by Ronny | Jun 21, 2013 | features, news
The buzzword “Cloud” is the center of enormous press, the basis for numerous Silicon Valley startups and is surfacing in a variety of emerging technologies, however, what impact will it have for the payments industry? In terms of commerce, the Mobile POS Market Survey by IHL reports that by 2015, traditional POS sales will drop by more than 13% due to the rise in mobile POS systems powered by the cloud. An additional IHL report states by 2015, 2.7 million tablets will be shipped per year to retail and hospitality venues. This shift will account for a growth rate of approximately 450 percent in just three years. While traditional POS systems cost thousands of dollars and can become instantly obsolete; could the cloud’s strong processing power and instant data storage/retrieval insure that cloud based merchant POS systems are future-proofed businesses? Think of the impact of Netflix and Spotify on your CD and DVD collections. No longer do you have to have physical goods for music and the movies. Vastly larger content libraries are now accessible in your home or as you travel on tablets and smartphones; they no longer need to be purchased and locally stored. Now think about that concept with data generated by transactions… Full cloud computing, with large and distributed cloud based computing systems, can offer more power, uptime and access to unlimited amounts of data with faster responses and virtual access from anywhere. Wow… The advantages of cloud computing are making more affordable devices (compared to a PC) like tablets and smartphones very powerful as they can access unlimited data, really fast, without the need...
by Ronny | Jun 14, 2013 | features
In the last few days both QSR Web and Fast Casual have posted articles about customers driving the need for restaurants to adopt mobile technologies. The truth of the matter is that your customers are on their smartphones. In order to compete, you need to be where your customers are and that means you need to be on their phones. Having a website that can be browsed on mobile is not enough. GoPago LIVE offers a one stop mobile solution. First, you get the mobile storefront for every location broadcasted through the GoPago app. Our killer app is a free download that allows your customers to browse, order and pay for your goods and services from their smartphones. Secondly, GoPago acts as a communication platform between the merchant and the customer. The customer can message the POS from their phone (like a text) asking for things like no tomatoes on their sandwich or substituting an item. The merchant has the ability to instantly respond. These quick message interactions are a game changer. No longer will the customer have to call, be placed on hold and wait to ask their simple question and get a quick reply back. An email, a tweet or a Facebook message isn’t as convenient as responding via a tablet POS: the hub of your business. Furthermore, the merchants can access their community, those who have previously ordered and those who have viewed their mobile storefront, and push messages like “You brighten up our day! Come by and visit us soon.” The level of communication can be customized and enhanced with the ability to push dollar...
by Ronny | Jun 11, 2013 | features, San Francisco
Last month, Mobile Payments Today declared that “The Wallet is Doomed!” and with a survey conducted by PayPal, 86 percent of Americans would be willing to get rid of their wallets for a digital solution. Since we launched our killer app with mobile ordering and mobile payments, we have heard (via tweets, calls and emails) from our customers about the instant benefits: they explained that even if they leave their wallet at home they were still able to eat lunch because they’re protected by GoPago on their smartphones. We decided to look deeper at the benefits of going walletless with a guest blog post by Krysta Gahagen, who is a San Francisco community manager and a mobile app enthusiast: As I walk out of my apartment, I find myself reviewing this list: keys, phone, wallet – my three essentials. These days, however, having my wallet with me is becoming less of a priority. In fact, sometimes it’s more convenient to go walletless. On a sunny Saturday morning this spring, I found myself walletless after going for a run with a friend who lives on the other side of town. Not wanting to carry my wallet for an entire run, I decided to leave it behind. I realized how hungry I was, as I was walking home, but I only had my phone, headphones, and keys with me. This was an incredibly discouraging realization for about half a block, but then I passed by a store that had a GoPago sticker in the window. At that moment, I remembered that I didn’t need to have cash or a card on...
by Ronny | May 31, 2013 | event, news
While attending the NRA (National Restaurant Association) Show in Chicago last week it became crystal clear what restaurants want: integration in the technology they adopt. Our booth was centrally located in the technology pavillion of the show where bulky legacy point of sale systems were replaced with sleek sophisticated tablet-based POS solutions. These cutting edge cloud-based systems and mobile applications were neighbors during the four day show and it got attendees to wonder: can they have the best of all worlds in one system for their restaurant? Thankfully, for restaurateurs and merchants, the future for integration is looking bright. GoPago is deliberately moving to an open platform. At the prestigious Google i/o Conference earlier this month, it was announced that we have integrated with Google Wallet. The Google Wallet Instant Buy API is available on the GoPago app on Android devices, so now GoPago LIVE can accept Google Wallet payments alongside mobile orders and payments. Through our own SDK (software development kit) we will be providing API libraries and developer tools to build, test and debug apps for GoPago LIVE. Through opening our platform, we get to extend the value for our merchants with the best industry apps developed by domain experts. With this openness, a sit down restaurant may want to use their favorite reservation app and have it integrated on their smart POS system, GoPago LIVE. We are very aware of the highly competitive nature in the industries that we occupy, but we do believe that the winners will be those who work together and don’t position themselves as an all or nothing solution. During the conference,...
by Ronny | May 15, 2013 | event, features, news
We will unveil our mPOS solution as the latest addition to our commerce in the cloud product suite at the National Restaurant Association (NRA) show. The mPOS has all the power of GoPago LIVE’s tablet POS on a smartphone that enables line busting by pushing point of sale to the edge of brick and mortar restaurants. “Traditional costs for mPOS solutions are over a thousand dollars and with technology changing so fast, hardware is obsolete in a year; hefty monthly maintenance costs have those solutions a non-starter,” said GoPago Founder and CEO Leo Rocco. “For a little over $1 a day (all in), a QSR can enable their employees with a smartphone to streamline the order taking and payment process. QSRs no longer have to run to the kitchen to communicate what they just wrote down on paper or be limited to a central POS station to accept payments. GoPago LIVE mPOS allows restaurants to turn tables over faster and provide responsive customer service.” Our new mPOS will debut on the Nexus 4 with a card reader, rugged case and with our POS software already loaded for $49 a month. The mPOS offers flexible connectivity for merchants via WiFi with the option to upgrade to a 4G data plan. “Green” flexibility is offered when customers can choose to have their receipts texted or emailed and for merchants who desire, printed wirelessly via Bluetooth. QSRs can especially benefit from this solution because the mPOS connects to a merchant’s personal commerce cloud with robust reporting across terminals and locations accessible on any device at any time. This POS on a smartphone...
