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 | 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...
by Ronny | Apr 3, 2013 | features
GoPago LIVE is NOT an iPad POS. GoPago’s POS software is run on the Android operating system, not iOS, which differentiates us from virtually every other tablet-based POS in the market. We made this decision very deliberately; the Android platform enables GoPago to deliver the most secure multi-tasking solution possible. Since the point of sale is the central nervous system of a business, it needs to provide the most reliable merchant experience possible. A point-of-sale, like a central nervous system, benefits from continuous monitoring of health to guarantee a strong solution. An Android tablet enables system level access, allowing GoPago to remotely monitor uptime, automatically upgrade software, proactively troubleshoot and limit POS-only functionality. This hands-on approach is, for now, exclusive to GoPago LIVE and only possible on an Android point-of-sales system. iPad POS systems cannot directly and in real time, monitor the health of the POS or serve merchants to the same extent as GoPago LIVE, since the POS software is one of many apps on the iPad tablet. Our Top 7 Reasons to Choose an Android POS System 1. Proactive and Remote Monitoring: GoPago monitors all of its POS units constantly, ensuring continuous merchant uptime and proactive customer support. Through our Control Center, we monitor everything from POS tablet battery life, components plugged-in, CPU and memory. Our world-class customer support team calls merchants if the tablet’s battery is low, if they have a pending mobile order, or if the printer has a bad connection. Notifying our customers before they are aware of a problem sets GoPago LIVE apart: no one else has the ability to see this information...
