Best Beauty Supply Store POS Systems in 2026

A beauty supply store carries thousands of lines across hair, wigs, extensions, nails and skincare, sells the same product at two prices depending on whether the customer is licensed, and keeps a good part of its margin behind a locked case. This guide compares nine POS systems on published US pricing, on how well each one handles shade and length variants, on whether it supports professional account pricing at all, and on what a second store costs. Every figure came from the vendor's own site in September 2026. New to buying one? Start with our guide to what a pos system does.

The systems at a glance

The systems compared

1. Vibe Retail

Best for: Independent stores that want published pricing and real catalog depth

Published pricing: Essential $19/month for one register, two users and 100 items. Pro $97/month for unlimited users and items, loyalty, ecommerce and multi-location sync. Card present from 2.9% + 15c down to 2.5% + 10c.

What stands out: Beauty supply is high SKU retail, and that is what Vibe is built for. Products carry variants, so a wig style holds its lengths, textures and color codes underneath one record rather than spawning forty separate items, stock counts down as it sells, and multiple stores run on one price list rather than a fee per site. Pricing is published up front, which in this category around half the vendors will not do. Our beauty supply store POS system page covers the detail.

Tradeoffs: Essential at $19 caps at 100 items, which no beauty supply store fits inside, so the honest comparison is at $97.

2. Lightspeed Retail

Best for: Stores with the deepest shade and size ranges

Published pricing: Basic $89/month, Core $149/month, Plus $289/month, each including one location and one register, with up to 18% off annual billing. Additional locations and registers are contact sales only. Lightspeed's pricing page states a card present rate of 1.5%, which is far below every third party report of their US rate.

What stands out: The strongest variant handling published by anyone in this category. Lightspeed describes multi dimensional matrixing and organizing ranges by shade, size and finish, which is exactly the problem a beauty supply store has. Wholesale stock and sales tracking is included, and purchasing and supplier ordering are better than anything else on this list.

Tradeoffs: A distinct professional versus retail customer price level is not published as a feature, so if trade accounts are core to you this needs confirming before you commit. Extra location pricing is not published at all, and Lightspeed's pricing page warns that additional service fees may apply depending on the nature of the business.

3. KORONA POS

Best for: Stores that want to keep their own card processor

Published pricing: Core $59/month, Retail $79/month, Plus $99/month, each per terminal. Modules add $10 to $50 each, including a franchise module at $30. No setup fees and month to month available. KORONA is processing agnostic and states it never takes a percentage of sales, so there is no card rate because you bring your own.

What stands out: Processing agnostic is a genuine advantage and an unusual one. You negotiate your own merchant rate and change it whenever you like, which over a few years is worth more than most of the software differences on this page. KORONA's Retail tier adds real inventory counts, barcode automation, shelf and price labels and supplier ordering, and the Plus tier adds multi location inventory tools and per store pricing.

Tradeoffs: Per terminal pricing means a single busy store with four tills pays four times, and multi location tools need the $99 Plus tier. There is no in house payment processing, so you are arranging that separately.

4. MicroBiz Cloud

Best for: Stores with a real trade counter

Published pricing: Standard $65/month or $650/year for one store, one register and up to 25,000 products. Enterprise $95/month or $950/year for up to 150,000 products. Extra register $32.50/month, additional store $65/month. Free setup and configuration. Card rates are not published.

What stands out: One of the very few systems in this category that handles both of the things beauty supply actually needs. MicroBiz's matrix products carry size, color and other variants properly, and customer price levels let you set pricing tiers by customer group so a licensed professional pays trade prices automatically. Purchase orders and vendor shipments are covered.

Tradeoffs: Card rates are not published. The 25,000 product cap on the Standard tier is generous but worth checking against your catalog, and the product is less widely deployed than the big names so there are fewer independent reviews to read.

5. Square

Best for: Small single stores with no trade accounts

Published pricing: Square Free $0, Square Plus $49/month per location, Square Premium $149/month per location. In person 2.6% + 15c, 2.5% + 15c and 2.4% + 15c. Online 3.3% or 2.9% + 30c. Keyed in 3.5% + 15c.

What stands out: Fully transparent pricing, quick to set up, strong item variations, and per location costs that are easy to budget. For a small store selling to the public only, it does the job and does it cheaply.

Tradeoffs: Square cannot charge professional customers a different price. It supports a single price per item and cannot set a separate price for a wholesale or professional customer list, which Square's own community has confirmed. Point of sale customer group discounts exist but do not carry through to online. For a beauty supply store running licensed cosmetologist accounts, that is disqualifying, and almost every article recommending Square for this category has missed it.

6. Shopify POS

Best for: Stores selling online alongside the shop floor

Published pricing: POS Pro $89/month per location billed yearly, on top of a Shopify plan. Plans are Basic $39/month, Grow $105/month, Advanced $399/month and Plus $2,300/month on a three year term. POS Lite is included free. In person 2.6% + 10c, 2.5% + 10c and 2.4% + 10c by plan. A single store on Basic plus POS Pro is $128/month.

What stands out: The best online storefront here, real time stock sync between web and store, and product variations handled properly with their own price, SKU, weight and stock per variant. Card rates are published in full.

Tradeoffs: Wholesale and B2B pricing is a Shopify Plus feature, so trade accounts effectively start at $2,300 a month. For a store with professional customers that is the whole ballgame. Per location POS Pro at $89 also adds up quickly across several stores.

7. Erply

Best for: Small chains, up to a point

Published pricing: Basic POS $49 per store per month for one user and one terminal. Multichannel Chains $179 per store per month for two users and a warehouse license. POS for NetSuite from $1,800/month and Franchise and Chain from $3,500/month. Card rates are not published.

What stands out: Priced per store in a way that makes a small chain easy to budget, with a genuine multi store and warehouse model rather than locations bolted onto a single store product.

Tradeoffs: Both of Erply's affordable tiers are capped at $25,000 a month of company turnover, which a real beauty supply store will pass quickly, and the jump above that is to $1,800 a month. Read that cap carefully before you sign. Wholesale capability only appears from the NetSuite tier upward.

8. Nextar

Best for: A single store on a tight budget

Published pricing: Free plan at $0 with no time limit, covering POS, product and customer records, supplier management and an online catalog. Premium $25/month or $250/year, adding cash register, multiple service terminals, label and receipt templates, accounts payable, unlimited users, inventory control and expiration date tracking. Per location pricing and card rates are not published.

What stands out: By far the cheapest credible option, and the free tier is genuinely free rather than a trial. Expiration date tracking is useful for the skincare and cosmetics side of the catalog, which most systems ignore.

Tradeoffs: Feature light for variant heavy, high SKU retail, which is the defining characteristic of this category. Professional pricing tiers are not published, multi store pricing is not published, and card rates are not published. Suitable for a small single store, not for a chain.

9. Cin7

Best for: Larger operations running several sites and a warehouse

Published pricing: Standard $349/month for five users and 6,000 sales orders a year, Pro $599/month for ten users and 24,000 orders, Advanced $1,199/month for fifteen users and 120,000 orders. Unlimited inventory locations are included on every tier. Cin7's point of sale itself is a paid add-on whose price is not published, so the real cost is the tier price plus an unknown. Card rates are not published.

What stands out: Unlimited inventory locations on every tier is genuinely unusual and a real advantage over the per location models if you run several stores plus a stockroom. B2B pricing is supported, so trade accounts are handled properly, and the inventory engine underneath is stronger than anything else here.

Tradeoffs: It is an inventory platform that also does point of sale rather than the other way round, and the POS add-on price is not published, so the entry cost is $349 a month plus an unknown. For a single store this is heavy and expensive.

The two questions that decide this, and one of them rules out Square

Almost every beauty supply store needs two things that general retail comparisons never test. The first is whether the system can hold a product as a matrix, so one wig style exists once with its lengths, textures and color codes underneath it rather than as forty unrelated items. The second is whether it can charge a licensed cosmetologist a different price from a walk in customer, automatically, without the person at the till doing arithmetic. Square, which is on almost every list written about this category, cannot do the second one. Square's own community confirms it supports a single price per item and cannot set a separate price for a wholesale or professional customer list. Point of sale customer group discounts exist, but they do not carry through online.

Wigs and extensions, the stock that walks

Hair is the highest value stock on the floor and the easiest to lose. A single lace front can be worth more than a whole shelf of shampoo, which is why so much of it lives behind glass or behind the counter, and why the inventory side of it behaves differently from everything else in the store. Nothing currently ranking for this term addresses it. The questions worth asking a vendor are practical ones: can you hold a style once and carry length, texture and color as variants underneath it rather than creating a separate product for every combination; can you run a cycle count on a single category without closing the store; does the system flag a negative stock position the moment it happens rather than at the end of the month; and can you see shrink by category rather than as one number across the business. US retail shrink now runs at roughly 1.6% of sales, and in this category it is concentrated in a small number of high value lines, which means a system that reports shrink by category is worth real money.

Professional accounts and how the pricing should work

Selling to licensed cosmetologists, barbers and salon owners at trade prices is normal practice in beauty supply, and it is the thing most POS systems handle badly or not at all. What you want is a customer record that carries a price level, so the trade price applies automatically when the account is attached to the sale, with the license on file, the tax position handled correctly, and reporting that separates trade revenue from retail revenue. MicroBiz supports customer price levels directly, Cin7 handles B2B pricing, Shopify needs the Plus plan, Lightspeed is partial, and Square cannot do it. If a meaningful share of your revenue comes from trade customers, this question alone should decide your shortlist. It is also worth thinking about where those customers work, because the systems they run in their own salon POS software and barber shop POS system setups are often the ones they will expect you to integrate with.

What an extra store costs, and the caps to watch for

Beauty supply is a category that grows by opening a second and third store rather than by growing one, so per location pricing matters more here than in most retail. The models are all different. Square and Shopify charge per location, which is simple and gets expensive. MicroBiz charges $65 a month per store. Erply charges $49 or $179 per store but caps both of those tiers at $25,000 a month of company turnover, which a real beauty supply store will pass quickly, so read that one carefully. KORONA charges per terminal rather than per store, which suits a chain of small shops and punishes one busy store with four tills. Cin7 includes unlimited inventory locations, which is genuinely unusual, though its point of sale is a paid add-on whose price is not published. Our multi-location POS system page sets out how these models compare.

What to check before you sign

• Ask whether professional pricing is automatic. If the answer involves a manual discount button, it is not a pro account system.
• Test the matrix with a real product. Bring a wig style with four lengths and three colors and ask them to build it in front of you.
• Ask how shrink is reported. By category, not just as one number, or you will never find where the hair is going.
• Check the turnover caps. Erply's two affordable tiers are both capped at $25,000 a month of company turnover.
• Find out who the payment processor is and whether you can change it. KORONA is processing agnostic and takes no percentage of sales, which is worth more than it sounds.
• Price the second store before you sign the first. Per location, per terminal and unlimited are three very different bills at five stores.
• Ask about EBT if you accept it. Almost nothing written about this category mentions it and not every system supports it.

What it actually costs

Published software runs from free to $1,199 a month, with most independent stores landing between $49 and $150. Around half the vendors in this category will not publish a price at all, and Cin7 hides the cost of the point of sale module behind its inventory tiers. Card processing is the bigger number in most cases at roughly 2.4% to 2.6%, though KORONA takes no percentage and lets you bring your own processor.

Vibe Retail starts at $19 a month for a single register, with multi-location sync, loyalty and ecommerce on the $97 Pro tier.