Pointy is a pretty slick little piece of hardware. If you’re a retailer, Pointy’s hardware plugs into your barcode scanner to suck the ASCII data your scanner sends to your POS. If you’re smart enough to use a cloud POS system, then Pointy has an app you can download for free, making their hardware unneeded.
Pointy’s value prop to merchants is three-fold:
First, Pointy will put your store online. Pointy gives you your own webpage with all your offerings so consumers can learn more about your business
Second, Pointy helps search engines like Google better optimize your store for search results and even puts the items you carry onto Google Shopping. Google has long had accuracy issues with retailers adding inventory to Google Shopping, so Pointy solves that with machine learning.
We developed a machine learning model that estimates the inventory from observing how the scanner is used throughout a normal day. For ex example, in a grocery store an item like milk might get scanned through the POS every 10 minutes on average. If no milk gets scanned for 30 minutes, it’s pretty likely the store went out of stock of milk.
Mark Cummins, Pointy Co-Founder
Pointy can manage your item availability on Google and remove an item if it’s no longer available in-store. As you can imagine, Google has received copious complaints from retailers who added items to Google Shopping only to have consumers learn the items aren’t actually in stock.
As Mark Cummins, Pointy’s co-founder tells us, Pointy has a partnership with Google around this inventory data and are a launch partner for Google’s See What’s In Store.
Google is so adamant that the data be correct they even send teams of people to stores to check the stock status of items.
Lastly, Pointy can help retailers run product Adwords on Google, bringing in new customers and revenue. Stores can run text ads or Local Inventory Ads (which Pointy has seen perform very well). Retailers set a daily budget and can start or stop campaigns at any time. Pointy takes a percentage of ad spend. Further, because Pointy works closely with Google, retailers can get coupons to try AdWords directly through the Pointy interface.
All in all this sounds great. But why does Pointy need hardware to do it? The short answer: Brick and mortar.
While the rest of the civilized world is moving head-first into software, brick and mortar continues to trail by meaningful measurements. Pointy’s hardware-first approach is unfortunately driven by two very real (and very sad) realities.
The first is that POS companies can be a pain in the ass to work with. Unreturned outreach. Fever dreams of monopoly. Hubris. This means getting an API for integration can be as close to impossible as one might dare define it. Think about how absurd this is for a minute: APIs are cheap, scalable ways for POS companies to extend their own value and revenue. Yet the vast majority of POS companies can’t be bothered to invest in building an API to help themselves nor their merchants. Some that do only view APIs as a means to enforce walled gardens. That’s despite the rest of the economy opening up to APIs.
We can land on Mars but a POS company can’t get an API? Are you shitting us?
Second, merchants can’t be trusted to even use their POS systems correctly. You’d think that retailers would keep inventory updated in their POS but nope, very few do. It’s like how 85% of restaurants have no idea what their COGS are. How batshit crazy is it to not know the cost of the items you’re selling? This is business 101 for f*ck’s sake.
Until common sense prevails, Pointy is here to help how they can.
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