Best POS system for convenience stores in 2026

Square takes first place because it's the best documented system on this page for the two jobs a small store does all day: scanning barcodes and selling by weight. Its retail mode gives you three ways to sell a weighed item. You can type the weight in, connect a scale, or use a label-printing scale and scan the label. Weights can be in grams, pounds or ounces. Square names two label scales it reads, the Hobart HTi and the Bizerba X-Class, on Square Terminal and on iOS devices. The label is a UPC-A or EAN-13 barcode that starts with 2 and carries the item number and the price. You give each weighed product a 5-digit SKU that matches the PLU set on the scale, and the register reads the price straight from the label.

The Free plan costs $0 a month and charges 2.6% + 15¢ per in-person payment. Plus costs $49 a month per location for 2.5% + 15¢, and Premium $149 a month for 2.4% + 15¢. Square states there's no long-term contract on any plan. Offline mode, as Square's help center describes it, is the other reason it leads. On Square Register, Terminal, Handheld, Stand and the 2nd-generation Reader, you keep taking cards when the internet drops, and the payments upload when you're back online. You have 72 hours to reconnect, and Square recommends doing it within 24. You can cap each offline payment anywhere from $1 to $50,000, and a card that declines after the upload is your loss, not Square's.

EBT works too, with conditions every grocer should read twice. Square accepts EBT SNAP on Square Register, Square Terminal and Square Handheld, not on Square Stand or a phone, at 1.8% + 5¢ per transaction. You need an active FNS number from the USDA before you can turn it on. EBT never runs offline or on custom amounts, and EBT Cash isn't supported. Grocers asked for EBT for years on Square's community board and ran a second terminal in the meantime, so check which device you buy before you count on it. The weak spot is payouts. On one large public review site, Square sits at 3.6 out of 5 across 7,514 reviews, and the top complaint is money held "under review". To send your sales into a spreadsheet or your accounting, our Square integration guide for Make covers the main triggers.

IT Retail is the one system here whose pricing page puts EBT/SNAP and scale support on its entry plan. The Starter plan costs $49 a month and lists scale-scanner support and EBT/SNAP acceptance. For a store where food stamps are a real share of the till, that's the two grocery must-haves on one line, with no device to pick around them.

It's a grocery specialist, and it reads like one. The general POS brands above try to serve cafés, boutiques and salons at the same time. IT Retail is built around the checkout lane of a food store: scanning fast, weighing at the counter, taking benefits cards. That's why it ranks second here, even though the rest of its record is harder to judge.

And it is harder to judge. Only the Starter price is public. The Growth and Premium plans sit behind a contact form, and the pricing page doesn't say how long you commit or what your card rate will be. We didn't find enough merchant reviews to grade its support or payouts the way we did for Square or Clover. So use the demo to get three things on paper: the card rate, the contract length with the early exit fee, and the price of each extra lane. If those answers are clean, IT Retail is a short path to EBT and scales at $49 a month, built for a grocery lane rather than a café. Its compliance score rests on EBT/SNAP being listed on the entry plan; the contract and the support are the part you still have to check.

Shopify POS makes sense for one kind of small food store: the one that also ships online. In-person selling is included in every paid Shopify plan, from Basic at $39 a month, or $29 billed yearly. Your products, customers and stock are already there, so the counter and the website share one catalog. A gourmet shop or a bottle shop with a delivery side gets real value from that.

Its fixed fee is also as low as any we could read: 10¢, where Square charges 15¢. In-person rates are 2.6% + 10¢ on Basic, 2.5% + 10¢ on Grow and 2.4% + 10¢ on Advanced. Small tickets make that 10¢ count: at 1,667 payments a month, paying 10¢ instead of Square's 15¢ saves about $83 (our math). POS Pro costs $89 a month per location, billed yearly, for staff and stock tools. New accounts get 3 days free, then 3 months at $1 a month.

The deal-breaker is weight. Shopify POS doesn't sell by weight natively. On Shopify's community forum, a food market owner explains that weighed products can only be counted as pieces, and that the scale's label (priced at $100/kg) doesn't scan. Shopify's answer was a workaround with variants, or a third-party app. If you run a deli, a butcher counter or loose produce, that's a daily fight at the register. If you're still choosing where to sell online, our ranking of ecommerce platforms for small business puts Shopify next to its rivals.

Loyverse gives away its register software, and its grocery page shows what a small food shop gets for $0: inventory with low-stock alerts, a loyalty program that runs on a customer barcode, and support for label printers. You pay per store only for add-ons, in US dollars: unlimited sales history at $7 a month, employee management at $25 and advanced inventory at $25. Each one has a 14-day free trial.

Weight is where it gets thin. Loyverse's help center documents selling by weight through manual entry: you type the weight at each sale. That works for a few bulk items a day, and it's slow at a busy deli counter. If your scale prints price-embedded labels, ask Loyverse support whether your exact label format scans before you buy anything. We found nothing official on EBT or on offline sales, so plan around neither.

The other limits come from merchants. On one large public review site, Loyverse sits at 3.1 out of 5 across 106 reviews. People praise the chat support. They complain about features that became paid add-ons, reliance on Loyverse's servers and trouble opening or closing shifts. Card fees come from whichever processor you connect, so put that rate next to Square's 2.6% + 15¢. To send sales into a spreadsheet, our Loyverse integration guide for Make shows how.

KORONA POS sells itself hard to convenience stores, and it's one of the few vendors that writes about them in detail. Its own guide to c-store POS systems ranks KORONA first. That's normal for a vendor's blog, and it's why we read its claims with care. We take its c-store focus seriously; its rank here comes from its scores, like every other card.

On price, KORONA lists KORONA Core at $59 a month and KORONA Retail at $69. Those figures come from the vendor's own article, which isn't always consistent from one paragraph to the next. So treat them as a starting point and ask for a written quote with the plan name, the price per register and the card rate.

What we couldn't confirm on an official KORONA page: EBT acceptance, the scale models it reads, its stock tools and how offline sales work. The first three are the questions that decide a c-store POS. Ask for each one in the demo, with your own scale and a real SNAP card if you can. If KORONA answers all three in writing at $59 to $69 a month, it becomes a serious alternative to IT Retail. If it can't, Square does more for less.

Clover shows up in almost every convenience store guide, and for good reasons on paper. The hardware is polished, the software covers retail and counter service, and third-party guides often cite Clover for EBT acceptance and for scale integration on its retail plans. We couldn't confirm either on an official Clover page, so ask your seller to put both on the contract.

The problem is how it's sold. Clover lists an entry point at $0 a month on some plans, with card fees; other plans cost more, and your price, rate and contract depend on the bank or reseller that signs you up. Hardware deals are often tied to three-year contracts with early termination fees. On one large public review site, Clover sits at 1.9 out of 5 across about 2,200 reviews. Owners describe 36-month contracts they can't leave, $750 charged after cancelling and a card rate different from the one promised.

The hardware trap matters even more for a small store. Clover devices are set up by your processor, and merchants who change processor often have to buy new hardware. Clover devices run from about $199 for the Go card reader to about $1,900 for the two-screen Station Duo on third-party price lists, so that's real money to lose. Before you sign, ask four questions: who processes my payments, how long is the contract, what does leaving cost, and is the hardware mine? Get all four answers in writing. Already on Clover? Our Clover integration guide for Make covers the automations.