A cafe till is judged on about ninety minutes a day. Between eight and half past nine the queue is out of the door, every order is small, most are near identical and the only thing that matters is the number of seconds between a person saying flat white and the next person being served. Almost everything else in a cafe till comparison is noise beside that number.
The morning rush is the whole test
Count the taps it takes to ring a flat white with an oat milk to take away. Three is good and six is a queue. The features that reduce it are unglamorous: a first screen with your actual top sellers on it rather than categories, modifiers one tap deep, and a payment step that does not need confirming twice. Ask for that exact order to be rung in front of you on the demo, and count.
Loyalty, and why the stamp card still wins sometimes
Most cafe tills offer a loyalty scheme, and most of them slow the transaction down to collect an email address. In a queue that costs you more than the scheme returns. The ones worth having attach to the card being tapped or a phone number typed once, with no extra step at the counter. A paper stamp card is genuinely competitive against a badly implemented digital one, which is a sentence no vendor will say to you.
Where a cafe differs from a restaurant
No covers, no courses, rarely a split bill, and table service is often optional rather than the default. That means half of what a restaurant till is compared on does not apply here, and paying for it is common. What a cafe does need and a restaurant often does not is fast repeat ordering, an easy way to handle a regular's usual, and takings by hour so you can see whether the afternoon is worth staying open for.
Questions people ask about cafe epos
Is a coffee shop POS different from a cafe EPOS?
Only in vocabulary. Coffee shop pos is how the American products are indexed and cafe epos is how the British ones are; the till in front of you is doing the same job.
Do I need table service on a cafe till?
Only if you run it. If people order at the counter and carry their own tray, table numbers add a step to every transaction for no return. Turn it off if the product lets you, and be wary of one that does not.
What should a cafe till cost?
Less than a restaurant one, because you need less of it. Published UK tiers for ordering products started at £99 a month on Storekit's pricing page read 2026-09-06, and a counter with no online ordering can often sit below that.