One of the biggest issues plaguing POS companies has been the entrance of payments processors. Payments companies are placing lightweight POS systems in merchant locations at record speed, often lying about system capabilities to lock down the processing. Then, when the merchant realizes they’ve been sold a bill of goods or even just needs basic support: crickets.
For many first-time merchants this experience ruins the idea of POS, which has obvious negative ramifications for the POS industry. This behavior has often led us to ponder if payments companies have the culture or will to ever figure out POS.
Which is what makes Linga POS so interesting.
Onur Haytac has been a payments ISO for as long as he can remember. 10 years ago he recognized that payments was commoditized and built Bevo POS, in Onur’s own words, a legacy POS. Yes his POS reduced churn in his payments business, and yes it provided Onur with additional revenue streams. But Onur wasn’t content to just sit on his hands.
While other ISOs would have been buying flashy cars to flying first class to the Bahamas, Onur invested his earning in building Linga, a cloud POS that would not only replace Bevo POS but also grow far, far beyond his existing customer base.
How? Strangely enough, through other ISOs.
ISOs have amazing sales potential, but they don’t always have the DNA to sell and support POS. As a fellow ISO we understand their limitations. So we built Linga where it would be more intuitive to learn and use. But more importantly we built an entire support structure around Linga so those ISOs who are really invested in selling and supporting POS will have a solution that won’t disappoint their customers.
That’s Onur’s code for saying that ISOs must be fully trained and qualified before he lets them sell Linga.
We let ISOs white label Linga but we don’t want people associating bad sales and support with the payments industry and our product. There are many cases when we turn ISOs away because they don’t meet our requirements.
Onur has a unique perspective on the role of POS in merchant success that needs to be seriously listened to.
Many POS companies build non-core bolt-ons because they view them as additional revenue streams. And I get that the POS company isn’t going to build a bolt-on as well as a third party, which I know is something you talk a lot about. But some of these bolt-ons are so critical to merchant success I would rather give them to the merchant for free so the customer has something instead of nothing and learns how to run a better business. Not only is this an ethical consideration in my opinion, but it’s also good business: a customer that stays solvent is better for us in the long run.
This might be one of the most profound things we’ve heard in a long time. We can find plenty of examples of POS companies building garbage bolt-ins and charging inordinate fees for them , but Linga might very well be the first POS company putting resources into building bolt-ons that, while they admit are not the best on the market, are critical for merchant success and thus given away for free. What sorts of bolt-ons fall into this category? Onur made a list for us:
- Inventory and recipe control
- Central commissary (kitchen functionality)
- Branch-to-branch stock transfers (moving inventory between locations)
- Online ordering because a proper tool needs to both deduct inventory as well as track in-store and online orders from the same users for rewards purposes
- Waitlist function
- Loyalty
- Kiosks
- Basic labor scheduling
Onur’s model has caught on.
Today Linga has product in over 30 countries, including offices in Canada, India, Turkey and Dealer partners in Dubai, England, The Netherlands, South Africa and Australia. No doubt part of this can be attributed to other aspects about Linga’s business model.
Linga doesn’t require that merchant use their payments processing; there’s no processing lock-in like there is with Clover, Toast, or Upserve. And Onur doesn’t believe in Free POS.
Free POS is a lie. Yea it’s a cute marketing gimmick but the merchant has no idea what they’re really paying. I’ve read some of your articles and I’ve seen it myself that these ‘Free POS’ deals end up being nothing short of loan sharking where merchants are paying 50% APR when you do the math. That’s not right.
Like Xenial, Linga is also portable across operating systems.
We built Linga natively on Swift for iOS but the new version will also work in any web browser. We’ve now got a native version of Linga that works on Android, Windows, and even Linux due to be launched end of this month for QSR Restaurants and another version for Retail. We did this as we found most larger enterprises preferred Android hardware because it’s cheaper and because their IT department can control the devices. Also it is a part of our global expansion strategy: iOS devices are very expensive in the Middle East and Asia Pacific due to tax and tariffs. Personally I’ve seen that the lack of peripheral ports on iOS devices has been a barrier for larger groups; if apple had USB C instead of their Lightning port this might change, but we can’t wait for them to figure that out.
On that note where is Linga installed? “We sell large enterprise customers directly, both in hospitality and retail. Our largest customer right now is a restaurant with over 1,600 locations. We have customers that are racking up 10,000 transactions per month per location and haven’t had any performance issues yet.” Obviously that means Linga will work more than well for smaller merchants, and if you’re a merchant with 25 or fewer items on your menu or in your store you can use Linga for free, forever.
Large enterprise customers wouldn’t use Linga if it didn’t have offline redundancy. “We’re fully functional offline. You can clock-in and out, use EMV (through our partnership with eDynamo) and print tickets to the kitchen.” This is possible because of local caching on the POS and a local sync server option for offline use. There’s also 4G failover. “We have one customer in Manhattan that ran offline for 35 days, no problem.” Onur credits the uptime to Amazon’s AWS Cloud Sync, which brings data above store at breakneck speeds.
And for those of of you like us, who worried about Linga trying to build too much and erecting walled gardens to keep competition out, Linga has an open and free API.
Onur and Linga are always on the lookout for qualified ISOs and POS dealers who want to deliver a next-gen POS experience without territories or borders. “This is a big, underserved market. The move to cloud is inevitable, and we’re very confident Linga will fill the gaps left by legacy providers.”
If this is something you want to learn more about, send team Linga an email at partner@benseron.com
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