We gave the OTAs they keys to the kingdom. We don’t own the customer anymore and they’ve been trained to go elsewhere first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even though we have had roughly 20 years to learn from the mistakes of the hotel industry, the brick and mortar industries of restaurant and retail may be too quickly ignoring this advice.<\/p>\n
If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a growing trend in on-demand convenience. One could fairly argue that this trend only exists at the scale and growth rates it does because it’s been subsidized by investors. Plainly speaking, investors are making the cost of Uber food delivery $5 when it would easily be $15 in a free market.<\/p>\n
That might explain some of the short term growth but it’s foolish to disagree with the idea that people want things cheap and convenient. That the internet exists only underscores this truism.<\/p>\n
The problem with these market trends is that a third party is the one representing restaurant and retail brands to consumers. Groupon. Opentable. Grubhub. Uber. Postmates. DoorDash. Yelp. Etc, etc.<\/p>\n
As far as we’re aware, these companies are not openly sharing data with their partners. That means every time a consumer uses these platforms to engage in local commerce, the local business has no idea who the customer is. Not only does this deprive the merchant of amazingly useful data to power marketing, it also plants a third party brand in the mind of the consumer.<\/p>\n
Why go directly to a restaurant’s site when I can search on XYZ and find many restaurants that fit what I need?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We cannot fault the customer logic and natural gravity towards aggregation. If any of you ever use a search engine you do so because it aggregates many choices into one common interface and saves time. No further explanation needed.<\/p>\n
But what does this mean for merchants?<\/p>\n
Truthfully, we aren’t sure. We think merchants should band together and use their collective mass to demand data sharing from these third party providers. Since that has about the same chance of happening as we do of getting struck by lightning while surfing on a shark, POS companies must fill this void.<\/p>\n
POS companies should look at building analogous tools with consumer-facing portals through partnerships. The POS companies should be able to deliver solutions that are better integrated technologically and cheaper for the end merchant (since POS companies are already leveraging an existing relationship). There’s a large opportunity here so long as merchants keep getting taken advantage of.<\/p>\n
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