Here is the part nobody selling you a till will mention: most "best EPOS" lists are written for a shop that does not look like yours. They assume you are starting from nothing, that you will happily pay a monthly fee forever, and that one product fits everyone from a single corner shop to a five-site chain. None of that is true. There are really five kinds of independent shop owner, and the right answer for each one is different. Get the type wrong and you will overpay for years.
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The UK has 50,387 convenience stores, according to the ACS Local Shop Report 2024, and 71% of them are run by independent retailers rather than the major multiples. This is not a corner of retail dominated by head-office IT departments. It is tens of thousands of owners making their own technology decisions, often alone, often at the end of a long shift.
And the tools in use are all over the place. The Retail Data Partnership estimates that around half of all convenience stores use no EPOS at all: a basic till, paper, or a spreadsheet. The ACS Local Shop Report 2024 found that only 17% have a self-service till. Meanwhile, The Grocer reports that over 16,000 UK shops trade under a symbol-group fascia such as Spar, Nisa, Premier, Costcutter, Londis, Best-one or Mace, each with its own EPOS arrangement attached. So when someone asks "what is the best EPOS", the honest answer starts with another question: which of these shops are you?
Before you compare a single product, work out which group you fall into. The pitch that suits one group is actively wrong for another.
Keep your type in mind as you read on. The comparison table below is honest about price, but price means nothing until you know which trap you are personally exposed to.
The loudest pitch in shop EPOS right now is "stop renting your till, own it instead". It is a good line, and for the cloud-subscription owner it is genuinely true. But it is sold as if it applies to everyone, and it does not.
Consider the own-it-outright owner. ICRTouch TouchPoint has been installed over 150,000 times in the UK, according to ICRTouch, on a perpetual licence with no monthly fee, where a single till is typically £1,000 to £2,500 paid once. That owner already owns their system. Telling them to "stop paying monthly" is telling them to fix a bill they do not have.
Now consider the symbol-group owner. Their EPOS is free or subsidised, but it is tied to buying stock from the group. Nisa, as reported by The Grocer and detailed by ShopMate, quotes its evolution EPOS as a £3,895 saving, which is real money, but it is not a gift. It is a discount in exchange for your stock loyalty. The "free" system is paid for at the wholesale invoice, every week, for as long as you stay.
Here is where the popular options actually sit. Prices are as published by each provider at the time of writing. The point of this table is not to crown a winner, it is to show that "model" matters at least as much as the headline number.
| System | Headline price | Ongoing cost | Model and the catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epos Now | Advertised at £199 (reduced from £849), per Epos Now. | Support and payments subscription from £54 per month, plus card processing. | Cloud subscription on a 12 to 36 month contract. The cheap hardware is the hook; the monthly fee and the contract length are the real commitment. |
| Square | No monthly software fee on the basic tier. | Around 1.75% on every card sale, per Square. | Pay-as-you-go. Cheap to start, but the percentage never stops. On £15,000 a month in card sales that is roughly £262.50 a month, about £3,150 a year (ESRE framework calculation from Square pricing). |
| Zettle (PayPal) | No monthly software fee on the basic tier. | Around 1.75% on every card sale, per Zettle. | Same model as Square. Illustratively about £262.50 a month, about £3,150 a year on £15,000 of card sales (ESRE framework calculation from Zettle pricing). |
| SumUp | Low entry on the 0.99% plan. | 0.99% plus £19 a month, per SumUp. | A blended model. Illustratively about £167.50 a month, about £2,010 a year on £15,000 of card sales (ESRE framework calculation from SumUp pricing). Lower rate, but a fixed monthly fee returns. |
| ICRTouch | Typically £1,000 to £2,500 per till, paid once, per ICRTouch. | None. Perpetual licence, no monthly software fee. | Own-it-outright. Over 150,000 UK installs. Higher up-front, nothing per month. Bought through dealers, so support and changes go through them. |
| Symbol group | Free or subsidised (Nisa quotes a £3,895 saving on evolution EPOS, per The Grocer and ShopMate). | Paid through tied stock buying from the group. | The "free" system. No software bill, but your wholesale spend is locked to the fascia. Leave the group and the deal goes with it. |
| ShopMate (TRDP) | Around £999, per The Retail Data Partnership. | Varies by support and services. | Convenience-focused EPOS sold by The Retail Data Partnership. A middle path between cheap cloud hardware and a full dealer till. |
Read the right-hand column twice. Square and Zettle look free until you notice the percentage runs for as long as you trade. Epos Now looks cheap until you add 12 to 36 months of fees. ICRTouch and the symbol group both have "no software fee" but for opposite reasons: one because you bought it, one because you are paying at the wholesale till instead.
Whichever till you pick, you still pay to move money. This is where a lot of the real cost hides, and where the differences are large. The figures below are illustrative, modelled on a shop doing about £15,000 a month in card sales using ESRE's framework and each provider's published pricing.
| Processor | Rate | Illustrative monthly | Illustrative yearly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square | 1.75% | About £262.50 | About £3,150 |
| Zettle | 1.75% | About £262.50 | About £3,150 |
| SumUp (0.99% plan) | 0.99% plus £19 a month | About £167.50 | About £2,010 |
| Stripe Terminal | 1.4% plus 20p | About £240 | About £2,880 |
| Revolut | 0.8% plus 2p | About £130 | About £1,560 |
The spread is the story. Using ESRE's framework calculation, moving from about 1.75% to 0.8% saves a shop doing £15,000 a month over £1,500 a year on transaction fees alone, before you have changed anything else about the shop. The Revolut figures assume a terminal at about £169 plus VAT as a one-off, plus a £10 a month Revolut Business account, which the annual saving covers many times over.
Why does this matter in an EPOS article? Because most cloud tills steer you towards their own payments rail, and that rail is often the more expensive one. When the till and the card processor are bundled, you lose the freedom to put the cheaper processor behind the same screen.
It is tempting to treat the till as a minor purchase. It is not, because of what surrounds it. Retail crime cost the sector £316m in a single year, according to the ACS Crime Report 2024/25, across 6.2m theft incidents, up from 5.6m, which works out at over 600 every hour. Retailers spent more than £265m on crime prevention, and the ACS describes the net effect as a 10p "crime tax" added to every transaction. A till that actually tracks stock, flags losses and gives you an audit trail is part of how you fight that, not a cost on top of it.
Labour is the other pressure. The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 per hour on 1 April 2026, a 4.1% increase from £12.21, under the National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2026 on legislation.gov.uk. For context, the ACS notes it was £11.44 in April 2024, a 9.8% rise that year. The University of Stirling and SGF put the true, fully-loaded cost of employment at about £15.39 per hour in 2024 once on-costs are included, and that figure predates the 2026 rise, so the real number is now higher. The same research found 75% of convenience store owners and managers work 65 or more hours a week, and the ACS reported that 53% of retailers cut investment and 47% took lower profits to absorb wage rises. When labour is that expensive and that stretched, a system that saves the owner an hour a day is not a luxury.
Every option above is somebody else's product. You rent it, you buy a fixed version of it, or you get it free with strings. A bespoke system is the fourth model: one your shop owns outright, built around how you actually trade. This is what ESRE Media builds, and it is worth being precise about where it beats the alternatives and where it does not.
It does not win on the lowest possible up-front price for a single basic till. A £199 hardware deal or a free symbol-group box is cheaper on day one. A bespoke owned shop system starts around £2,000 to £3,000 as a one-off for a core build (ESRE internal offer), owned outright with no monthly software fee, with larger scopes such as multi-site, a staff rota or an integrated website costing more. So it is not the cheapest first cheque.
It wins on three things the generic platforms cannot match.
There is no subscription, no per-till licence and no contract. If the relationship with ESRE ended tomorrow, the system keeps running. Your data lives on secure UK servers, fully exportable, and you can roll the whole system back to any second through a write-ahead log. Compare that to Square's percentage that never stops, Epos Now's 12 to 36 month contract, or a symbol-group deal that evaporates the day you change wholesaler. Ownership is the whole point, and it is the one thing none of the rented options can give you.
Generic EPOS makes your shop fit the software. A bespoke build does the opposite. One system replaces the till, the stock control, the supplier ordering, the reports and even the website, with one source of truth instead of five apps that do not talk to each other. ESRE's working shop demo already runs a real till (scan or type, card via a Revolut Terminal or cash, receipt prints, stock decrements automatically), live stock with low-stock alerts and expiry tracking, supplier ordering that proposes purchase orders from thresholds you set, and reports that most owners never get: margin per line, top sellers, dead stock, busiest hours, waste and loss, and VAT by rate. You keep your existing screen, USB scanner, receipt printer and cash drawer; only the card reader is swapped for a Revolut Terminal at about £169 plus VAT.
This is where the growing owner should pay attention. A bespoke system can include a staff rota with hours and pay-owed tracking, and a single multi-site HQ view across every shop, things most off-the-shelf tills handle poorly or not at all. And the economics flip as you grow: for an owner opening a second shop, a bespoke multi-site system at roughly £2,000 to £3,000 (ESRE internal research) is materially cheaper than buying a second premium dealer till, which can run £5,000 to £7,000. The product that looked expensive against a £199 box looks cheap against two dealer tills.
Serious capabilities come as standard from day one: a complete audit trail, rollback to any second via a write-ahead log, automated backups, and data on UK servers. It is built in weeks rather than months, it is noticeably fast, and it is built to last and grow with the business. The catalogue handles CSV bulk import and barcode lookup via Open Food Facts with phone-camera scanning, so nobody keys in 1,000 products by hand, and every smartphone becomes a scanner through a PWA with no app-store download. End-of-day cash reconciliation is built in, and the till is offline-capable, so it keeps working if the internet drops and syncs later.
The part that makes it genuinely future-proof arrived in December 2025, when AI tools became mature enough that your own team can evolve the system in plain English, inside failsafe environments with version control and automated backups. So the shop is not frozen on the day it launches. It changes as you change. And there is a guarantee most software companies will not offer: if something ESRE built is faulty, it is fixed at no cost, with no time limit. For early clients, hosting is free and permanent for a limited time. You can read the full reasoning on why bespoke, and see the kind of systems we build on the projects page.
Honestly, it depends which of the five owners you are. If you are on no system, almost anything beats flying blind, and the decision is about how far you want to go. If you are renting a cloud till, the "own it" argument is real for you, and a bespoke build is the strongest version of it. If you already own an ICRTouch outright, you owe nobody anything, and the case for switching is about capability, not cost. If you are tied to a symbol group, understand what the "free" till really costs at the wholesale invoice. And if you are growing, the bespoke multi-site maths is hard to argue with.
The thread running through all five is ownership. Rented tills keep taking a slice of every sale or a fee every month, and the symbol-group "gift" takes its cut at the till you cannot see. A system your shop owns outright, fitted to how you actually trade and able to grow with you, is the one that stops the meter running. That is the difference a bespoke build makes.
Speak to us about retail software · +44 7494 618 651 · Mon to Fri, 9am to 6pm