Straight answers.

Technically, all three are the same kind of thing — cloud software in a browser. The difference is weight and shape. QuickBooks and Zoho are enormous platforms built for every business on earth, so your trade's realities get bolted on. Tillfront is operational software for the counter: the scan, the invoice, the route, the register, the time clock. Most customers keep QuickBooks for the books and run Tillfront in front of it.

Two ways, your choice. Integrated chip-and-tap PAX terminals through Humble Payments — the terminal and the register act as one machine. Or keep the merchant account and terminal you already have; manual card mode works beside it. Nobody is ever forced to switch. The difference is the subscription: stores on Tillfront Payments pay $0/month for the register; stores on their own processor pay $79/month.

Fourteen days, full software, your real data. A card goes on file when you sign up but $0 is charged today — the first monthly charge happens when the trial ends. Cancel before day 14 and you pay nothing. Wholesale from $199/mo, ordering portal +$50. Retail stores — standalone or attached to a wholesale account — are $0/mo with card processing through Tillfront Payments; bring your own processor and it's $79/mo standalone or +$50 per attached site.

All 50 states are configurable — per-mL, per-unit, percent-of-cost, or percent-of-wholesale-price. You enter your rates, flag taxable products once, and every invoice computes excise from the customer's ship-to state and freezes it on the line. Rate changes never rewrite history.

Your data lives in a professionally-run cloud database, encrypted in transit, with access enforced in the database itself per login. A store login sees its store, a portal customer sees only their own account and never your costs. You can download a complete backup any time.

Honest answer: Tillfront is cloud software, so it needs a connection — same as QuickBooks or your card processor. A dead register costs you a device, not your data. Sign in on any other screen and keep working. Most shops run fine on a phone hotspot in a pinch.

Yes — that's the ordering portal. Each customer gets a login, sees your catalog at their prices with their order history and invoices, and sends orders that land in your Orders tab as drafts you review and turn into invoices.

A wholesale distributor and shop owner who got tired of running the trade on software that wasn't built for it. Tillfront runs a real wholesale operation and real retail stores every day — the features exist because the business needed them.