Shopfront POS — bank compatibility

Shopfront is a point-of-sale system for general retail and retail. Melbourne-built, grew out of a 2006 purchase of AVRO Retail Minder, and quietly took the biggest share of the independent liquor market.

Certified on Linkly and on Tyro. Worth knowing the difference: Tyro is its own acquirer, so that route means banking with Tyro. The Linkly route does not.

Certified to do split bills and cash out.

The Linkly integration runs on premise.

Shopfront's lineage runs back further than the product name. SAS Online bought AVRO Retail Minder in 2006; the cloud POS now sold as Shopfront launched in 2017 off the back of that. The company is based in Melbourne.

Where it has won is bottle shops. Shopfront says it took the largest market share in the IBA space across 2020 to 2022 — that is Independent Brands Australia, the Cellarbrations and Bottle-O side of liquor retail — and now runs in over 800 stores processing more than a billion dollars a year. For a cloud POS that nobody outside the trade has heard of, that is a serious installed base. Technically it is more opinionated than most: a proprietary query language for reporting and WYSIWYG editors for receipts and statements, which suits an operator who wants to build their own reports rather than live with canned ones. Liquor is the sweet spot; general retail works but you are buying a liquor system.