit card for dozens of transactions during testing before I put the system into my business for production use. I verified that all charges where actually deposited into my business checking account. This told me that the backend of Revel with regards to credit card processing was setup and working properly.
I’m not saying that Revel is perfect because they are not. But it seems to me people are just expecting to bust open the box, install the equipment, and be off and running within an hour. This is not how to properly install a complicated POS like Revel. If you don’t have at a minimum of two weeks to do the testing/configuration/employee training before going “live” in your business, than you will be disappointed.
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There is room for a value-added reseller / support consulting business between Revel and their customers. A day of onsite set up and 60 days of ongoing, single-team support would work wonders to get new customers installed correctly and trained properly. Revel has its quirks, as do we all, but it is a solid system with a lot of great features. I’d give it **** (4 stars) now with constant improvements.
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faulty payments structure: we lost all the money from credit card transactions on day 1 of the business !!! By far, the worst customer service that one can ever experience. So every single person who reviewed them negatively, were so right. I am really surprised by the way this entire situation was handled. Firstly, nowhere in the training did anyone ever mention the 2 buttons and the purpose of credit and credit plus. Secondly there should have been some sort of pop up or error message saying the transaction didn’t go through and if they could take it off today I’m not sure why they couldn’t do that earlier. The experience with customer service has been the most unpleasant experience so far since nothing gets resolved in less than 2 hours at the very least. We spoke of all the negative reviews we saw online and you mentioned that a lot has improved with additional and better quality staff. Somehow we seem to be the unlucky ones to not get good customer service. Level 1 there are just not equipped with answers to any questions and can never help. In fact each person you talk to gives you a different answer. What a way to start new business with a loss of $$$ for no fault of ours. The least we could expect was for Revel to take a tab of the errors. To my surprise, it was very convenient for the staff to point fingers at us for being wrong. The call with one of your managers got disconnected and the least that one can expect is a call back but to my surprise, no one cared to call back and address this issue. We have already invested so much money behind this system. I would never recommend Revel to anyone.
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Sorry you had to experience this horrible system as well. Of the hours and hours I spent with them in my attempt to transfer to this horrible system, my experience was much the same. I at least dropped them before I went live-THANK GOODNESS. I can not even imagine how Revel is still in business. One of my final calls with Revel was with the "second in charge" at Revel-the "chief of staff", and she could not have been any ruder. She was extremely unapologetic for my hours and hours and hours of attempting to get their system to work or for her seemingly untrained staff.For anyone reading these reviews to evaluate the Revel system - DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY.
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Swetha, sorry to hear about all the trouble you had getting the system setup and working properly. Customer support is our top priority. We want to ensure that all of our customers are happy and have their questions answered. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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I purchased Revel across 4 terminals two and a half years ago. It was hands down the biggest mistake we ever made when opening our business. The system is poorly designed and should not be used in anything bigger than a street side coffee stand. Definitely does not work across multiple terminals. The POS would un-sync and loose whole tables and items off tables on a daily basis. It would also regularly completely crash mid service on a busy night. The stock control feature was so inadequate for a real business with any quantity of stock that the only work around Revel could come up with for us was to export out into an excel spreadsheet to do a our count and then back in to revel to update figures. Doing this caused many errors as well. The company mantra was that everything would improve over time with the promised regular updates. However with the updates it actually appeared to get worse. It felt like the company had run out of funding for development and was slowly falling apart. The system cost us $10k in the end and we threw the whole thing in the bin and bought a real POS last month. When you consider $50k would be a very conservative estimate of how much lost sales we had due to Revel complete deleting items off customer bills it makes a $20k established POS system look very cheap. This is just the start of the problems we had with Revel.Simon.
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I have been using revel for 7 months now. I moved my whole company over to it. Revel is awful. Here are some of the things we have experienced:1. Poor customer service- revel has offered us an option to pay a monthly fee for faster better service2. system down- lots of lost revenue due to this3. enterprise features not working properly4. lag time- for example you cant sell something if its not in inventory. When we add items to inventory its taken upwards of 24 hours to show up on the POS5. Huge discrepancies in reporting- we can pull the same report several times and the revenue collected shows up different each time.Revel explained that this is normal and cant be fixed6. poor business practices7. High start up costsIf you are going to charge $1000 upfront for software you better have the best darn software and service out there. Its non refundable. Thats just my view. I would NOT use revel if you can avoid it.
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Joey, we are truly sorry about the troubles that our product has given you. We hear your feedback and are working to fix these issues. Customer happiness is our top priority and we continue to work hard so that problems like this do not keep arising.
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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Worst piece of equipment I bought in 40 years of being in business. It is set up for restaurants NOT retail business. My IT person would ask them a question and they always had to call her back. Half the time she couldn't understand them because of their thick accents, The other half of the time they gave her bad info. Run don't walk away from this company. Never could get it to work correctly. Returned the enitre system to Revel. They received it three weeks ago and I am still waiting on my refund which is going to have a 35% restocking fee deducted from it. The Revel System never worked probably for me and Revel Systems never could get it work either.
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I would be interested to know if the reviewer actually USED the Revel system in a REAL retail and restaurant business. Guessing not as I doubt there is any way they could possibly give it 4.5 stars. Based on my actual personal attempt to use this system in my retail business, 1 star would be a generous rating.
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After months of horrible customer service and countless bugs and limited functionality I dropped my attempt to use Revel and returned back to my old system. If you need basic functionality try Square or some other basic POS product. If you need any real business functionality-RUN!!!! The product is EXTREMELY limited and customer service is awful. Just a terrible company and should be avoided.
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Thank you for your honest and sincere review. We are sorry that our system did not work well for you but we are committed to improving so that issues like this do not happen in the future.
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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I am considering Revel for my new sub shop. Has anyone noticed marked improvements in the system integration with QBO or Support since Revel received their latest round of funding? Revel always ranks very high in the “Best POS” reviews – so I am surprised about all of the very negative comments in this forum.
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Our Revel sustem ran well for 18 months with very few glitches...I'd guess we called tech support less than 3 times. Then, in one fell swoop, our system crashed on the very same day Revel had an upgrade. Four months later, HUNDREDS of support calls later, thousands of dollars later (because they said it was our hardware, then our cabling, then our internet, etc etc), we finally gave up and switched to Square, which handles our million dollar volume with ease. I followed every one of their suggestions, yet only at the VERY very end did they admit that their software did have a "known problem."But the other reason I'd say RUN AWAY was the salesperson's radio silence when I called him pleading for help. ZERO calls back. Deafening silence. Completely unacceptable. Our staff, BTW, LOVES Square, and their credit card prices actually ended up saving us several thousand each year.
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RUN!!!! Very fast!! Away from the nightmare called Revel. Total disaster.
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Do not purchase your POS from Revel. Their sales team will sell you a system telling you that it will work for your application not knowing the details of your business. Their system is very basic as far as what it has to offer. It is very complicated and hard to operate. We contacted tech support and got put on hold many times to get no results. I feel their customer service has been poor. And their return policy almost doesn't exist. All I am looking for is to return everything to them and receive my money back so I cam move on to a product that suits my application. Please do your homework before purchasing Revel POS. I warned you
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Brandon, we are sorry to hear about the experience that you had with our product. Every product has its issues and it is unfortunate that these problems happened to you. We thank you for your honest review as we take every customer’s feedback into consideration.
Jr. Community Manager | Revel Systems
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Merchant Maverick needs to use reviewers who actually have a dog in the fight. It’s very misleading to give Revel rave reviews and yet almost all of the Revel customer reviews are vehemently negative.
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AGREE COMPLETELY. We left Revel also.
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Tara I agree with your statement here. Merchant Maverick isn’t really a true review site when it comes to reviewing Revel. Unless they purchased a software license and the hardware that goes along with it (they haven’t), then they have no way to give a true review of the software.
Basically, this “review” of Revel that they are providing is nothing more than them regurgitating bullet points that they got off the Revel web site.
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Rodman,
We have demo access to Revel’s software.
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Hi Tara,
We definitely consider user experiences in our reviews, but that’s not the only data point we use.
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Think you missed on user experience of Revel in anything other than the easiest of businesses. It a terrible product.
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We’ll definitely look into this Todd. Thanks for the heads up. Our goal is be as thorough and accurate as possible, so if we’re missing something, then we’ll fix it. I’ll push this to our POS specialist and she’ll re-evaluate Revel.
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WHY CAN'T I GIVE REVEL ZERO STARS?Have used Revel for almost 2 years and would NOT recommend. Tech support is offshore, which honestly doesn't matter to me, but they do NOT know anything other than the basics which I already know. Worse, they give you WRONG advice.RUN. RUN RUN. Upgrades result in new problems. I spent over $6,000 buying ADDITIONAL new equip (they said my ipads were too old) only to find out it's a software issue, not hardware or cabling.RUN RUN RUN.
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Be very wary before purchasing this software. I purchased this system after being told it would do dual retail and restaurant transactions for my items. But upon receiving the system I discovered that instead you had to create two separate duplicate items for each single item. Not practical for my 1000 plus bottles of wine and beer. When I went to return it, they only wanted to offer me just over half of what I had just paid them for it. It had never even been used and was still in their original boxes. Second, when purchasing an iPad system, you imagine it to be streamline and of minimal hardware requirements. However that is far from the case here. Each location requires some 10 power cords, 8 ethernet cables and connectors. Everything is hard wired. But since you don't have a computer bus or connections, every serial port is simulated. Each of these serial access ports require not only the serial connection to the device, but also two separate power cords and an ethernet cable. Each POS location has to have its own ethernet switch to handle all the cables. So for the nice streamlined system they show in the photo, understand that there is a 6 inch diameter bundle of cables coming out of it.
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Troy,
I can’t speak to your first point but I’d like to comment on your second. I personally like the fact that the POS system is hardwired. If you have a businesss that does any kind of real volume (>$250k year) you don’t want wireless peripherals that run on Bluetooth. You want a solution that is tried and tested like Ethernet/Serial. You will never see any major retailer/restaurants using Bluetooth bar code scanners and printers. They will all be using hardwired systems.
Revel just introduced a new stand that is tubular where you can hide the wires inside to clean up the look a bit. But it not worth it to me to change out both my systems to this new stand.
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I completely agree to be cautious. The set up of the hardware is extremely involved with cables, cords, switches and such just to run an iPad. Then the software is extremely limited. 6 months later and still fighting with them on a refund. Be VERY cautious with this company. My experience was awful.
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Hi Troy. I’d love to get more information about what you mean regarding the wine and beer issues you had with Revel. We are in the process of making a transition and Revel seems like a great fit. We are a deli/take-away catering business with a rather large wine, beer, cheese and gourmet grocery portion. Thank you in advance for your reply.
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I agree with this. The amounts of wires, cords and switches to run and "iPad" system is overwhelming. AND the wireless router they sent me died within 7 days and rendered the system useless until a replacement was sent.Just find another solution. Trust us.
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I wish I could give this zero stars. We tried for 3 months to go live with Archaic system. when you call tech support you go staright to Serbia. Which would be cool if they could fix anything! After 3 months we threw the towel in. Not only would they not refund us our money for the overpriced old sovtek equipment they hussled us on, or the software cost that never worked. But they charged me for 8 months of "Hosting and support" when we not only never processed one order, But couldn't even get the thing to connect to their network with their cracker jack "escalation' team on it. This company sucks and is crooked as three miles of bad road. stay away from this POS because that's what it is.
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I completely agree with Jeff on his review. 1 star is WAY too generous. Awful system and company. Do NOT even waste the time and effort.
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Still haven't gone live with this system. There is a huge disconnect between sales and onboarding. I am beyond frustrated. Our onboarding specialist is just as new as I am and while he is a lovely person, he has been little help. The customer service is piss poor and trying to get a response? Laughable. I want to talk to someone who knows what they are doing. I don't think that is too much to ask. The support email is a joke. They don't even read what the problem is before they respond. The sales associate hasn't returned an email since the moment we purchased the system.
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Molly, seriously do yourself a favor and just move after from Revel now. Regardless of how far you have gotten in the process it just gets worse. I tried for months to get this system to work and it is just rotten from sales to support to the upper management folks. I would likely say they are probably one of the worst run companies with a really inferior product. While you may be determined to get it to work, do yourself a favor and move on. It's the best thing you can do. As I said, I tried for months and finally went back to my OLD system that was MUCH better than their "new improved" product. They are such a joke.
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We have been in the restaurant business over twenty years and have owned our own restaurant eleven years. Tomorrow, our second restaurant, Mad Taco, will open. I am sick to my stomach at the prospect of operating a business with Revel as the POS. As the owner/ operator, I do the books for our restaurants, coordinate with the accountant, pay sales taxes, etc. Our Director of Operations researched POS systems and even went to Houston to demo Revel at a restaurant who uses it and loves it. We purchased Revel with much enthusiasm and felt confident that it would be a great partner in our expansion plan for this new fast casual concept. The first red flag with Revel came when Cara, the DoO, told me that Revel said we had to process our credit cards with their preferred processor. We pushed through that and are processing with our processor of choice - Cambridge. I LOVE them and our Rep. The second problem arose when we tried to reschedule our install. A common issue for restaurants is that they never open on the first projected opening date. When Cara communicated with them through email, just the way they like, she was told to simply accept the new install date of April 28th. Our new projected opening date was April 27th. She reiterated this, and they again suggested installing the day after we were planning to open. I'm not a fan of email communication when there is a problem not being addressed, especially when I'm the paying customer who is supposed to be receiving a particular product or service. So we called and demanded they install before we open. Really?!?!? They then suggested we install the system ourselves and they would consult with us. We refused, given that installing the POS system is a small part of opening a restaurant. That's what we're paying Revel to do. We have a million other things to do to get the restaurant open. We're not lazy and we're not idiots. We have several thousand dollars and a reputation at risk if this restaurant doesn't succeed wildly. We're TRYING to be smart and have the experts do the things they're experts in, so we can do the things we're experts in. So, they finally scheduled a contractor to come out and install our system. I'm so relieved we stood our ground on that point. He was at the restaurant all day, doing technical things, and "tool guy" things with drills and bolts and wires, and things that Cara really doesn't know anything about. Good thing she was allowed that day to continue hiring people, working on menu costing, etc. You know... restaurant stuff. My husband, the chef was completely consumed in the kitchen. I was still in the dark about the problems to come that would involve reporting. Ignorance is bliss. Ahhh, so we're in the clear - smooth sailing from here. Not quite. Last week I began to familiarize myself with Revel's back office reporting. I foolishly assumed there would be a plethora of reports that could be customized, tweaked, etc. especially since one POS review website described Revel as "fully customizable" This is false, completely false. Cara sent me Revel's Sales Summary Report. I dismissed it thinking there had to be a MUCH better report. This thing was useless. I started looking around Revel's reporting options and my dismissive attitude quickly turned into panicked gut wrenching horror. That's it? There had to be more reports. (I'm still hoping for this, and maybe this post will get a person who can really help me - this David guy responding to posts? - to contact me.) So I geared up and got my head in the game. I contacted Revel to set up an "on boarding" session. This was after Cara told me that you're supposed to communicate with Revel through email. She had been spending so much time teaching herself how to use Revel with their tutorials and emailing questions to them. I don't have time for that. She doesn't either actually, but she's much nicer than me. Again, I'm paying Revel to provide a service, and I want things to work efficiently for me and my business. Cara didn't even know about "on boarding" sessions. So I called Revel to schedule one and was rerouted to a friendly man somewhere overseas. We tentatively scheduled the session for 9AM Central time the next morning. I contacted my accountant to make sure she could join us for the session, since I'm all about having the experts do what they do best. I called Revel back and confirmed 9 AM Central time. The next morning comes, I get the kids off to school, beds made, coffee drunk, ready to go. Mary, the CPA, comes over about 8:30 so we can discuss the reports and are prepared for the "on boarding" session. 9 AM, 9:05 AM, 9:10 AM. Huh. No phone call. I call Revel. I get my friends over seas who apologize saying they accidentally scheduled it for Pacific time. Annoying but completely understandable since its 3 AM or some awful hour their time, and I try to remember that I'm dealing with first world problems when I'm on the phone with overseas reps. Unfortunately, I'm also 100% sure I forgot my manners at some point in a later conversation with them. OK, well let's reschedule for 11 AM. Great. The CPA stays, and she's not cheap. It's not cheap for your CPA to make house calls. 11AM, 11:05 AM, 11:10 AM. Are you freaking kidding me? Now I'm livid. The CPA finally leaves about 12:30 because she has other clients, and it's clear that our "on boarding" session isn't happening. So now, I'm realizing that not only is Revel misleading regarding their products and services, but they are actively threatening my ability to do my job. Figuring out how to properly collect mixed beverage tax in Texas is no simple task. I had no clue how to do that with this POS, and we were scheduled to open in 2 or 3 days. I was not going to open a restaurant without having the taxes properly accounted for. Forget normal book keeping practices. I was ready to fly to San Fran and help the Revel team put a face with the email address and my "cloud". While I was on hold for 40 minutes on one phone, I called Revel from another phone and hit "1" for sales knowing I'd get a cheerful voice on the other end immediately. That poor guy and his poor supervisor. They still said I HAD to send an email to reach anyone with the "escalations" team. They didn't even have a phone number for them. I sent an email to the supervisor about the question regarding alcohol tax and the missed meetings. I will say Revel came through this time. Clayton called me within 10 minutes from the escalations team, and even waited patiently while I finished making sandwiches for my hungry kids. He and I were on the phone quite a while, at least an hour maybe two. Ultimately he created a new tax button for me for the alcohol tax, but said there was no way to create a report that calculated the specific alcohol tax. Ughhhhhhhhhh. He said that since it was a hidden tax, it would be impossible to calculate. What? Just create a report that calculates 6.7% of all alcohol sales. Who cares that Texas is trying to force restaurants to pay the tax instead of the customers. Come on, Public Policy 101. People pay taxes, not businesses. Its a pass through. You may not see it, but it's a passthrough tax. I digress. OK, let's talk about the report I need. I spout off the list of items Mary and I had three hours to perfect for beautiful bookkeeping, and he said there's no way to compile that information into one report. He had said the information I needed could be found on four different reports. So I have to look at four different reports everyday to enter the data I want into Quick Books? Thats ridiculous, inefficient, and allows for waaaaayyyy to large of a margin of error. He said there should be a report rolled out in a couple of weeks that will have all the information I'm looking for in it. I'm hopeful that it will be a step in the right direction, but given that Revel cannot customize reports, I know it'll lack information I want. Anyway, I had the chance to call again today to revisit the tax button issue and still try to figure out what I'm going to do with these reports. I called and gave my case number and waited 40 minutes. I did have the chance to talk to Robert for ten minutes before I had to get off the phone and go to work. He suggested that I email a list of all the items I need to find, and he would research them and let me know which reports housed the information. I've still not had an actual "on boarding" session. Nor has anyone contacted me about the missed sessions, which is something I requested in my first email. Oh, the printers. Those were requested about a month ago, and they finally arrived today. Sweet. So for three days we've been practicing on invited guests using hand written orders for the kitchen. That's very tech savvy. My husband rolled in about an hour ago and said there was a problem with the printers. The font is tiny, and there's no spacing between the items, so the tickets read like a book. He asked Cara to contact Revel about fixing it, and they said they can't change it. HAHAHAHAHA!!!! What else? I think I'm missing something else that's happened, but I can't think of what it is. I'm curious - is there a restaurant out there using Revel and getting good reporting out of it? If so, please contact me, Help! Help! We're in this for $12,000. I don't want to have to flush that money down the toilet and get another system, but it's what we're already considering. Or contacting or attorney, or a Revel executive can fly out and fix all our problems. Man, that was cathartic. I guess, in short, Revel may be "the bomb" in a few years, but they have really misrepresented what they can do now. It really kind of fascinates me. This push toward technology - Sure, it's great. Sure, I'm a generation too old to really appreciate it. But no amount of technological progress can displace the need for customer service, readable tickets in a restaurant kitchen (that one really cracks me up), and rock solid book keeping to keep your business thriving. Side note: I even called Quick Books today to inquire about switching to the on-line version hoping that would relieve some of the pressure if reporting information was imported directly into QB. Tiny problem. We use ADP for payroll, and QB said ADP can't export payroll into the on-line version of QB. Someone, please. Take me outback and put me down like an old dog.
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Thanks for your very honest and detailed review. I WAS considering Revel but after reading all the negative reviews…..especially their horrible tech Service….over seas…no thanks. I’ll never undertand how a business can STAY in business with bad service.
Thanks Again!
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The ONLY thing I can imagine is that Revel got lucky with venture capitalist funds to support them. I had conversations with the 2 second highest ranking people at Revel during my dreadful experience of attempting to make this system work, and they could not have been more rude if they tried. This is a HORRIBLE company with a TERRIBLE product run by nasty people.
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Thanks Tara for the very honest experience using Revel. Your C/S experience is ridiculous.
I’m on the opposite side of you – I’m starting my first takeout and pantry store and looking for a lightweight POS system and CC processor for us. I’ll stay away from Revel!!
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Tara, can you update your experience? I just signed on to Revel, and would like to know if you ever got it setup the way you wanted it? Thanks
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My apologies for taking so long to update my review. I haven’t visited this site since posting originally. Unfortunately, there have been few glimmers of hope that Revel will be anything other than our biggest liability at Mad Taco. Since posting the review, we have continued to have serious problems. To be brief, these problems include:
1) the loyalty program not working correctly despite Revel telling us that it would function as we specified before we purchased the system. There was initial turmoil in setting it up, and once used it didn’t function properly which caused mayhem in the middle of a busy lunch shift. It has been shut down while we’re waiting for Revel to fix it. There may have been two rounds of trial and error at our expense – literally and figuratively. I’m real tired of paying management to be on the phone with Revel. I’m tired of being on the phone with Revel.
2) I discovered on June 30th that some credit card transactions from May 17th didn’t get processed. Of course Revel said it wasn’t their fault and didn’t have any solution for recouping the money. I contacted Cambridge, the credit card processing company I mentioned in my earlier review, who got me the contact information for the “gateway” processing company, who then created a report of transactions “accepted” but not “captured”. I then manually batched out those transactions but still lost $300 due to cards being declined for various reasons. If you’re wondering why it took me so long to notice the missing money, I’ll tell you. We’ve been so consumed with problems with Revel that my accountant and I haven’t been able to get to the point of using the reports to enter CORRECT information into Quick Books. I now check USA E Pay’s website every few days to make sure our credit card transactions are hitting the bank. And, yes, USA E PAY charges me a monthly fee now for fraud protection. Again, in 11 years of owning another restaurant, I have never lost credit card transactions. Period. The representative at USA EPay stated he’s seen this happen several times with Revel.
3) because there isn’t a report that simply calculates different tax rates, I am 100% certain I didn’t pay the state mixed beverage taxes correctly. Yesterday Revel sent a message out indicating they updated the program so you can now use different tax rates. I want to feel hopeful about this, but I have my reservations that it will work correctly. Cara tried to implement it yesterday and was having trouble so she asked for help in the chat box that appeared. That person’s response was so unhelpful that she took a screen shot of the conversation as evidence of how ridiculous their tech support can be.
4) my accountant discovered that the taxes reported on the Operations Report do not equal the taxes reported Sales Summary Report, and the Product Mix portion of the Operations Report doesn’t equal the Net Sales portion of the same report. She was able to ferret out after a few hours and a few hundred dollars that the Comped Gift Certificates are being rung is part of the problem. I discovered today that they have been rung up three different way. Why is it even possible to ring up Comped GC’s three different ways??? When the customer has to teach themselves how to operate the program, enter all the data in, and set up everything there are bound to be problems. We are not in the POS programming business, we’re in the restaurant business. Revel should be doing a lot more to set up things correctly for us to prevent problems, and they should be able to fix problems when they do occur. Maybe other reporting issues our due to how we set up the system, but it’s so user unfriendly we can’t access information we need to figure it all out. Who has time to scroll through 70 pages of reports to find all of a particular type of payment received and have to resort the list each time you click on the next page? Apparently Cara and I do because it’s what we did tonight.
In the last few weeks, Revel has reached out to us to address our issues.
Cara and I have a telephone conference with David with Revel tomorrow at 3 PM. And we received two phone calls and two emails last week offering tech support help. For a couple of weeks before that I had two or three conversations with a member of the escalations team that resolved a small issue. I can’t remember what it was. It is no exaggeration to state that Revel legitimately requires a full time employee allocated to manage it. It’s difficult to quantify the impact Revel has had on our business, but it’s bad. Real bad.
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So sorry you've had to experience all these issues. I have up during the initial installation process. The surprising thing to me is how this company is even still in business.
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I have now used Revel for 2 Food based companies, if you are looking for a very basic restaurant POS with little to no reporting Revel is basic enough to work. (takes orders and collects payment)I now (not through choice) i'm trying to use for a multi site food company. If you are multi site or plan to be. RUN, RUN NOW. there is only basic multi store help. for example.I add a new Salad to our menu for the brand (all stores to carry)- Name copies across to all my sites, that's it. I now need to go into everyone of my sites and input all the ingredients and any modifiers (no XYZ, extra XYZ etc). I guess I am lucky as I only need to re enter the same date 5 times, before we expand further we will have a new POS as I am not repeating the process any more as simple change already take up more of my day than they should.As this basic feature is not available with Revel (Confirmed by their tech support today) I was asked if I wanted to submit a feature request.. just horrible that a basic feature needs to be requested! Add this to the complete lack of reporting available and the lack of inventory management and my advice is for any food based business stay away, for any multi site business unless only looking for a very basic cash collection program look elsewhere as we are now doing for our next expansion.Maybe in a few years Revel will do most of what they claim they can now, but do not fall for the 1/2 completed program it is now.
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Hi Adam,
I saw your review and it sounds like you aren’t getting the full benefits of our POS. We most certainly do have the option to control all products from one location, we have over 25+ reports, and full inventory management with Purchase Orders. A large portion of our clients have 5+ locations and are using our EMS to run their businesses.
I couldn’t find your contact information based on the info given here. Can you please contact our Sales Team at 415.744.1433 and they will be able to give you a demo of all this functionality.
—
David Grant
Director
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I ordered a system for a juice bar we are opening. Our buildout has taken a lot longer than projected so I haven't been able to get them a start date. that being said, I just found out they have been charging me $50 a month for four months. I've asked 3 times for a refund and they keep telling me they're going to get around to it. I'm beyond disgusted with this company.
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I’m sorry for the confusion on our monthly hosting charges. Once you have signed up with Revel we start your monthly hosting charges. We do not charge based on usage, but have found a flat rate model works best for our customers. The monthly hosting charges cover your management console and all of Revel’s standard services.
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Hi Jeremy: I am considering REVEL for a pos for our business. Why would they charge you a hosting fee at all if you weren’t using the system yet? The sales guy I talked to said we wouldn’t get charged the 119.00 until we went live.
Any other comments/complaints?
Thanks
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Bottom Line Upfront: If you are looking into getting this systems for QBO integration, DON”T DO IT. It’s not even close to being ready for primetime and at least for me, now that it admittedly doesn’t work as advertised, they won’t give me my money back. -------------------------------------------------------I want to really like this system. It looks polished and appears to be on the right track conceptually and I think it will eventually given Intuit is involved. But it needs to work. I first became aware of Revel a few years ago when looking into another business opportunity that in the end didn’t materialize. We would have needed a POS and Revel was going to be the solution. So with my current business, when it was announced that Intuit was partnering with Revel I was excited and took the plunge immediately. The sales staff was very responsive and polished and the equipment was delivered quickly. Setup was very easy and the initial onboarding was impressive. But then challenges set in and getting a response from their troubleshooters was difficult to say the least. It’s been three months since I purchased the system (did it in my business off season) and I have now hit my busy period and don’t have time to help them fix the problems they caused. Specifics:1. Upon initial lash up with my QBO, Revel immediately created duplicates of all of my customer files that subsequently replicated with another app that I am running with QBO. It’s a real mess. Revel’s solution was to credit me for buying an app in QBO that I can go through and delete duplicates quicker than one-by-one as QBO affords. But it’s still time consuming, falls completely on me to do it AND it doesn’t eliminate the duplicates from other app running with QBO. So now I have plenty of extra data grooming to do thanks to Revel.2. The troubleshooters don’t seem to have a clear understanding of how the integration is supposed to work as evidenced by conflicting information I received regarding the inability of Revel to push inventory data to QBO. In the end, one of their reps simply admitted to me that it doesn’t work and that they need to do some rework on the entire system. So if you think you are going to get a comprehensive inventory management tool working with QBO, that’s not the case. Perhaps they have backed off on advertising this. I don’t know.3. Security is a concern, at least in practices of the troubleshooters. In my initial calls, it was suggested more than once that I simply email my QBO credentials to them so that they could log in and look around for problems (Easter egging?) Far cry from the screen sharing that one would expect in such a situation from a more mature service. 4. Getting a hold of them to troubleshoot is almost impossible. In fact, talking to anyone with the authority to make things happen is very difficult. I scheduled multiple “screen shares” via email only to be “stood up” and only get voice mail when calling to see if we were still meeting. In short, there was no sense of urgency to get this thing fixed even with my busy season rapidly approaching. On a humorous note, one of the troubleshooters attempted to up sell me on their pending service management functionality during one call. Interesting tact when even the basic functions aren’t working.I’m out of time to transition my POS for the new season and I’m now at the point that I can’t get them to call me back (I have left four messages and counting) and I will be canceling my subscription to at least stop their monthly draws on my account. I’m out about $3000 that they refuse to refund for a system that they couldn’t get working and extra work that I have to do to clean up my data. My staff jokingly calls it “Revel….P….O….S” and they don’t mean “Point of Sale.” Quite simply, it has been a train wreck and a huge black eye for a company that I was VERY EXCITED to do business with in the beginning. \I would welcome a response here by someone from the company and will amend my post IF AND WHEN they do right. I have a few industry colleagues who had been considering this product as well and have dissuaded them by my experience already. All I can do here is likewise offer my cautionary tale to others.
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I'm a very patient and fair person. I try to be as accomadating as possible. But I own convenience stores and the one that has REVEL pos has 3 employees and sales of over 100k a month. We don't really have downtime. I can't afford to be on hold for 55 minutes at a time while they do god knows what. All my peripherals have been down for 3 days now.The customer service and sense of urgency is shit quite frankly. There doesn't seem to be anyone there who gives a rat's ass about the fact that I'm losing money. The system has currently been down for almost 3 days. Hours spent on the phone? Probably 10-15 between me and my employees. I had to come to this location and been personally put on hold for an hour and 25 minutes. The account manager has now disappeared. Haven't heard from him for a few months. I've tried calling and getting the name of my new manager or anyone who could possibly help, and nothing. Right off the bat I told them to just send someone out here (I live 45 min south of San Fran) and I will pay whatever it is to get this shit running. "That is not a possibility sir"I own several businesses. The #1 imperative is to take care of customers. I'm a good customer. These guys have made my business lose i don't even know how much money this week (this is just the final straw, i've had MANY problems with them since installing). I'm definitely shopping for new pos provider after this.
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I have just spend 2 weeks and many hours attempting to switch from the Quickbooks POS desktop software to the "new" QB POS Online by Revel product. This is nothing but the legacy Revel product and is so basic and limited it's a joke. PLEASE understand that the Revel POS system is for the most basic of functions and does not offer features that would normally be part of a decent POS solution. For example: reporting is extremely basic and does not allow for customizing reports (so obviously does not offer memorizing them either). The purchase order module: while yes you can generate purchase orders, once they are issue you cannot change them in any way, nor can you reverse them or delete them. The vendor cost does not flow from the product record to the PO. When receiving products you can not add any shipping charges so the inventory costs are wrong if you are trying to see your "true costs" of the item. There are so many limitations and issues I could go on for days.If you want a system that gives you information to help you make decisions about your business, this is not the one for you. If you want a very basic system to only add a product and have it appear on the sales screen, this might be okay for you. But then you could just use Square or something like that for less.
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I wanted to add my .02¢ to this discussion. I’ve had Revel POS now since August of 2014. In that time I’ve come to like the system but there was a learning curve and a lot of cussing in between. Like every piece of software out there they have their pros and cons. I have two full POS systems from them with two mini Ipads for customer facing displays. So basically two register systems. Here are some bullet points from my perspective of the system overall.
Pros
1. Tech support is always there no matter the time/day and I’ve never really had to wait for them to answer. Yes, they are offshore (Philippines) but their English is fine and they very polite. They can help with moderate technical support questions. Anything harder and that will have to be referred to Escalated Tech support which is back in the U.S.A. Escalated Tech support is only available during business hours.
2. Their equipment “just works” (although you do need to be somewhat computer savvy) and most of it is Enterprise level. No crappy Bluetooth to sync with and no garbage Socket Bluetooth scanners that all the other iPad POS systems use. All peripherals (except the cash drawer) are hard wired to a serial server which in turn you plug into a network switch. The cash drawer plugs into the network printer “kick out” jack and in turn the printer connects to the network switch. This is how it should be and how virtually all non-iPad POS systems works and I’m glad Revel took this approach. The only wireless device is the iPads themselves. Everything else is wired.
3. They update their features non-stop with each software release. With every release the notes have substantial updates that were done on the backend. New software is released on a semi-monthly basis. Sometimes even quicker.
4. Offline mode. Allows you to take Credit Cards with no internet connection. Admittedly this is more and more common with all of the iPad POS’s now.
5. Reporting on the backend is very detailed. Honestly it is overkill for me but it’s nice that I can make it as complicated or as easy as I want.
6. You can use just about any merchant service you want. I would advise against Mercury which Revel likes to push. Mercury isn’t a true merchant service. They are basically a reseller for Global Payments and they can drop you/raise your rates any time they wish. Go with Heartland if you aren’t already contracted. That is who I use and I would never contemplate using anyone else. Ever.
7. Adding inventory is easy if you import it into the system via spreadsheets which is what I do. I don’t add any inventory in the backend individually. I add everything to a spreadsheet and then upload it to them. Adding it manually through the backend is the wrong way and tedious way to do it unless you only have very few products.
8. You can customize the look of the buttons/layout on the POS system so that only certain product inventory are showing on your screen to your employees. This takes time to set up however and it’s not very easy but once done it’s done.
Cons
1. The Honeywell Image scanner they offer is junk for a high volume retail solution. I replaced it with a Honeywell/Orbit Omnidirectional Scanner. Only had to make a few changes in the serial server and it works like a charm.
2. The beginner level APG cash drawer that comes with the system is NOT enterprise quality. Too flimsy. I replaced it with the Series 100 which is a heavy duty cash drawer and will probably outlive me.
3. Price. It’s friggin expensive to buy the software license. There is no getting around this. Expect to spend close to $3k for a license plus hardware for each register system depending on your needs. The monthly service is inline with other cloud POS systems. I will say a lot of the cost is because of the quality of equipment not including the included cash drawer and the image scanner. The Epson Printers are high quality network printers that carry a high quality price tag. The same for the serial servers that allow the peripherals to connect to the system. These are expensive to buy from anywhere not just Revel. The card swipe hardware price tags are also inline with what you would pay elsewhere. Take away the cost of their software license and the price of going with Revel isn’t much more than anyone else.
4. They update their system non-stop. Wait, what? I thought that was a pro? Well it’s both. I don’t believe they give themselves enough time to test enhancements before they are released. For example there is a feature that was released in 1518 that was then broken (or removed?) in subsequent releases. No explanation was given and I only found out it didn’t work because I used it in 1518 and then couldn’t use it again after I upgraded. Level one tech support had no idea about it other than to say “Yes, you are correct it doesn’t work in spite of what the release notes say”.
5. Account managers are “Meh”. Quick to return your calls before you become a customer but after they sign you up, you will need to hire a P.I. to find them again.
6. Quickbook integration. They are overselling this “feature” in my opinion. I’d rather have a rock solid dependable system with “real features” than this Quickbook fluff crap they are adding in . I use Quickbooks for accounting in my business but I refuse to have it integrated with my Revel POS system. Way too many moving parts for me and when crap gets mess up who do you call? Quickbooks or Revel? Seems one will point fingers at the other.
The bottom line is that they are the best iPad POS system around. Unless you want to hire a programming studio to design custom software for you (and spend big $$$) you are going to have to settle. The other options are client-server based POS systems that have been around since the 80’s but those are a bear to operate and you better have an I.T. department to manage it. They are also very expensive.
I spent about 3 months learning Revel and having my employees go “through the motions” before we went live with it and put it into production. There is still the occasional issue my employees face but for the most part they like it. I have laundry list of things I would like “fixed” or “changed” but, again, since it’s not custom to my business this is just the nature of the beast.
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Hey, Jeff, lets compare notes and experiences. Looks like we are in the same boat.
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I have seen many POS systems in my lifetime and what Revel has built is by far one of the best systems in the market. I have called there sales people and have demoed the product and it looks amazing. Some key pointers when buying a POS. Offline mode- Revel was the first one to offer offline mode in the iPad space and is the only one that works totally offline. Use a competitor's POS and turn off the net and you will see what I mean. Revel is the only POS that is fully functional while offline even credit card machines work offline. The new retail features in the iPad POS is something I would like to comment on. Many years have gone by where POS systems just do not cut the mustard and Revel is one of those special POS systems out there. I would highly recommend it.
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Very interesting. How does system work offline?
Thanks
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Frank,
Revel is an app that you download to your iPad. All functionality is stored locally on your iPad and data syncs periodically with the Revel servers. That way, even when your web is down, you still have functionality.
Best,
Amad
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Our establishment, Flying Saucer Pizza, has been around since 2005. During this time frame we've had 3 POS systems. The first was a Windows-based system designed for restaurants. We were one year in and after 70K transactions the system started falling over. It wasn't scalable for a single restaurant. When I contacted support the first thing they asked for was my credit card number. Support was only free for the first 60 days. We dropped them like a hot rock. Our next system was another prevalent Pizza-based POS system which also ran on Windows. We ran into these guys at the Pizza Expo in Vegas. It seemed like these guys had it all together. For several years it ran fairly well but it began to experience database integrity issues. This, coupled a lack of support and an inability to upgrade to fix bugs, and a lack of online ordering forced us to look in a different direction. Looking around at other solutions the things which frustrated me about the existing systems was:1) Hardware which is going to fail and Operating systems I have to license 2) The need for regular backups and maintenance 3) The inability to see solid reporting and control my ecosystem from anywhere4) The inability to scale my businessThere weren't many solutions out there which offered this. I did know that an iPad we've personally owned for a few years, was one of the toughest and most reliable pieces of hardware in our house, and not even our 2 year old could destroy it (although she tried). I'm not saying they are unbreakable but Apple had proven they passed the reliability mark long ago. My desire was for something which ran on an iPad but could offer some of the things I needed to support and grow my restaurant. So, I downloaded and evaluated Revel on my personal iPad, and a few months later I spoke with Revel Sales and pulled the trigger.While the prices may seem high in comparison to other iPad based POS systems, those prices pale in comparison the cost of an enterprise computer-based POS, so this didn't bother me as long as Revel could do what I needed. My hardware was shipped and once I had it set up and everything communicating I spent some time working on backend setup. It takes time to do it right. (Note I wish revel had templates for different types of establishments like pizza or coffee shop). There are many settings to consider and review, but doing it right will save you tons headaches later. I suspect many of the other folks in this thread With pizza for example, there are many modifiers, and Revel has made it convenient for you to customize modifiers in multiple ways. This is very powerful. Pricing modifiers correctly can make be make or break for pizza chains. Revel even allows you to build in the raw ingredients to your modifier so you can track your COGS. We didn't use this feature at first, but are now once we realized what it could do. This is a great advantage of cloud software, the data is there, and we can collect and analyze as much as we desire, and Revel will continue to add new features to make us more efficient than our competition. Once I had everything set up. I performed testing for a several weeks, and had nearly everything ready to go. Then without warning, while I was toward the tail end of my testing phase, my server for my existing POS died. Disaster right? Fortunately I had been running Revel next to my existing system and said to my manager, "no better time than the present", so we literally yanked the hardware out, slide the iPads into place and started using them. I can't say it was super easy at first, mostly because my staff wasn't trained. They had to learn everything but that transition took a few days. There were other issues too, but but we spoke with support and got through them. Fortunately Revel doesn't charge for support as a separate service. It's built into the monthly cost of service. I hope it stays that way, and I'd be willing to pay a little more to keep this benefit. This is one of the more expensive parts of running a technology company and so that cost gets passed to us. From what I can tell Revel has off-shored that service and the folks I've spoken with have become fairly proficient in answering my questions. If they can't then they escalate. I'm not saying I've been able to get through in every instance. Once there was an issue with our merchant service. They changed their software and that broke revel's API with the service so Revel was backed up. We ran cash for 45 minutes and a tech did call me back, but by then the service was up again. Revel's support is far better than anything I've seen in this industry. I think a tip for revel would be to partner with someone who could set up systems for non-technical customers (Geeksquad or something). I realize this cost would get passed onto us customers, but it would be worth it. Preparation is key to making any system like this work seamlessly, and while iPads are pretty user friendly, they have may options, and from time to time the Wi-fi stack dies and has to be restarted (so restart your iPads every few days).Up until December of this year, for online ordering we were using a service which takes online orders and then faxes/emails them to our establishment. Then my staff has to go through the pain and agony of hand entering this into our POS, and this service was not cheap. We did such high volumes of online orders, our bill was nearly $500/month! Our customers relied on online ordering and we have become very dependent upon it. I knew Revel supported online ordering, but recently, they have had a big effort toward delivering online ordering for their POS customers. The benefit was Web orders just show up in the POS. No transcription of orders...no time to hand enter...no human errors. This was the holy grail for us. So far it's been very reliable. When we have issues, Revel is quick to fix them. It has honestly made my kitchen staff 20% more effective, because we're not dedicating someone to deal with this. My only nit here is that the look and feel doesn't fit that of my website, but Revel does offer the ability to have your own web developer download code and build your own branded version of their interface for your establishment. We're heading that direction so we can have total integration. My next goal is to provide the kiosk version of revel in several craft beer tasting rooms around us for their customers to order pizza, so this system is allowing us to grow outside of our restaurant's footprint.So, in summary:1) If my hardware fails, I can run to Staples and have an iPad in 20 minutes and replace the one I pulled from another station in another 30 minutes, while my system continues to operate.2) I don't worry about backups or maintenance any longer.3) I have a bird's eye view of my establishment from anywhere and can see exactly what's going on at all times!4) When I open another store, it's a piece of cake.I know I took a gamble going the direction of a cloud-based POS, but I think that gamble will allow my company to beat competition by putting info at my fingertips I didn't have before, scale my business, help us adapt and change to new forms of social media, payments, and digital marketing yet to be discovered. I think those who can't adapt will go the way of the book store.
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I have worked in the restaurant industry for over a decade and I have never used such a shitty POS system. Revel has the potential to be good but their system is still very much in BETA which means they shouldn't be charging monthly fees to their customers who are helping them figure out all of the bugs in the system. From the beginning, our transition from Revel was a nightmare and every time I think it is getting better, something happens -- such as a big crash during a busy day or a component just completely stops working for weeks. Maybe in a few years this system will be good but right now it lacks so many features and has so many bugs that I absolutely would not recommend it.
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If I could give this company 0 stars I would. After over 6 months and a system that is completely paid for, it is still not operational. I can not speak to their ability to design a retail pos system, but I can tell you to NEVER use this company for a restaurant. Their "menu" building team is completely incompetent and their customer service, while friendly, is not capable of helping at all. It took over 6 months to design a menu that was even somewhat functional and they still can not get the system to run. I read a lot of reviews of the company which I believe the company must have put out their themselves or paid to promote because there is no way that a company which has received rave reviews would treat their customers like this. If you are looking for a system for your restaurant, take the time to speak with other restaurant owners and do yourself a favor and do not do business with this company....it is the worst business decision I have ever made.
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I wish I had followed the advice of the other retailers that were also burned by Revel. My ordeal started with a sales rep that sent me equipment that I didn't order, like an external WiFi antenna, a wireless access point...I'm a brick and mortar liquor store and already have a network established. Next, I come to find out that my sales rep has quit, and there was no hand-off to implementation. I literally called Revel no less than 20 times over the course of a 3 week period seeking assistance with my product load and setup. I spoke to reps in the Philippines, California, and what appeared to sound like reps own homes...which were on terrible VOIP connections. I finally had to resort to posting my woes on Twitter and @'ing the CEO. I finally started to receive some movement when my complaint was handed off to Revel's Chief Counsel who I spoke with personally. Unfortunately, this was only the start of the spiral into support hell handoff. The customer service experience from Revel was the worst I've had in my 25 year professional career. I even hand a rep tell me that my support issues were "unfortunately not a priority at this point due to a recent release that caused major issues with current users". What? Wow! Yes, that really happened. Oh, and they tell you that you have an assigned "Implementation Manager". That is total bs, and was confirmed by a second or third level supervisor that there is no one specific person assigned, but all of their reps are fully capable of handling any of my needs....no they are not. I will say, I did work with a couple of individuals that seemed like we could have got my system up and working, however, there is no way to get to a specific individual when calling support. I should have known at that point this wasn't going to turn out good. I was still within my 30 day return period at that point, and should have boxed all the Revel junk up and sent it back. And when I say junk, I do mean junk. Just take one look at the hideous stands that are used to hold both the sales clerk and customer iPad's. Metal on metal swivels, and more articulating joints than a Transformer. Compare that to the Clover station swivel and you couldn't get further apart on a usability spectrum. Yes, I'm currently using Clover, but I'll save that for another review if we get one started on here. At the end of this nightmare, and about 6 weeks in, I requested a refund and was told, too bad sucker, you are out of your 30 day window. I pushed the issue stating the only reason I was out of my return window was due to the utter incompetence I suffered at the hands of Revel's support team. I was told by one of the aforementioned supervisors that he would take my request to committee and get back to me. Committee....for a mishandled implementation clearly as a result of Revel's dropped balls, shocked. A the end of the day, I sunk $4000 dollars and received one heck of an education. I was super eager to get off my big box Gilbarco Passport POS, that I didn't heed the other reviewers here. I'd sue as well, but I'd end up spending more than the $4k likely in attorney fees.Interestingly enough, my neighborhood pizza place had the same issue as the other reviewer here as well (no relation). They couldn't get the menu's setup correctly, so he scrapped the system.Stay away, far, far away from Revel.Louis Thomas III
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I have used this product many times and love it for my chocolate store. It has features like shipping and even invoicing for my store front shop. If you look at competitors you will see this is the best out there.Sam
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STOP!!! Please do not buy this system and waste the tons of money I did. Read all of the reviews, believe all of them that state that this company and its product are terrible. On top of the tons of money I paid for a weak system they have charged my account for an extra $98 over a six month period without my consent and say it was a mistake although I still have not got reimbursed! Any advances they have made recently to features and functionality for inventory and ordering, which ain't much, is do to me and my teams demands. The kicker is that as they develop this software on our time and recommendations, we are paying them a high price to do it. Not anymore, we ditched them like so many others I've heard have had to do.Take my advice and go with ERPLY instead. Way ahead of Revel and WAY less money. The support seems a lot better too.
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Hi Dave,
Thank you for your feedback and I’m sorry for your experience. I have looked into your account and have confirmed that on Dec 3rd we refunded the extra fees mistakenly charged to your account. I see these were refunded within days of you alerting us of the problem, however, banks do not release the refunded fees immediately and there is a delay. I have sent you my contact info directly so please reach out to me directly if you still have not seen the refund.
—
David Grant
Director
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Wish I would have seen your review a month ago. I agree the product is junk.
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We switched to Revel about three months ago, after a lot of research in different iPad POS systems. Our first impressions were pretty bad. The sales rep failed to meet us TWICE at the scheduled meeting time to do the demo. This threw up some red flags but we were contacted by the sales manager and they took care of us after that. It was a pricey system to buy, at $1000 for the license fee plus the cost of all the equipment, at a minimum was around $3000. The monthly fee is $49 and tech support is another $25 (optional).The Good:Getting started was fairly easy, getting all our products on (1000+) and organized took some time but wasn't too bad. There are a lot of options in the backend in which you probably will not use half of them, but is great if you plan on expanding to many different areas in business. The layout and sales reports are very nice and easy to understand, once you play around with things. A tax table can be utilized to calculate the correct sales tax on items if you live in a state that requires this, which we were not able to find on other iPad POS systems. They are always pushing new updates and seem to listen to our input on how to make things better. Usually when I find something I think they should do it comes out in the next update anyway. They do a pretty good job, in my opinion, on keeping these updates coming and making the system better for $49/month.The Bad:As I said before, they keep updating the system and always are coming out with new features. The problem here is, they never tell you when a new update is out. You basically have to check the update site every week to see if a new one is available, or wait until you notice small glitches in your iPad/system and realize there is an update that is needed. I don't see how it is so hard to notify customers there is a new update. If there is another way to do this, I haven't found it yet, and neither has tech support or my account manager who I've talked to about implementing this.Always on mode... not exactly. We use our own standalone credit card processor, so this isn't a big deal, or at least it shouldn't be. If your router breaks down for any reason, you can't do anything with your devices (barcode scanner, cash drawer, receipt printer, etc.). We were told they would overnight us a router if this ever happened, but that still does not take care of the problem at that time. You had better have a backup system in place (we have a cash register ready for this). Also if you run other apps on the iPad besides the POS app or if you leave the app open for too long, you run the risk of taking up too much memory, and some intermittent outages could occur, resulting in lost connection between the iPad and you devices (no receipts printed, barcode scanner doesn't work, can't open cash drawer). That's not a small problem if you have customers in the store waiting to checkout.Tech support is a hit or miss. You either get someone who knows what they are doing, or you get someone who thinks they know what they are doing and take you in circles. We cancelled tech support a month in, but took another month to actually cancel and that took me having to constantly bug my account manager and tech support to make sure this was taken care of.Returns: make sure you get your money back and keep the receipt of return. We returned an item and were never given a refund for it until I bugged the account manager many times and asked what was happening. Keep the tracking number, get confirmation of the package arriving, etc. We had to prove we sent it back a month after it was confirmed delivered.Conclusion:Revel is a decent iPad POS choice providing a wide range of options for pretty much any business out there. Things seem to be getting better and we've noticed these changes having only been with them for a few months now. Every now and then you will get someone from tech support that you want to punch through the phone or someone you want to hang up on since they are just wasting your time, but there are good ones there too. I'm hoping things keep getting better with them but for now I can only give them three stars, an average rating. I'm optimistic, however, and I expect greater things from them in the future.
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Nice features and sleek space-saving set up does little to overcome the agonizingly horrifyingly bad customer service at Revel. Honestly, if I lived in California I would walk right over to their offices and sock the very first person wearing a Revel logo shirt right in the nose. No accountability, no urgency, just excuses and more cost to the merchant than meets the eye. Do yourself a favour and check any other option on the market these girls and guys don't deserve your money.
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Hi X. Ziggy,
I am sorry to hear about your issues with Revel. I couldn’t find your account in our system. Could you contact our support line and they’ll put you in contact with me?
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David Grant
Director
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Completely agree.
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Hi Ziggy: Are you still using Revel? I am considering them for a POS system but their TECH/SERVICE reviews are not good. Your review was posted last October…any updates?
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What would be the best POS system for coffee shop? We were about to get Revel system but the latest reviews are really making us hold on to getting this system
Please help
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Feel free to check out our article on the best POS system for cafes. That should have some good information for most coffee shop owners looking for a great POS system.
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Our on-boarding process was terrible. I was lied to during the sales process about the capabilities of the system. In particular, I was told about a robust customer database. The database is terrible. It doesn't serve any purpose because it doesn't talk to the reward program or the gift card program. I am spending a fortune on a system that has never been fully functional in the way it was sold to me. However, the issue I am currently having with them is beyond excusable. Revel has had some sort of "glitch" (for the second time) that has caused several of my customers to have multiple credit/debit card preauthorizations on their accounts. Some of these customers have had more than 30 preauthorizations and have had their checking accounts drained down to negative because of it. Revel's stance is "we understand, we apologize, there's nothing we can do until the banks refund the money". My customers are fuming, I am fuming, and I am losing customers because of this. Someone needs to speak out about this because I am tired of Revel getting high recommendations when they are killing business for small businesses.
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The biggest mistake in POS we've ever made. Cannot go five minutes without the system not working properly. Buy this system if you enjoy long phone calls on hold with tech support. You come to know them by name.
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I have had this system for 6 months and they still have not set up my menu correctly. They do not proofread anything. They send you a file with a bunch of mistakes and want you to find them all. This is not a good product and this company has terrible customer service. 6 months and I am still hand writing tickets.
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I own a restaurant in Berkeley, CA and chose Revel as our iPad based point-of-sale product back in October 2012. Before I get into the bad stuff, let me say that the product has improved dramatically and is working pretty well right now. I would actually recommend the product to any new restaurant or cafe.The one-star is for Revel's poor business practices and deceptiveness of the management. They are rude, defensive, and play the blame game, as in: Nothing is their fault; everything is on you. Without writing a novel, I have listed out some of the more egregious conduct:1) The Revel sales person quoted an all-inclusive price for the equipment and the software, but then the main office pulled a back-door move and tacked sales tax on to that price (about $500 extra). This directly contradicted the sales person's oral promise that his quote was a final price. When confronted with this, the main office refused to refund the overcharge and cited to a contract where the sales tax was listed as "tbd." We did sign the contract, but this is no way to do business. If you give us your word, we expect it to be honored. We were lied to by Revel. To be honest, I don't think the sales person - a really nice guy - was to blame. He probably would have honored the quote if he had that kind of pull with the main office. I think he even had to pay the equipment shipping cost out of his own wages, because free shipping was another promise he made (which I suspect the main office did not want to honor). He left Revel shortly thereafter. I wonder what he really thought about the people he worked for....2) The equipment mark-ups were exorbitant. I think they are more than doubling what they pay for the equipment, but you kind of have to go with their equipment package due to security-encryption and compatibility with their POS station (the unit that holds all the devices).3) There was a glitch in their software which caused the service charges (for groups of 6 or more) to go uncharged. This went on for a few months before we realized what was happening. When we brought up the issue, our Revel account manager made a change to our back-end to correct the problem, which was fine. However, there was still the issue of all the uncollected service charges (close to $2k). It was too late to charge the customers after-the-fact. We took the position that since their software had glitched, they should be responsible. Revel refused to make up for their error and blamed us for not catching it earlier. Granted, we did not catch it for a while, but it was still a clear error in their software. The CTO was unapologetic and Revel made no effort to compensate us for the loss.(If any other restaurant owner who uses Revel is reading this review and had a similar problem with uncollected service charges, please email me at damien2502@yahoo.com.)Also, there were a lot of problems with the product early-on, most of which have been corrected. If you are considering Revel, I would say go for it, but be prepared to deal with some unscrupulous people...
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We enthusiastically and optimistically signed up for REVEL for our business, wowed by all the promised features, including KDS, online ordering, kiosk mode, and tableside ordering. We are a cafe/restaurant that does both takeout and table service but we primarily do table service. REVEL from the get go was extremely buggy. The handhelds continually have connectivity issues, our printers keep reprinting orders, our stationary POS stops connecting to main server for no apparent reason, our receipt printers stop communication with the POS (which hampers our ability to open our cash drawer), and support is extremely difficult to work with! The list goes on and on of issues we have had. Kiosk mode was incomplete (though they charged me for both the software and monthly fee to have it), online ordering was far from done (recently finished but ugly and im afriad to touch it for $50/month based on how their in house software works), and the handhelds for tableside ordering are useless and we use one as a stationary POS (though im paying for 3 additional handhelds on a monthly basis). The "Account manager" who has had glimpses of being a nice person, is too busy for her own good to deal with a small time account like ours, not that she has anything she can help us with. They also don't realllly do anything in regards to requests in feature changes. I have made multiple requests to my account manager that have disappeared. Also updating the app is a hassle, you have to delete and reinstall the app on each ipad. If you have more than 2 ipads its a major inconvenience. A few other frustrations with them: -no bill for my monthly charge, just a charge to my CC so im never 100% sure, unless i check with them of when they are charging me and for what. They were charging me for 3 months $50 a month for gift cards services that we weren't interested in using (they also refused to give us back the $50/month that i had paid already- they have a strict no refund policy). -Some updates on the backend have caused some custom setting we like to change for no apparent reason (an easy fix but frustrating).- Some features on the backend are unavailable to us, up until recently, such as role accessibility and configuring table layouts. -I received a courtesy call asking on our experience and I told them im extremely unhappy and am strongly considering leaving....the gentleman apologized, said he'd pass it along, and haven't heard from them in a month following. -Support Sucks! in an emergency situation there is no one who can truly help us effectively. Expect to be on the phone with them for an hour, even during your rushes at the bussiest times of the day, until a solution is given. Communication with support is very difficult as well. I don't know if there is a language barrier but there have been times when they just straight up don't listen to what I just told them (in basic and plain english).- The worst part of REVEL is the fact that they are so expensive. You would think a company who you pay thousands of dollars for software licenses to use their products and a high monthly fee to use their product should work and have great service but they dont!The only positives I have experienced with REVEL is their back office and some features. Their back office is accessible anywhere and they have a couple of nice features, which are available on other ipad POS systems. The only person who ive spoken to whos been genuinely helpful and seemed to care about helping us was an upper level support gentleman. It took us days to be able to reach the right level of support and speak to someone who can address our issue properly (though we still experience some of the issues we were dealing with).We are still using REVEL for the time being but are actively seeking to move to another POS that works consistently and cares about its users. My recommendation if you are considering using REVEL, it seems to be popular and useful for the retail sector of the food world, not for table service. It handles transactions relatively well but when it comes to running a full service restaurant, there are too many problems for it to be a reliable POS.
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We purchased this system in April. Since then we have had 3 confirmed phone calls that Revel people never came through on. They have also told us we have to pay for services that we were originally told were included in the monthly pricing. Customer service is AWFUL!! You are also required to uses Mercury or USA Epay for credit card processing, which you then have to pay extra gateway fees on.
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Bad product, bad support, bad customer service. don’t touch it with a 100-foot pole.
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If you believe this rating, you’re in for a bad experience. See all the comments on YELP!. Revel is awful. Run Away!
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I don’t see any reviews on Yelp for Revel except 1. I wouldn’t base a final decision off of one single review. Most complaints about any POS system is lack of training and support.
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Updating previous post. David at Revel has help me through a few glitches. Not perfect yet, but getting better.
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I’m about to launch a 30′ Trolley in Sonoma, CA. Need to make a final decision on POS. I love the capabilities of Revel, but the price is outrageous! 2 printers, 1 cash drawer, 1 apple wifi router, 1 16gb wifi iPad, 1 16gb wifi mini iPad (line buster), PCI Compliance, 2 Infinea Tab Card Swipes, revel software. Total: $4,200. Discount of $700 if I go with Mercury processing. $1,500 of the total is revel software and $400 of the total is PCI compliance. Oh yea, and $50 per month for ongoing support.
This seems way out of line. It’s like these guys need to understand what they want to be…a Cloud-based SaaS company or a premised based software co…they are trying to be both.
Am I off-base here? Is there a better solution?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Andrew,
Glad to see you decided to join Revel! I see you bought your system soon after your post. Happy to have you as part of the REVELution!
—
David Grant
Director
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I have had numerous issues with the Revel system that have taken months to fix or can not be fixed at all. This was a terrible investment and I am in the process of switching to Quickbooks POS. Revel was developed for Restaurants, not for Retail businesses with significant inventory. The back end inventory system is completely separate from the front end sales system, which requires a refresh each time you update something. There are severe limitations with importing existing barcodes. The system does not generate it’s own barcodes and requires 12 digit barcodes, so when I moved from my 5 digit barcode from my previous POS we were told we had rebarcode 1,000s of products or add zeros requiring significant time to look up products at the point of sale. There is also no automat upload feature for Vendors and each vendor has to manual be attached to each inventory product item, which is a huge process that is very labor intensive. This system is a D- in my opinion. The only redeeming quality is that the front end system runs on an iPad. There customer service follow-up and account management team are nice, but they do not provide updates and are not terribly responsive, suggesting they have way too many customers per account manager. There is also no way to delete old items or misentered items…they remain in your system forever. The iPads they supplied also operate very slowly despite the fact that no other applications are running in the background. The Revel app also shuts down regularly. Their system is terrible for a high volume retailer with many products.
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You're better off with Retail Pro for high count inventory items. Quickbooks POS is good if you have a low inventory count. Plus Retail Pro has the purchase ordering system where you generate the PO, send to your vendor then upon the arrival of shipment you get what's called a receiving voucher. That voucher is scanned then all items from the initial PO automatically upload to your inventory. It's a far better system and was designed by Intuit, whom own QuickBooks.
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I purchased the Revel system for a business I opened on Jan 17. I have had 8 days of credit card transactions since we’ve opened…totally over $3000.00. When I inquired as to why I have not seen those charges in our bank account, it was discovered that Revel personnel that set up our account, linked it to another business…who received ALL of our deposits! They have fixed the problem going forward, but have given no resolution for getting our money back. Does anyone have any advice on how I can rectify this????
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I purchased ten POS terminals from Revel DEC 30th of 2013. I received them jan 3rd 2014 and I have no issues at all with their support team. In fact I just heard they just created a 1.2 million dollar support center to help out since they have previously been lacking in support. Call the number 844-584-3316 ext 2 and the support team picks up in less then 60 secs each time to help you with your support request on the iPad POS. I am really impressed! I know I have seen support that was bad and some support that was good and this is just WORLD CLASS SUPPORT!
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I own a garden center. I looked for the best p.o.s. for my business and ended up selecting revel systems. Getting ahold of tech support when you need it has been hard. It seems when they get around to it they get back, not when you need them while you are stuck in a retail situation. It seems like it is designed around restaurant application. I have had issues with there returns. Customer must have the reciept in order to return and that doesn’t work for my business. I have complained about this and the sId they sent it to there tech teem and its up to them. The system does have a lot of upsides to it. Just hard to get around the downsides.
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Revel POS – December 2013
We have been using Revel for 9 months now.
In the last 30 days or so the system has become incredibly buggy with some serious problems.
In addition the system is not responding to backend commands to correct strange issues. One issue is randomly not charging sales tax on certain items. Obviously has a financial impact on my business.
Support also now seems to be non-existent… only an answering service which never seems to get the message to someone. If they do – at best case – 6 hours later!
Not sure what is going on with REVEL but i am very concerned and will most likely NOT purchase another system for our new restaurant in NYC next month.
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I purchased three POS terminal from Revel in May of 2013 it is now November of 2013 and I haven’t been able to put together a three week period without problems. Suppiort is decent when they finally call you back but it usually ends in you downloading the latest “build” to fix the glitches. That build then serves up new glitches. You are pretty much paying them a $1500 license fee to beta test the softeware. I think this type of POS sytem is the future.. and if revel can continue to get people to pay to test the systems it will probably eventually work. I am running as fast as possible. I think Apple would be displeased to know that customers see the frustration of dealing with this and think it’s an apple problem. But is for sure a REVEL problem. Walk slowly. take off your business owner hat and put on your IT hat.
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I too think the IPad system has potential but in my opinion Revel tech support gets an “F” We purchased a system in August of 2013. We estimate we have spend about 50% of the cost of the system to get it running correctly. We have had an extraordinary amount of down time. We have had weekends, when restaurants are busy, when only one station was working. Call in for an issue and you may or may not get a live person and if you get a live person or leave a message you may or may not get a call back. If you start with one tech and get connected to another one at some point they have no history of your issues so you have to explain everything from the start…..again and again. one tech will give you one solution (that usually does not work) and another tech will provide another solution which may or may not work.
We actually thought, after several months, that we were finally past the big stuff and had only small issues to face. Today our credit card system went down. We did the usual check and resets which did nothing. Our office manager called for help and they had her do the very same check and reset. When they did not work she called back she got voicemail. She made several calls with the same result. WHat happened to the tech who was on this? When I arrived at the restaurant location I called and reached another tech. He took all of my information and then asked what problem did I need to address to day? I explained the calls, checks and resets already tried since the a.m. Then he asked some questions that were the same as those posed this morning. So we will be without credit cards the rest of the day. Oh and one station is now completely down. This is the type of thing that has gone on since we purchased the system months ago. We have in house people who have been able to work with our POS systems in all of our locations but somehow they hit a brick wall with the Revel reps. So we brought in an outside guy who does nothing but work on POS systems and computers thinking we could make some headway. After several attempts to address several issues that came up in a two or three week period he said he could not get any where. He said you can continue to pay me to deal with Revel techs but it is a very difficult thing to do. We have been in the restaurant business for many, many years and have used three different POS providers along the way. In our opinion Revel has the worst tech support of any company we have encountered. Right after we purchased the system we immediately began encountering issues that prevented us from using it. Several techs said we needed to look at their videos because all the answers are there. I asked my office manager to do just that. Much of the information in the videos was outdated and some of the videos did not address issues we were having.
At one point one of the founders (he said) came into town and said he was going to come by to check everything out. He was there on a Saturday afternoon (no advance notice of when he was coming) and he sat in a booth for a while with some girl. They kept looking at the cashiers or something so we noticed this. We did not realize until he came to the POS area, who he was. He played around with system for a time and said he wanted to come back in the morning (Sunday) and work on the system but he would have to shut it down meaning we could not use it. Hello, are restaurants usually busy on Sunday morning? When I explained this to him he said he would come in at 3 pm. Guess what? He did not show.
A week or so later and dealing with POS issues all week another “executive” called and during a long conversation said that he was going to get to the bottom of the problems and get them fixed. He said he would have a tech call us on the following Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. and then he would join the tech and us in a conference call at 9 a.m. No tech called and neither did this guy. This has been our history. We paid about $9,000 and we have easily spent half of that in office manager, manager and outside tech help. The last couple of months or so the system has been working well enough but not as is supposed to work. We are all drained by this experience and I guess we were almost willing to settle for a system that was working even though not on all cylinders. We have had two or three tech calls in this period and the issues were worked out. I am thinking that I am so sick of this that if we can just get by I will pretend its o.k. Then today my office manager wasted another two hours trying to fix our issue before calling the tech support. The guy was not very helpful and said he did not have the answers. He said he would call back. Did not happen. At least Revel is consistent in this regard.
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Wow ! such bad reviews. I was going to purchase revel or shopkeep for our restaurants but after reading REAL reviews ,I am definitely staying away form purchasing the POS system from both companies! Strangely Revel and Shopkeep are the most top 5 recommended POS systems. I hope we find a reliable POS system in time. Thanks merchantmaverick.com and everyone for your honest reviews.
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I left a second negative review about Revel to follow up my review on May 2nd, but it isn’t here. We are now looking at Breadcrumb. A friend in the POS industry advised us to steer clear of Revel (we didn’t listen), and he recommended Breadcrumb. We’ve pretty much given up on Revel, and I will fervently spread the word for any merchant to avoid them as well.
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Tara, me too. I just hate to think that anyone else has to suffer through Revel.
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I’m looking for a POS system for a new restaurant launching soon. This review is detailed and insightful and will be a big factor in my final decision.
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David – Do NOT do it. This system is terrible and the support is worse. I have spent countless hours on the phone trying to get a hold of tech support. Only to have that “update” cause a new problem. It is so bad, I am currently purchasing a new system, after only 1 year in operation. The system is just too new and they are just always trying to catch up. Perhaps for a quick serve restaurant it would be different but I cannot tell you enough that you will hate this decision.
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Jolene,
What system did you decide to go with? I’m looking at Shopkeep after reading all the reviews about Revel I will definitely stay away.
Thanks,
Durea
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I love my Revel Systems POS the iPad just makes it so much more user friendly then any other POS system i have ever used. Thanks REVEL!
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Mark,I am happy you are having a good experience with Revel-you are probably the only one. My experience was very different unfortunately.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.