Café POS for a coffee shop that also sells retail
Plenty of cafés make real money off the shelf: bags of beans, mugs, grinders, gift boxes. That changes the POS question. You need fast drink orders and proper stock counts in one checkout.
Drinks are a menu, beans are stock
A latte with oat milk and an extra shot is a menu item with options; nobody counts lattes. A 250 g bag of house blend is stock: it arrives from the roaster, sits on a shelf and runs out. Your POS should treat both properly in the same sale, so a customer can buy a coffee and a bag of beans in one go and your stock count still drops by one bag.
Test the mixed sale
In any demo, ring up two drinks with different options, add a bag of beans and a mug, apply a loyalty reward, then refund the mug. Check that the drinks kept their options on the receipt, that the beans and the mug left stock and that the mug went back after the refund.
- Reorder point on beans, so you know when to call the roaster.
- Gift cards that work for both drinks and retail.
- Loyalty that rewards a bag of beans, not just the tenth coffee.
When a café needs a restaurant system instead
If you cook to order and send tickets to a kitchen, or you serve at tables, you need kitchen routing — that is restaurant territory, and systems like Toast or Square for Restaurants are built for it. If you serve at the counter and the barista works from the screen or a printed ticket, a retail-strong POS like VoVi can run drinks and shelf stock together. The finder asks about a kitchen display for exactly this reason.