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 | Apr 26, 2013 | features, news
Mobile payments are estimated to hit one trillion dollars by 2015. Fortunately, we equip our merchants with the technology to accept this influx of capital. Each and every one of our GoPago LIVE point of sale systems comes integrated with the mobile storefront allowing merchants to receive both mobile orders and mobile payments from their customers’ smartphones. The GoPago app, which has been downloaded by more than 100,000 people in San Francisco, allows customers to browse, order and pay from a merchant on their phone before they arrive at the location. This ability to save time and skip the line streamlines the whole transaction process for both merchants and for consumers. Lou’s Cafe has been using the mobile storefront to broadcast their business to their customers’ iPhones and Androids for nearly a year. Through the implementation of the GoPago mobile app, Lou’s Cafe reports an average of 15 mobile orders per day. Employees say that GoPago saves them at least an hour a day because they get to spend less time answering the phones and managing the lunch rush lines. Furthermore, the customers experience increased satisfaction and visit more often as a result of the efficiency. Nearly half of their GoPago users are repeat customers who “feel like VIP when they skip the line and are recognized by name” according to T.J., manager of Lou’s Cafe. Through the tablet Lou’s Cafe can message their customers and notify them what time their order will be ready, push rewards and discounts and send them special personalized messages. The operational improvement is so significant that T.J. has said, “If we could, we’d...
by Ronny | Apr 22, 2013 | features, news
Everyone at the San Francisco GoPago headquarters is familiar with Piper’s Cafe and the owner, Chip Adkins. He was one of the first to sign up for GoPago LIVE and has provided our customer support, marketing and engineering teams with great feedback, praise and suggestions. His contributions have been invaluable. As a startup looking to provide the best POS system for all brick and mortar merchants, there’s nothing more important to us than engaged customers who partner with us to improve our product and service. We welcome and encourage that level of feedback from all our GoPago Live users: enterprise corporate cafeterias, food trucks and small mom and pop shops. Here is an in-depth look as to why Piper’s Cafe in Kentucky chose GoPago LIVE as their solution to transact and interact with their customers. Piper’s Cafe in Covington, Kentucky, took five years of planning and dreaming before Chip Adkins and Charles Killian were able to make it a reality. They wanted the whole cafe and the whole customer experience to be different, new and totally in line with the future. From their homemade ketchup to their locally sourced ingredients everything had to be well thought out and have their seal of approval. The point of sale system was a vital component in their plan. A simple cash register would never cut it. Dumb, old fashioned technology would hold back the promise of their vision. Originally leaning towards Square, because of fixed rates and sleekness of a tablet POS; they wanted more in a POS solution. They wanted the ability to broadcast their business to their customers smartphones and...
