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We’re now make managing complex inventories a snap. Merchants can break down their inventory into the raw goods used to create each product.
DetailsThe iPad is an excellent business tool, and we’ve seen it being used in a number of business scenarios so far — as a tool to go green, to collaborate or to increase productivity. Clearly, the iPad is helping businesses meet goals in style.
We did some poking around to see how companies are using the iPad as of late, and we observed a few recurring themes. The iPad obviously has a place in the retail environment, but we also heard from a surprising number of doctors using it to decrease operation costs.
Check out what we learned below, and let us know how you’ve seen the iPad being used in the business world in the comments.
Zinneken’s employee Joel Lashmore chats with a customer.
Mobile payment systems are redefining commerce, and so far, smartphone-related payment systems — such as Square, Intuit GoPayment, and PAYware Mobile, have been making the most ruckus. But the iPad is a contender in this space, too.
iPad-based point-of-sale (POS) systems are popping up everywhere we go. Cantabrigian waffle shop Zinneken’s, for example, uses the free iPad app ShopKeep as its POS system of choice.
Zinneken’s co-founder Nhon Ma says that the startup cost of using an iPad POS system has been low, compared with other options. “We’ve spent around $1,300 in equipment as a start-up cost — iPad 2, cash register, acrylic display, printer. Other non-iPad POS suppliers would charge you from $5,000 to $6,000 upfront,” he says. Maintenance on the system is also ideal, says Ma, as ShopKeep’s software upgrades are free, compared with traditional supplier maintenance fees of $50 to $100 per month.
Training is a breeze, too, says Ma. “In the restaurant or retail industry, employee turnover is known to be high in general. With our POS system, every new hire has been operational with the POS after just 10 minutes of explanations.” That’s no time at all, considering some of Ma’s employees have commented that previous non-iPad POS training lasted around a week.
Zinneken’s keeps its iPad in an iSkidz flippable dock so that the cashier can easily flip the iPad over for customers to sign their receipts.
Ma says there are some downsides, though. “Peripherals — such as credit card readers and [product] scanners — must be iPad-compatible. As it is fairly a new market, few options are available. And to my knowledge, only one brand of printers is compatible with ShopKeep POS — that’s Star Micronic printers … expensive but highly reliable.”
Worst of all, though, is the fact that credit card processing is impossible if the Internet is down, Ma says. He recommends using a router with a 4G USB key as a backup.
For businesses in the market, another iPad POS system worth checking out is Revel Systems.
HubWorks brings the iPad to the table.
While some retailers and restaurants are installing iPads up front to manage sales, others are installing them right at the table.
HubWorks Interactive, an iPad solutions provider for the hospitality industry, is one company making in-store iPad ordering a reality.
With more than 800 stores, Buffalo Wild Wings is one of the largest to give at-table iPads a go.
Customers can not only order and pay on the tablets, but also update their social channels, including Twitter and Facebook. The hope, of course, is that customers will talk up the restaurant to their social graphs.
HubWorks’ new technology — offering social media entertainment at the table — is proving to increase sales by 10%, reduce customer wait times by 30% and increase repeat customer visits by 85%.
Another budding restaurant chain on the block is benefiting from in-store iPads, as well. Let’s Yo, a frozen yogurt franchise launched in October 2011 in Marlboro, New Jersey, decided to install iPads at customer tables for entertainment purposes and has had great results. The iPads are hooked up to closed-circuit TVs that allow consumers to interact with one another and post on the Let’s Yo Facebook Page. The company recently ran a Facebook contest, powered greatly by the in-store iPads, which led to a 41% increase in Facebook Likes. Not too shabby.
While we may not like to think of hospitals as businesses, they have operation costs like the rest of us. Both independent physicians and large medical groups have to figure out how to slash operational expenses.
For years now, we’ve been hearing about electronic medical records, yet I haven’t seen a single iPad, mobile device or laptop in use in any of the waiting rooms I’ve frequented. So, what’s the hold-up? Well, once again, it’s the medical world we’re talking about here — slow to adopt, highly bureaucratic and weighted down with regulations. But it can’t stay that way forever.
We’ve seen a number of iPad apps on the market created to help doctors cut costs and manage data efficiently. One player in the market is DrChrono — the startup has created a cloud- and web-based electronic health record, accessible via iPad and iPhone, as well as via any Internet browser.
Along with its electronic health record platform, DrChrono also implements scheduling features, patient reminders and a billing system, making data collection and maintenance easy for doctors and their staff. Going digital benefits the patient, too — say goodbye to that chunk of papers you used to fill out in the waiting room. DrChrono enables users to create profiles that can be easily updated with future visits.
While researching the most recent innovative uses of the iPad, we came across a number of options — inventory trackers, in-flight entertainment, taxi screens, sales tools and more. These three topics stood out as the most interesting and promising, but it’s clear that the tablet is aiming to revolutionize many more industries.
Video Transcript
00:00 Jason Richelson: My name is Jason Richelson. I am co-founder and CEO of ShopKeep.com, which is a point of sale system in the cloud, which helps retailers make smarter business decisions. I’m a co-founder here in Brooklyn of a grocery store and a wine store that I opened with my partner, Amy Bennett about seven, eight years ago in Fort Greene and we had a point of sale system from a competitor, a large software company, and eventually then, we started having technology problems. So the database we were using got full. And we had to upgrade it, but it stopped working in the middle of the day. It dawned on me that after fixing these things and just trouble… Not even troubleshooting, fire fighting all these problems. It was like you know what? We’ve gotta switch to a cloud point of sale. So I did a little searching in 2008 for a cloud point of sale, and I didn’t find any. I asked Amy in like, I think we should start this company. She’s like, “Let’s do it.”, and we did. In August, we finally got the app store around August 5th, with what we currently have is the ShopKeep register.
01:03 Jason Richelson: As we’ve grown as a company with more employees, me just understanding what retailers need, and being able to talk to them has been a big help for this company. And being able to communicate that down to the engineers who don’t necessarily know what a retailer does on a daily basis. So when the engineers came up with a way to do inventory, I was like, “Guys, when you do inventory, you start on the left and you count all the way to the right”. So you have this sphere here and you need to find it. And you can’t find it on a piece of paper and you can’t… You have to look it up. You have to be able to be able to quickly find it by search, type in the amount, go to the next one, type in the amount, and work left to right. Then you’re going to find one bottle over here that was with this one, and you need to be able to quickly and easily add that to the count. I’ve counted inventory in our grocery store and our wine store. That kind of experience really comes in… In ShopKeep, in everything we do. Like the simplest, easiest and quickest way to do it, and also with the best design. It needs to be pleasing to the eye and work and work fast. So that was super important to us including how we manage the transactions, manage the printing, we just make sure everything runs really, really fast so that you can ring up sales super fast.
02:14 Jason Richelson: So when I look at other apps in the app store that compete with us, I’m just like, these guys have never stood behind a register. They just don’t get it. They don’t understand what retailers wanna see, what numbers they wanna see, where they wanna see them, how they wanna see them? And I do. So when a retailer actually trial ShopKeep, their like, “Oh I get this, this is what I’m looking for.”
While much of the payments industry’s attention is on mobile payments, mobile technology is also starting to transform the traditional retail checkout. This week, a tablet-based point-of-sale startup called ShopKeep POS launched software to keep track of employee hours and to let restaurants modify orders on the fly.
Also this week, POS terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. announced an offering that integrates its GlobalBay in-store mobile technology with Fujitsu America Inc.’s GlobalStore software. The integration will run on a variety of mobile devices and allow store personnel to check out customers anywhere in the shop. It will support alternative payments as well as digital wallets, according to the announcement.
New York City-based ShopKeep, which started in 2008 and introduced its application for the Apple Inc. iPad only 15 months ago, now has 3,000 merchant locations using its service around the country, says Sandhya Rao, vice president of marketing and sales. Most of these outlets are specialty stores, coffee shops, and dining establishments. Competitors include another startup, Revel Systems Inc., San Francisco, and NCR Corp., which markets a tablet-based POS product under the Silver name that works on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
With competition heating up, providers are rushing to add features. ShopKeep’s new so-called modifier feature lets restaurant personnel change standard menu items to suit customer orders. A customer might ask that mustard be added to a hot dog, for example, or mayonnaise not be put on a hamburger. The app keeps track of the changes for pricing purposes and sends the customized order to the kitchen to be printed out. Meanwhile, the company’s new time-clock feature lets managers enter and track employee hours on the iPad.
ShopKeep works with about 140 independent sales organizations to help generate lead for its cloud-based checkout system, says Jamil Hossain, director of partner channels. The system can process cards but also features an integration with PayPal Inc. Similar integrations with two other alternative-payment processors, Dwolla Inc. and LevelUp, are in the works.
Merchants pay $49 per month per iPad, which includes the app, unlimited access to customer service, and a transaction gateway. Merchants continue to process transactions through their existing acquirer. “We are acquirer agnostic,” says Rao. She adds that, while ShopKeep is working out a residual plan for ISOs, most are interested in working with the company to be able to offer new technology to their merchants. “We’re getting good traction even without [a financial] incentive,” says Rao.
She adds that there will probably be integrations in the near future beyond PayPal, LevelUp, and Dwolla. “We get quite a few calls from payment providers who want to be in our system, so that’s going to be a trend,” she says.
As for boarding more merchants, ShopKeep expects features like the order-modification capability, known as “modifiers,” to be especially attractive . “About half our merchants are in the coffee/quick-serve/bakery category,” Rao notes. “Because of modifiers, we expect we’ll bring in a lot more. There’s not a lot of cloud-based apps that do this real well.”
Observers say startups like ShopKeep are exploiting a durable trend in POS technology. “They’re another outfit that’s emerged to say we have a very different hardware environment than we did five or 10 years ago,” says one independent expert who asked not to be identified. “They saw an opportunity.”
ShopKeep Merchant Life Disc Sports, in Rockwall, Texas will help you understand the game and create your own custom 9 or 18 hole disc golf course.
DetailsShopKeep is trying to use Apple’s iPad tablet computer and the Web to break into the mundane but lucrative market for cash register software.
The New York-based startup has raised $2.2 million in financing led by Tribeca Venture Partners and TTV Capital, as two-year-old ShopKeep hopes to expand amid competition from giants like Microsoft and promising startups like Square, which have much bigger sales and engineering forces.
The funding values the small company at slightly more than $10 million, said a person familiar with the matter.
ShopKeep was co-founded in January 2010 by Jason Richelson, co-owner of the Greene Grape, a wine and gourmet food retailer in the New York area. The software runs on a PC and connects with a cash drawer, credit card swiper and printer, allowing a merchant take and record transactions, keep inventory, and print receipts. It even works when an Internet connection is down, said Mr. Richelson, storing transactions on the local computer. In August of 2010, ShopKeep released a version of its software that runs on the iPad.
The company has 15 employees and about 1,000 customers. It aims to reach 5,000 customers by yearend and plans to hire a few more employees in sales and customer support. The software isn’t sophisticated enough to run a bar or restaurant, so ShopKeep plans to focus on small retailers and quick-serve food establishments.
Mr. Richelson got the idea for the business when he became frustrated with the Greene Grape’s point of sale software, supplied by Microsoft. “The servers kept breaking down,” he recalled. A Microsoft representative didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In 2008, he looked for an alternative but he said he couldn’t find one. So using about $800,000 from the Greene Grape, the tech-savvy co-owner decided to build his own system from scratch that merchants could use over the Web.
In January of 2010, he founded ShopKeep with Greene Grape co-owner Amy Bennett. In May of that year, they launched a version of ShopKeep that worked with PCs.
“We squeezed the Greene Grape,” said Mr. Richelson.
He aims to undercut existing leaders in the market. ShopKeep costs $50 a month, including customer support. Existing point of sale systems can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $12,000, said Mr. Richelson.
The U.S. cash register and point-of-sale software market will reach about $8.4 billion in sales in 2011, estimates research firm IBISWorld.
“I think this is a billion dollar opportunity,” said Brian Hirsch, managing partner of Tribeca Venture Partners, who is also joining the ShopKeep board. “We think the whole point of sale market will turn over due to the lower cost and greater flexibility.”
Janet Johnson, cofounder of the Savory Spice Shop, a chain of 17 spice stores, said her company replaced its existing point-of-sale system from Radiant Systems Inc. with ShopKeep software in 10 of the company’s 17 franchises. In the next three months, she said she plans to convert the rest of the franchises to the new system.
“It means less down time and fewer crashes,” she said. “We’ve been able to save the franchises money.” A spokeswoman from Radiant didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Johnson said ShopKeep’s software is saving “at least $5,000 to $7,000 per store.”
Ike Escava, co-owner of The Bean, which has two coffee stores in New York City, said he replaced his PC-based touchscreen register using PixelPoint software with ShopKeep software and an iPad, primarily because it lets him easily access his sales data remotely over the Web.
“It wasn’t easy to get the info with the old one,” he said.
PixelPoint owner Par Technology Corp. A spokesman from Par Technology said “utilizing a consumer grade solution does not offer the same reliability” as its offerings and that while the acquisition cost may be lower, a tablet will carry a higher total cost “based on more frequent replacements and down time by the restaurant.”
Mr. Escava said the ShopKeep system is more stable, cheaper and easier to teach his counter clerks. Mr. Escava’s previous setup cost $5,000 while the two ShopKeep registers cost him $100 a month.
“We always get answers from support,” he added. “I called one after midnight and I heard right back.”
NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — ShopKeep.com Inc., the leading cloud based iPad POS system, today announced that it closed a Series A financing, at the National Retail Federation BIG Show. Led by New York City’s Tribeca Venture Partners and Atlanta’s TTV Capital with New York City’s Contour Venture Partners also contributing, the funding will build on ShopKeep’s aggressive 2011 expansion…
DetailsWe welcome to the ShopKeep family a new secure iPad Stand for POS… the Rhino Elite iPad Enclosure.
DetailsWow! We did not expect such a response to our iPad point of sale beta test announcement! We have been communicating with thousands of people around the world though email, chat and our 800 number. Lots of great people in need of a simple affordable solution. I have compiled a list of frequently asked questions. …
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