Clover reviews online are a mess, and not because Clover is a mess. The same product is sold by Fiserv direct, by banks, and by thousands of dealers with their own pricing and contracts. A review of “Clover” is often a review of whoever sold it. We sell it, so read this knowing that, and use it to sort the reviews you find elsewhere.
What merchants consistently praise
- Hardware. Station Duo, Mini and Flex are solid, fast and good-looking on a counter. Units run for years. The Flex’s battery and printer make pay at table work.
- Restaurant software. Clover Dining for tables, modifiers and combos, tips, kitchen display, online ordering included on restaurant plans. Enough for a single location.
- Ease of use. Staff learn it in an hour. The interface is the reason many operators choose it over more capable but harder systems.
- App Market. Loyalty, gift cards, scheduling, accounting sync, delivery integrations, payroll partners. Broad.
- Reporting. Sales, items, employees, tips, by period and location, from the dashboard or phone.
What merchants consistently complain about
- App fees. Each App Market addition carries a monthly fee, often $10 to $60. A restaurant that adds five apps has doubled its software bill. Buy the ones you will use.
- Locked devices. A Clover is locked to the processor it was boarded on. It can move between accounts on that processor, but it cannot be reprogrammed for a different one, so a used unit only works if the processors match. This surprises people and it should be disclosed before purchase. Details on used Clover and reprogramming.
- Inventory depth. Purchase orders, vendors, case breaks and age verification are thin. High-SKU stores outgrow it.
- Multi-location. Workable for a few locations, weak for chains.
- Support. Clover’s own support is adequate; the experience depends heavily on whether a dealer stands in front of it.
- Outages. Cloud POS outages happen. Offline mode and LTE backup limit the damage, but a Station without either is down when the internet is.
What is not Clover’s fault
Read a page of one-star reviews and sort them. A large share say some version of: the rate went up, there is a lease I did not understand, I was charged an early termination fee, nobody answers the phone. Those are the seller. Clover.com’s own terms are month to month on processing with published rates; a dealer’s terms are whatever the dealer wrote.
| Complaint | Whose fault |
|---|---|
| App fees | Clover’s model, buyer’s choices |
| Locked to processor | Clover’s platform |
| Limited inventory | Clover |
| Lease on the hardware | Dealer |
| Three-year auto-renewing contract | Dealer |
| Teaser rate that rose | Dealer |
| PCI, annual, statement fees | Dealer or processor |
| Cannot reach support | Dealer, or Clover direct queue |
| “Free” hardware that was a lease | Dealer |
How we score it
Hardware: excellent. Software for single-location restaurants, cafes, bars, general retail and services: good. Software for high-SKU retail and chains: not the right tool, and we say so and install Exatouch. Processing terms: entirely up to the seller, which is why ours are on one page, month to month, with dual pricing so the processing line is zero.
Before signing with anyone, including us, the questions are on Clover reseller vs direct. If you are comparing against Square or Toast, those pages are Clover vs Square and Clover vs Toast.