Some of those consumer behavior changes will be permanent without a doubt, but the magnitude<\/em> of that change is certainly up for debate. Perhaps more worthwhile is questioning the need to have all these disparate solutions. For example, maybe paying $100\/mo for a QR ordering tool was great when that was the only<\/em> type of payment acceptable during peak COVID. But now that people are resuming their pre-pandemic behaviors, can merchants really afford $100\/mo for a solution that represents a much smaller customer use case?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Needless to say that the retailer tech ecosystem is more complicated – and costly – than it’s probably ever been, and there’s been an undercurrent of fear catalyzing spend on items that we’d argue become much less worthwhile as 2021 marches forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following graphic is our best effort to summarize the tech stack as we see things today. We’re clearly going to miss a few pieces, so for that we apologize upfront. For simplicity we’ve divided the tech stacks into two categories: operations, and marketing. We tried to group solutions by related categories as well. It should surprise none of our more ardent readers that we’ve put POS at the center of both ecosystems as it truly remains the most important technology decision an operator can make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s assume each one of these solutions asks for $100\/mo. Being careful not to double count the POS, that’s 28 solutions, or $2,800 per month. We’d probably want to add another 14 solutions (half of the 28 solutions we thought of) just to cover for things we’ve undoubtedly missed. That’s $4,200 per month per store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That ain’t cheap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clearly this is wholly unsustainable. There’s probably no bigger advocate for best of breed than those of us at ReformingRetail, but merchants are being nickel and dimed to death, and the sprawling universe of products is unsustainable. The pendulum has swung too far in one direction as far as we’re concerned, and we didn’t even list payments processing which gapes merchants for zero value in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The stack will have to collapse. Operationally:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a giant mess going on with third party ordering and delivery, no doubt catalyzed by the disaster that is legacy POS integration. Like why the hell in 2021 are online orders still spitting tickets to kitchen printers instead of routing natively into the POS? Why is there an alphabet soup of middleware to handle POS integrations? <\/p>\n\n\n\n For fuck’s sake POS companies, learn how to build an API.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/reformingretail.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Screen-Shot-2021-04-10-at-1.50.03-PM.png?resize=770%2C356&ssl=1\")
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