Toast POS recently announced at partnership with TripAdvisor. At first we thought Toast might be finding a way to syndicate their online ordering service to TripAdvisor. Or to push menu updates to TripAdvisor, or pull TripAdvisor reviews back into Toast’s POS interface to alert restaurants when guests have positive or negative sentiments. This is a great use of cloud connectivity and something POS companies should strive for.
Closer inspection leads us to believe this is a way for Toast to syndicate TripAdvisor ads to their merchants. Considering the average restaurant earmarks 5% of gross sales for marketing, this is a great way for Toast to find additional merchant dollars. And if the advertising works, awesome! After all, who has the best set of data to measure lift from marketing campaigns?
POS companies that see all the transaction data, not just card swipes.
We reached out to TripAdvisor to learn more about how the campaigns would be rolled out. How will merchant’s know the ROI of their campaigns? How easy are they to set up? Is there any integration in the POS to make this seamless? TripAdvisor said they didn’t know and copied us on an email to Karen DeVincent, a PR manager for Toast, to learn more.
Karen was unresponsive.
At any rate, here are the questions that should be answered about this partnership.
1. How are you proving the ROI of the advertising? TripAdvisor will track clicks and views, but will those translate to sales? The POS is the unique entity that can measure indirect marketing with machine learning through examination of lift and velocity since they have both SKUs and the complete sales picture. Is Toast committing itself to provide such value for its merchants or is this advertising not integrated? Why?
2. What’s the workflow to set up the TripAdvisor advertising? Ideally a merchant would stay within Toast’s UI to measure and manage their promotions. If not in Toasts’s UI, where is the merchant going? The value of APIs is that you can move data without needing to change the customer experience.
3. Has Toast integrated TripAdvisor in a deeper fashion to allow their merchants to push menu and pricing updates to TripAdvisor? What about syndication of Toast’s mobile ordering solution on TripAdvisor pages to drive more exposure for their merchants and enable customers of TripAdvisor to order from their favorite restaurants? If done properly this would avoid the often hefty commissions associated with aggregation. If Toast hasn’t done this integration, why not?
Maybe we’re way off base but these strike us as very reasonable questions to ask if you’re a Toast merchant. And since merchants aren’t engineers or data scientists many won’t ask these questions to understand IF the TripAdvisor ads are delivering ROI. If Toast is to keep a good reputation it must acknowledge that it has a responsibility to be fair and committed to the success of their customers; they cannot support initiatives that are penalizing for their merchants.
TripAdvisor ads might be great for merchants but won’t know unless Toast talks about how these efforts help their customers. Even though we send Toast copies of our articles for input prior to release they are consistently reticent. If you were doing something commendable for your customers you would want it to be mentioned. So their silence is a little off-putting. As many POS and payments companies will tell you, they’re happy to review our content and provide feedback ahead of publication. That’s what good companies do to manage their PR.
It’s entirely Toast’s prerogative not to respond. But we think their merchants deserve an honest assessment of the TripAdvisor ads before being sold down the river, if that is indeed the case (which we cannot know without Toast’s input).
We recommend any merchant that read this contact Karen at her work email (kdevincent
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