Cloud software has made selling restaurant point of sale solutions a little less cut and dried for value-added resellers (VARs) and managed services providers (MSPs). With software that can be demoed and downloaded right from a website, customers can potentially subscribe directly from the vendor, but many sell through a channel so their software can be a part of a comprehensive POS and restaurant management solution, backed with service from a local provider.
How Do You Know How a Vendor Sells Its Software?
Websites are a great place to start to learn how POSaaS solution vendors sell their products. You may have to do some digging — POS software websites are often designed to be end-user facing, so information for potential partners may not be in the top navigation. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try Googling the company name and “reseller program” or “channel partners,” and you may find a link that takes you to the information you need.
The vendor probably won’t publish all the details about its channel partner program on its website, but those with a channel will provide contact information for the member of their team who handles inquiries from VARs and MSPs. Email or call to initiate a conversation about providing their software to your clients.
POSaaS Vendors Speak Out
With so many restaurant POSaaS solutions on the market, researching all of your options could require a lot of time. To provide you with a shortcut, we invited some leading POS software vendors to share some information about their channels. The vendors that responded, links to their partner web pages, and the information they provided follows.
Focus POS’s business is 100 percent through the channel. Its Focus as a Subscription (FaaS) program allows partners to sell Focus POS on a recurring revenue basis.
Focus POS provides its partners with free sales and technical support and offers MDF equal to 2 percent of sales, once a minimum number of sales is met. Focus POS also provides partners with training and holds a tech conference every April for ongoing and continued education on the product, feature set, and support.
ShopKeep has increasingly begun to focus on channel partners as a way to sell and distribute ShopKeep point of sale software to its small business-owner customer base. Finding a point of sale for small business comes very early in the process, but sometimes isn’t the very first step. Because of this, ShopKeep recognizes the opportunity for reaching potential small business owners through various channels, one of which being channel partners. This allows us to reach more prospects during the early stages as they begin to build their business.
Considering the small business community that ShopKeep serves, we know that one avenue for reaching that market requires building good partner relations. As ShopKeep continues to explore growth strategies, we have seen an increase in the number of our leads come through various partner channels.
Shopkeep offers set, industry standard, referral fees to all of our channel partners for business owners that sign-on to ShopKeep as a storefront. Partners will refer the potential customer lead, at which point, the ShopKeep sales team will begin working with the business owner.
Upserve works with ISOs and agents, consultants, resellers, IT networking integrators, and distributors, accounting for about 40 percent of its business. Partners are paid after they hold a qualified demo and the customer goes live.
Upserve offers its partners sales collateral and onboarding, as well as quarterly training webinars and dedicated internal support.
Vend has more than 300 active channel partners, and 60 percent of its business is through the channel.
Its tiered program varies margin the partner receives based on the number of activations. Vend provides sales support, demos, and installation of the software on their partners’ behalf. Vend also offers its partners market development funds (MDF), training, and a certification program for its expert partners. 
