We earlier laid out a vision for how we expect the future of brick and mortar to work. In that world POS becomes an open platform and steward for their customers: through APIs and data syndication POS companies facilitate commerce and create success for their merchants. Yes, that’s a big change from where POS finds itself today.
Even as POS hopefully makes this transition they won’t be able to build all of it by themselves. By that we mean to truly offer end-to-end value the POS will need to partner with a number of third parties.
Enter Olo.
Olo has grown to over 48,000 restaurant locations, offering white label online ordering services for some of the world’s largest hospitality brands. In late 2015 they launched Dispatch, a tool restaurants could use to better handle their deliveries.
In concept Dispatch operates like eBay for delivery services: third party companies like Postmates, DoorDash, DeliverLogic, and others “bid” on a delivery order and the one that meets the requirements gets the job. Dispatch stitches together a dozen national and regional/local players to maximize coverage for multi-location retailers that operate in many markets. In practice the restaurant sets rules about who can take what deliveries, what price points and commissions they’ll accept, and Dispatch does the rest. Perhaps the biggest advantage of Dispatch is the embedded rate throttling which means kitchens don’t become overwhelmed by an influx of orders.
Yet as Google is showing, restaurants aren’t the only merchants that can benefit from open POS systems.
As consumers demand ever-increasing convenience, retailers will need to think aggressively about last-mile delivery services not named Amazon. Assuming an open POS (this is unfortunately still a big assumption today), consumers will find online the red sweater they’ve been looking for from your local outlet. At this juncture a consumer needs to think about timeliness: will they wait 2 days for Amazon Prime to deliver the sweater? What if the sweater is the wrong fit – do they send it back and select another? What if the sweater is needed more immediately?
Expanding Dispatch to retail lets retail merchants benefit from these consumer user cases and compete with Amazon. Olo is making moves to set merchants up for success.
Is your POS?
To learn more about Dispatch reach out to Olo here.
Add comment