Nobody with half a brain would argue that the retail customer experience hasn’t changed markedly. From EMV pressures to pay at the table to the proliferation of online ordering and delivery, customers are driving the technology adoption more now than any time in the history of retail.
Yet despite this rapidly evolving landscape POS companies still seem to be far, far behind the times. And to prove our point we’ll introduce OneDine, a restaurant tableside ordering and payment platform.
Let’s start with some high level stuff.
Too many table service restaurants – especially of the enterprise variety – have held on to their legacy POS systems. Given the dearth of viable replacements (no, locked-in payments isn’t workable no matter how good the features) it’s actually fairly understandable. But the other side of this coin is that they’re effectively patching broken solutions that don’t offer anywhere near the capabilities to be relevant in today’s market. Non-functioning EMV. Lack of native tableside ordering. Broken or unworkable connections with third parties. The list here is long.
OneDine saw this opportunity three years ago and began working on a solution. While their founders would agree in principle that OneDine should have been something POS companies developed, they also knew POS companies would fail to build what the market needed. “Through our work with enterprise customers at Marketing Vitals we noticed a large gap in the market,” shared Rom Krupp, Marketing Vitals Chairman and now-founder/CEO of OneDine.
We’ve been on the record before saying that tableside ordering (and general EMV compliance) should be native to the POS company. Just like ownership over your API, kiosks and tablets are an extension of your ordering interfaces. If a POS can’t even keep their basic house in order, what the hell are they doing?
Oh, they’re working on a bunch of fringe crap to verticalize the stack and financial engineer their way to a win for investors?
Got it.
Meanwhile, customers have gotten a little bit smarter on the walled garden game. Yes, cloud POS introduces a new set of integration challenges, but merchants didn’t suddenly forget that the SaaS explosion happened and that they could source high quality software for monthly payments without a long term contract: that they could get the best in marketing, labor, inventory, online order, you-name-it and not have to suffer under some subpar solution offered by their POS provider.
OneDine saw the gaps POS companies were leaving open and built something to plug those holes. That’s the diplomatic way of saying that OneDine might have known the POS would shit the bed on something that was supposed to be core to the business model of POS.
Why would a merchant use OneDine? In a nutshell, OneDine provides a way for guests to order and pay at a restaurant. It sounds so profoundly simple yet if you’re dealing with a legacy POS you know how much hair is on this dog.
OneDine first devised a very clever way to integrate into the POS and extract the menu data. In doing this OneDine has sidestepped one of the largest pitfalls of online ordering: building a menu taxonomy and hierarchy that doesn’t take a boatload of human effort. “OneDine pulls menu data in real-time so any new changes are automatically reflected in the OneDine experience,” explains Vance Miller, CRO at OneDine.
We asked how OneDine intended to integrate with some of the legacy POS companies knowing that at least one of them (Aloha) has a reported two-year integration lead time per third parties.
“We’re using Omnivore to get integrated into POS systems quickly. They’ve gone through the headache of integration.” This is a quick-n-dirty hack but we think Omnivore’s expensive business proposition makes it so partners like OneDine have to go direct to the POS companies eventually.
Once integrated, OneDine accomplishes its goal with two primary interfaces.
First, every table has an NFC and QR code sticker that a guest can use to order. Nearly every mobile device made in the last five years recognizes a NFC or QR code. If a guest puts their phone over the NFC code the restaurant’s HTML5 web app will load and present the user with a menu. The user can then order and pay on the HTML5 app or use the native OneDine app. The NFC code is unique to restaurant brand, location, and even table or seat number, so the server or cashier knows where you are. You can think of the use case here even for quick service and fast casual brands: like what if I don’t want to wait in line again? OneDine automates the Larry David guidelines.
Second, OneDine equips servers with tablets to perform tableside ordering and payment. Technically the merchant can bring whatever tablet they want although OneDine usually recommends an Amazon Fire tablet due to the low costs. Once armed with tablets, servers can take orders and payments from the table. Servers can easily split items for individual guests and fractional subsets of parties which was often very cumbersome on legacy POS systems. The tablets use the merchant’s existing processing relationships and will send alerts to servers or managers based upon customer needs – think of a bad survey result sending a notification to the manager.
Relative to a lot of other pay at the table devices out there (PATT), OneDine is incredibly cheap. “Our one-time costs for using four devices would be about $1,500 ($200 for the devices, $250 for a printer, $250 configuration fee per location, and $200 for the sensors sensors/stickers). However, most of our customers are ordering anywhere from 10 to 25 devices because they are so affordable. The thought is they should have 1.5 to 2 devices per server on their busiest shift – they use the tablets to take orders and then drop them at the table when it’s time for payment. Then they pick up another tablet to take care of other tables while guest pays without server hovering over them during tipping and survey. Our monthly fees will range from $250 to $350 per store based on volumes. This includes all third party fees for gateway access, connectivity, etc.”
Here’s a cost chart for PATT options on Aloha with four devices as a cost reference – it’s a huge difference in OneDine’s advantage: even the cheapest option on conventional Aloha is nearly 4x the cost of OneDine.
As data nerds the most interesting part of OneDine is their ability to associate items with a specific person at a table, not the entire table itself. For example, today when you look at the items ordered at a table you cannot associate them with an individual guest. OpenTable has gotten better at this but OneDine can take it to another level. In tokenizing credit cards or monitoring loyalty OneDine would know the specific preferences of an individual and that could be worth big bucks to suppliers (suppliers have like 20x the marketing budget that retailers do so let’s not skirt the issue).
Honest question: why buy POS terminals if 99% of your orders are coming from a patron’s own phone or a tablet used by your server? This doesn’t even begin to touch on the gratuitous nature of a POS in a ghost kitchen either. Legacy POS companies should pick up the phone to call OneDine: you’re not even at the party and OneDine might be the only way to score an invite.
Still, as we’ve been saying forever, POS is becoming about the data, not about the hardware, and even less about the software. POS is becoming an ordering node and nothing more. Sure, you can still call POS the hub, but it’s really just a node. POS provider Qu has been very smart at recognizing this evolution, as has Paul Rubin, one of the masterminds behind Brink POS.
In this world of commoditization POS companies need to seriously rethink their value, and it has less than nothing to do with payments processing.
We’re BIG believers of using tablets to Order and Pay at Table and using customer devices so they can order and pay on their own phones. But in our minds this should not be an add-on to a POS, but the POS should do it natively.
1) Is it really fair to claim one dine is 4X cheaper? Recurring fees say no.
At $250-$350/month, one dine is asking $3K – 4.2K/yr,
Eyeballing your chart, the other players come in at $2.5, $3K, $4.2k (twice). Only one vendor is more expensive than Onedine on a recurring basis. So what if the hardware package is a cheaper if you’re paying thousands more per year, every year?
And to be clear, that’s in addition to the POS fees. Ouch.
2) Also, I would say as wonderful as the omnivore-style POS integration sounds…in-store pay at table is a different beast than taking the occasional online order, because in person, the high latency and low reliability from restaurant networks will cause
In-store transactions through the cloud mean the tablet has to send each request UP to the cloud, which then sends it back DOWN for the the POS in-store, then POS sends the response back UP to the cloud, which in turn sends it back DOWN again to the tablet. up-down, up-down for each request. That’s not pleasant on asymmetric-bandwidth DSL, and a lot of chances for orders to hang.
In real life, the networks hiccup and servers and guests will be standing there, waiting for an up or a down to finish, and they’ll wishing for a solution that is native.
Again, I love the features but have doubts that “up-down, up-down” add-ons are the right architecture to deliver good customer or server experiences. Native in the POS can be much, much better.
Great comments!