Tapos (Jacro) alternatives: a real front end for your PoS

Tapos is the cinema PoS from the Roe family's Jacro business, which traces its cinema history from Jack Roe in the 1920s to Alan Roe today and has more than 25 years in cinema software. It sells itself as a complete cinema operating system: omnichannel ticket and food sales, a built-in CRM, F&B modules, loyalty and membership, email marketing and tools for family entertainment centres. Customers quoted on its site include WTW-Scott Cinemas in the UK and B&B Theatres and Eisentraut Theatres in the US.

For online sales, Tapos offers three routes: its WordPress solution, an iFrame embedded into your existing website, or its full sales API. That third option is the important one. It is exactly what a dedicated front end plugs into.

Embedding a booking frame in a website you already have is the quickest way to sell online. It is also the reason so many cinema websites look like a brochure with a ticket machine bolted on. In our view a frame never carries your brand properly, it splits your film content from the booking, and on its own it does nothing for an app, for push, or for knowing who looked at a film and left.

Filmgrail uses the Tapos integration to do it properly. We read films, sessions, seating and prices from Tapos and write each completed sale back, so Tapos stays the record for the box office, concessions and reporting. On top, you get a website and native iOS and Android apps on one CMS, film pages with trailers and structured data, a checkout built for completion on a phone, loyalty, push campaigns and audience analytics. The Tapos integration page sets out what moves and what stays.

Across cinemas on Filmgrail, nine in ten end users create a profile, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%.

You should not have to move your PoS to get a better website and app. Filmgrail runs the digital side for circuits including Bergen Kino, Trondheim Kino, Ster-Kinekor, Wallis Cinemas and Classic Cinemas in the US, as well as single-screen town cinemas.

Pricing is published and scales by screens: from $200 a year for a single screen up to $20,000 a year for a large circuit, flat per screen with no per-ticket fees (see pricing). Because we already integrate with Tapos, you can be live in a few weeks.

See your own cinema on it first: the cinema website prototype tool builds a prototype from your current URL. Then book a demo against your real programme.