Merchants can turn their smartphones into registers using the Square credit card reader and having customers sign with their finger. (Square)

Calgary food truck owner Cosmo Spina used to watch potential customers walk away hungry because he couldn’t accept their credit cards and they didn’t have any cash.

“I found that as I got busier and got to more places and more people, a lot of people just don’t carry cash anymore, not even $10,” Spina said in an interview outside the Husky building.

Now, after adopting e-payment technology from one of the many players jockeying for position in this new market, both Spina and the customers who want to use credit cards at his Italian pasta truck are much happier.

Cosmo Spina says about 20 per cent of the customers at his Calgary food truck pay with a credit card, which he can put through a Square reader. (Courtesy Cosmo Spina)

Late last year, Spina signed up for Square, the tiny credit card reader that attaches to a smartphone and was the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and his vision of making commerce “easy for everyone.”

Square joins other companies like Interac and Rogers, all trying to eke out a position in the highly competitive — but still nascent — mobile payment marketplace.

Interac recently announced the first NFC (near-field communication) debit transaction via a smartphone in Canada, and hopes to roll out the service for consumers later this year.

Rogers says it is expanding its “suretap” service for mobile payment to more smartphones.

“To continue driving adoption and growth of mobile payments in Canada, it is essential that a strong ecosystem is established to include multiple devices, operating systems and payment networks,” Jeppe Dorff, Rogers’ vice-president of transaction services, said in a recent release.

Cosmo Spina runs a credit card through a Square reader attached to his iPhone. (Courtesy Cosmo Spina)

For a small merchant such as Spina, however, just gaining access to the mobile pay world was a huge step.

Spina estimates that one in every five of his customers looking for his gnocchi bolognese or bacon carbonara pays by a credit card run through his iPhone — a marked change from the days when perhaps one in 10 potential customers left empty-handed because he wasn’t accepting plastic.

Spina is the kind of merchant Dorsey and his Square co-founder Jim McKelvey were hoping would sign up after the card reader arrived in Canada — its first stop outside the U.S. — five months ago.

Square isn’t releasing specific data on the uptake in Canada, but Dorsey says “it’s been amazing to watch” how adoption of the reader and its accompanying Square Register app have taken off.

“We had pretty high expectations for growth in the market but they’ve exceeded those expectations.”

Square says it is processing more than $12 billion in payments annually in Canada and the U.S., and that the Canadian uptake is double what it had predicted. The average Canadian transaction size is larger ($120) than in the U.S. ($70), where Square launched in October 2010.

“In the U.S., we saw a very different set of initial merchants. We saw a lot of cafés and coffee stores and much lower transaction size,” says Dorsey.

In Canada, more independent services such as language schools or accountants have adopted Square, which takes a flat fee of 2.75 per cent per transaction.

Square’s adoption also ran into an unexpected factor, but one that plays into so much of Canadian life: the weather.

“It tends to be colder up there,” Dorsey said in an interview from California.

“In the United States, we saw a lot of food trucks and food carts signing up immediately, but when we launched in Canada, we launched in a cold time so we didn’t see a lot of that type of merchant. But we expect that to change as we go into spring and summer, and go into all the festivals that places like Montreal have for instance.”

As much as Square has opened up retail potential for merchants such as Spina, it has limitations — no debit capability, no chip-and-pin technology, no capability on BlackBerry smartphones — which reflect how tricky and fragmented the Canadian mobile payment system is.

Dorsey acknowledges the limitations, but says Square had to start somewhere and isn’t standing pat.

Keep evolving

“The simplest way to start is to start with magnetic strips and the card the majority of the world has, so that’s where we started,” he said.

Various partnerships involving wireless providers, banks and others are emerging to allow mobile payments in Canada. (Canadian Press)

“We think we’ve done a great thing in making commerce easy for people, and easy to start and easy to run and easy to grow your business, but we think we can do a lot more and we continue to evolve and build.”

Interac also wants to evolve and sees its recent announcement as an important step, says Avinash Chidambaram, the company’s director of mobile programs.

A partnership involving McDonald’s Restaurants, RBC Royal Bank, Moneris Solutions and BlackBerry will give some customers the chance to buy smaller-value items such as Big Macs and McMuffins by debit with the wave of a smartphone at an Interac Flash terminal.

“Generally, younger people like to use debit,” says Chidambaram, who notes that 56 per cent of all point-of-sale transactions through Interac’s network are debit.

Unlike Square, Interac’s technology is built around chip-and-pin, something Chidambaram says has been responsible for a reduction in card fraud.

“We’ve been very careful in developing this technology and ensuring we’re leveraging a lot of the security features and capabilities that we’ve already put into our network and our products.”

Still, for any mobile payment system to take off, it has to resonate with someone who wants to use a smartphone for a transaction.

And for that to happen, says Doug Macdonald, a senior manager at consulting firm Deloitte in Toronto, it has to be as easy as using a plastic card, and give a person more benefits.

Make it easy to use

If the new system is “too hard to unlock it,” says Macdonald, “if it doesn’t work, if the battery is dead, then it’s not going to replace your physical wallet.”

For all the action taking place in the mobile payment market, however, widespread adoption and usage of phones for payment is still sometime down the road.

“We’re still very much in the early days,” says Macdonald. “The first generation of NFC wallets that’s coming out right now are very much just replicating what a physical card does, and then linking it into the mobile banking experience of that particular bank.

“The path to one wallet, one application on your phone that holds all of your receipts and keeps track of your spending and helps you make payment from whatever card you want, is still going to be a couple of iterations away.”

Macdonald says there is pent-up demand in Canada for a service such as Square and similar products, such as Moneris’s PAYD.

“I think this trend towards using consumer devices to accept payments has the potential to really shake up both the payments industry and the way that consumers pay.”

What about the cash register?

The fact that Square doesn’t process chip cards is something it will have to solve in the Canadian market, Macdonald says.

In Europe, similar card readers that plug into smartphones have been replaced by a small pin reader that connects to a phone via Bluetooth.

“You’ll start to see more of that,” says Macdonald, adding that there will be more changes in the way consumers pay inside stores, as well, with cash registers potentially fading away.

“You’re increasingly going to be seeing, for instance, sales people carrying tablets and phones with them and making the purchase while they help you shop.”

Still, if you want to pay with cash, that is still going to be an option for the foreseeable future.

“You can still send a telegram if you really want to, too,” says Macdonald.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/04/05/f-mobile-payments-smartphones.html

The food truck revolution is in full swing, with chefs on the roll, serving up everything from your basic panini to an artisanal pizza from a 20-foot shipping container equipped with a roaring wood fire.

Based on one estimate, there are three million food trucks and more than five million food carts in the U.S. A reality-TV show called “The Great Food Truck Race” depicts the drama in setting up shop, and the challenges of making a profit.

So it’s no wonder there’s now an iPad-based solution made specifically for the four-wheeled purveyors.

Revel Systems, a two-year-old San Francisco start-up, has created a point-of-sale system for food trucks and quick-service restaurants. It’s available today, to make accepting ordering and payments as simple as possible.

What’s special about this version is that it allows the trucks to accept orders and charge credit cards with little to no wiring, so kitchen crews in cramped quarters don’t accidentally stumble over or chop their lifeline to the Internet. It also enables them to continue taking orders, even when their Internet connection goes down — because that can happen when moving from one street corner to the next.

“Before, you’d have a router and cabling all around; it was one big mess,” said Revel Systems’ co-founder and CTO Chris Ciabarra. “If you want a printer and a display, where do all the cables go?”

Additionally, the software enables food truck owners to update their location, or offer specials via Twitter.

What’s different about this iPad solution from others, like Square, is that it’s focused on the enterprise customer, Ciabarra said.

As traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants like Popeye’s and In-N-Out Burger experiment with food trucks, they want a point-of-sales solutions that isn’t a one-off, but is able to support franchises, he said. ”The food truck industry is booming. All the brands are trying it out.”

Revel also allows merchants to integrate any payment solutions or rewards and gift card programs, including traditional providers like Visa, MasterCard and American Express, and also upstarts like LevelUp. The software also easily tracks what items are selling well, as well as the things that are the most profitable, so truck owners know which items on the menu to emphasize.

Revel, which was founded in September 2010, launched its first product in beta last summer, and has raised $3.7 million in capital.

The company is charging food trucks $2,000 for the package, which includes the iPad, the cash drawer, a printer, the software and the cabling. Each Internet-connected iPad also costs $30 a month. The enterprise version, which has additional features, costs $3,300, and $100 a month.

That’s a lot of tacos.

http://allthingsd.com/20120718/the-food-truck-revolution-now-armed-with-point-of-sale-ipads/

Solution delivers a powerful, convenient way for food truck business owners to respond to real-time conditions and attract new customers

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., —Revel Systems, the leader in iPad point-of-sale (POS) solutions, today announced the release of an iPad-based restaurant POS system specially designed for food trucks on the go, complete with Twitter integration. The system offers peace of mind to food truck business owners, freeing them from worries over router connections, loose cables and power reliability. Integration with Twitter, which is embedded into the main console, enables users to send Tweets out if business is slow and to alert followers of special offers and changes of location.

The food-truck solution is the latest flavor in Revel Systems’ revolutionary point-of-sale software line-up, which includes versions for quick-service restaurants (QSR), counter service restaurants and retail. The food-truck solution includes Revel Systems’ new Revel Router—a “made-for-iPad” device developed by Revel Systems in conjunction with Apple that allows customers to run their iPad POS systems without additional Internet connection hardware or wiring. Instead, Revel Router accesses an Internet connection directly via the user’s Verizon 3G- or 4G-enabled Apple iPad, eliminating the need for an Ethernet router or a MiFi 3G hotspot.

Combined with the Twitter integration, this makes the solution a powerful and easy-to-use asset for food truck business owners. Having a slow day? Just click the “Tweet” icon on the main console to push out deals and discounts to thousands of your Twitter followers and let them know exactly where you are, all in real-time and without the expense of a Groupon.com blast.

“Customers talk and Revel listens. Our customers were expressing frustration with installing other systems inside food trucks, so we set out to help them with a purpose-built solution,” said Revel Systems CEO Lisa Falzone. “Being able to Tweet within the point-of-sale system on the iPad has generated a tremendously enthusiastic response from our food truck restaurant POS solution beta testers, who until now have had to put up with bulky connectivity hardware such as routers and cabling. It’s a simple way for them to attract more customers.”

The food truck edition of the POS terminal with the Revel Router is currently available is for $1,999, plus a small monthly software as a service fee.

About Revel Systems

Revel Systems seeks to deliver quick, powerful and intuitive solutions that move the point-of-sale industry away from antiquated and overpriced legacy point-of-sale solutions and into the iPad era. Using sleek, cutting-edge technology, Revel Systems is disrupting how point-of-sale systems are developed and utilized by their end customers, and restaurant and retail establishments. Founded by Stanford graduate CEO Lisa Falzone and CTO Chris Ciabarra, Revel Systems is the leader in iPad point-of-sale technology.  For more information visit www.revelsystems.com. Join the REVELution!

ISISPOS now provides Sizzlers with the POS technology to create exciting new food trucks that bring a fresh flavor to the streets. The delicious food trucks made possible by ISISPOS technologyare providing people with what they love most: tasty and natural food.

One unit is already in the streets, testing the gut of hungry customers. Its a fun way to re-introduce people to Sizzler, says Kerry Kramp, chief executive of Sizzlers. If they think were cool enough to do great food on a food truck, they may think were cool enough to check out our restaurants.

New technology has been a game changer, allowing trucks to pick up and move to where the customers are on short notice using Twitter to post messages on followers cell phones, alert customers of their whereabouts and even ask for tips on parking spaces. Included in all this is the new POS app from ISISPOS, says Scott Forrestall CEO of ISISPOS.

ISISPOSs technology not only helped Sizzlers truck get off the ground, but they are starting a revolution in the way restaurants build relationships. They put something better on the menu for the food service industry. Its a new type of restaurant called ISISPOS and it changes the way restaurant owners, managers, front-of-the-house staff and back-of-the-house staff all interact with customers, each other, and their restaurant software.

The idea of running a Sizzler truck grew after the chain’s chief executive, Kerry Kramp, saw people wait for nearly an hour to get food from vendors parked along Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice.

The new breed of lunch truck is aggressively gourmet, tech-savvy and politically correct. The Green Truck, which sells sustainably harvested fish tacos, roams the streets of Los Angeles in vehicles fueled by vegetable oil. The Dessert Truck in New York is owned by a former Le Cirque pastry sous chef who donates proceeds from desserts such as a pavlova with red fruit to charity. In the San Francisco Bay area, the RoliRoti rotisserie truck serves free-range chicken, heritage pork and local lamb, prepared by owner Thomas Odermatt, a Swiss former organic farming student whose business card reads Rotisseur.

About ISISPOS:

ISISPOS is the perfect recipe for restaurant success. What do you get when you throw restaurant software developers, businessmen with respect for the bottom line and folks with decades of restaurant experience into the kitchen? You get a totally innovative, totally amazing product and service designed to make restaurants better, more productive, more profitable and more successful than ever. ISISPOS is a brand new iPad based restaurant POS system that works out of the box. And just like the iPad it runs on, the restaurant POS system is also incredibly easy-to-use. No learning curve. No complex staff training to worry about. Just launch the app and go. Servers love the simplicity. Owners and management love what it does for sales. For something that costs a lot less, youd be surprised to learn that ISISPOS iPad for is full of features, easy to use and totally wireless.

http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/?p=24118

Kyle Paoletta used a smartphone to read customer Rebecca Heyl’s credit card at a Bon Me Foods truck at Dewey Square Wednesday. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff)

Paying by smartphone is an emerging trend

Is your wallet the next relic of the digital age? Why pay with cash or plastic when you can use a smartphone?

That is what Ainsley Onstott did on a recent afternoon in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. She simply showed her iPhone to pay for a sandwich at Sebastians Cafe. “They scan it, and I get my receipt e-mailed to me,’’ said Onstott, 26, a special events manager at the American Heart Association.

AisleBuyer is another Boston start-up in the mobile commerce market. Its software lets customers make in-store purchases with a smartphone. Last Monday, the company announced a partnership with Big Y, the Massachusetts grocery chain, to let the store’s customers get product information and coupons on their Androids and iPhones while shopping. Some Stop & Shop customers have been able to speed up checkout by paying with smartphones using the grocery chain’s SCAN IT! app.

Square's founder Jack Dorsey

For smaller merchants, mobile commerce can make it easier to accept credit cards. When Patrick Lynch, a co-owner of Boston’s Bon Me Foods, needed a way to take plastic at his food truck, he signed up for Square, a San Francisco company that gives customers free card readers and charges merchants 2.75 percent per swipe. Square, launched by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, processes the transaction and deposits the money into the merchant’s bank account.

The list of big names in mobile commerce is growing. Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and eBay Inc. are invested. MasterCard, Visa, and Citi also have mobile payment platforms.

Google partnered with MasterCard and Citi to launch its e-wallet in September for Android phones. The app uses a short-range wireless technology called near field communication, or NFC, to let users pay with MasterCard’s PayPass system.

There’s a gee-whiz element that is attracting early adopters. But for mobile payments to gain traction, consumers will need more incentives to use smartphones instead of plastic, say analysts. “Once you get over the cool factor, it really doesn’t do much for you. They have to make mobile payments work for the consumers,’’ said Aaron McPherson, an analyst at International Data Corp., a research firm in Framingham.

LevelUp gives built-in discounts and coupons to its users. “I don’t think it’s any faster than paying with cash. I think it’s the reward system people like,’’ said Mike Follen of Area Four, a Cambridge coffee shop and restaurant that accepts LevelUp.

Seth Priebatsch, SCVNGR founder, admits there is a “geek value proposition’’ to paying with smartphones. But, he said, what should interest consumers is security.

“Thirty-five percent of fraud happens because your credit card is taken from you at restaurants,’’ he said. LevelUp, said Priebatsch, doesn’t access card numbers. Its system acts as a digital conduit between the merchant, customer, and the customer’s bank.

But for mobile commerce to take off, say analysts, consumers and merchants have to trust that it is safe.

“It took 10 years for consumers to get accustomed to buying products on their PC,’’ said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester, in an e-mail. “I don’t think it will be so long with mobile devices, but I would suspect that security will continue to be a concern for at least the next three years.’’

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/11/12/cash_credit_card_and____smartphones_accepted/

By Serena Dai | Northwestern.edu

Artie Bethishou, owner of food truck Chickpea Delights, checks his phone. More small businesses are using mobile apps to run business. Serena Dai/MEDILL

Bethishou stands in his food truck. Serena Dai/MEDILL

When Artie Bethishou’s red-and-white checkered food truck Chickpea Delights debuted early September, he and his wife could only accept cash payments for their Middle Eastern vegetarian fare. Bethishou had managed fast food before—he once owned and operated a Subway Restaurants sandwich franchise—so he knew he needed to accept credit card payments to stay competitive.

But Bethishou wanted something simple and mobile. He asked other Chicago food trucks. Everybody was using Square, a free-to-download mobile app that charges a fixed 2.75 percent fee for each transaction. He signed up.

“It was a two-fold decision,” he says. “Other vendors were utilizing [credit card swiping]. Customers were asking for it. When everyone else is doing it, we thought it was important for us to be doing it too.”

Now, nearly 25 percent of Chickpea Delights’ business comes from credit card payments, a number Bethishou expects to grow. As for Square, Square Inc. has shipped more than 750,000 of its credit card readers, a small white accessory that can be attached to a phone or tablet, a company spokeswoman says. Several thousand of those went to Chicago.

But Square is not the only technology making business easier for entrepreneurs. From credit card swiping to customer loyalty programs, apps geared toward small businesses are popping up. And more small businesses are embracing that tablet and mobile app technology to run operations—spurring further mobile innovation and, in turn, simplifying customers’ experiences.

Chicago tech consultant Jason Burton, who works with as many as 50 businesses at a time, has seen a big shift away from PCs to mobile apps in the past two years as owners update old technology.  With the increased quality of cloud-based apps, or applications that store information via the Internet rather than on a computer, businesses can access information through web browsers on a tablet or smartphone. The cloud practically eliminates the need to haul around a laptop, Burton says.

“You can accomplish 90 percent of the tasks of a desktop computer with a tablet,” he says.

Though tablets have been around for years, the release of Apple Inc.’s iPad ignited higher interest in the technology. The iPad is cool and people like to have one to appear modern and chic, says Jonathan Pasky, the president of Techweek, an annual Chicago-based tech conference and trade show.

“[People want] to show clients that they’re up on the new technology,” Pasky says.

Most businesses still have a computer to run higher-powered software that can’t be used on a tablet such as video editing or graphic design programs. But with the growth in cloud computing, the future looks mobile, Burton says.

“The time will come where we can totally eliminate computers, and small businesses, in general, won’t need desktops anymore,” Burton predicts.

Chicago innovators have been responding to the demand for mobile technology. All six of the mobile development companies in the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce have appeared in the past two years, says John DeRango, director of web and social media at the chamber. These new companies do things such as help businesses manage quick response codes—those black and white squares on ads. Others consult on mobile marketing strategies.

“We haven’t seen growth in an industry sector like this in awhile,” DeRango says.

Reid Lappin, CEO of mobile strategy company Vokal Interactive, works with businesses to develop their mobile presence.  Sometimes he develops apps for them. Just in the last six months, Lappin has seen increased demand from clients for mobile apps that smooth daily operations by streamlining workflow or simplifying communication. For example, Vokal is building an app for a construction company that will let workers at construction sites update their progress in real time so people in the office can follow the status of the project without a phone call or email.

“The ability to have remote access has become really powerful,” Lappin says.

Mobile technology aimed at small businesses becomes especially important when it provides a function that local entrepreneurs don’t have the expertise to execute. Bellyflop, a new customer loyalty app based in Chicago, streamlines customer reward systems through a mobile network that also provides customer feedback. Traditionally, small businesses with loyalty programs might offer punch cards to frequent customers, offering a discount after a certain number of purchases. But punch cards don’t provide contact information or demographic feedback—Bellyflop does.

“We have the ability… to say, ‘XYZ customers haven’t been in in three to six months. Why don’t you send them a free appetizer and have them come in to give you another shot?’” says founder Logan LaHive. “We segment all that information.”

For a subscription of between $50 and $100 a month, small businesses can customize a reward system with Bellyflop, and Bellyflop will install an iPad in the business that adds it to a mobile network. (Bellyflop received start-up funded from Lightbank, the same venture capitalist firm that funded Groupon.) A customer only has to hold just one customer loyalty card for multiple businesses.

Bellyflop, which launched in September, has already signed up nearly 60 businesses to test the app. The number has been doubling each week, LaHive says, and already 57 percent of the businesses have signed year-long contracts to continue the reward program.

“We’re working with small businesses to level the playing field,” LaHive says.

The only problem with all the new technology is its youth—some of the apps are still a little buggy and require a trial-and-error process for both business owners and app developers. Burton says the reason many business tablet owners opt for the iPad instead of Android-based tablets such as Motorola Mobility Inc.’s Xoom is because the Apple app marketplace is more developed. It has more applications, and if an app is available on both platforms, the Apple version is likely to run more smoothly, he says.

“The iOS [the Apple operating system] is a little more polished,” Burton says.

Even then, some Apple products didn’t work as well at first. Scott Simmons, manager at Evanston’s Coffee Lab, likes using Square on the coffee shop’s iPad because of his previous familiarity with Apple products. But when Coffee Lab first opened last winter, sometimes the app didn’t record sales accurately, and it would occasionally freeze after customers signed for purchases. It took awhile for

Simmons to figure out why it was freezing, but his employees soon realized they just had to wait to reorient the device. And after nearly a year of updates from Square, the app runs “way smoother now.”

“It’s getting better,” says Simmons, “and we’re getting better.”

http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/?p=23031

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=190476

I first saw Square’s product when Gizmodo’s Mat Honan whipped one out at a dinner in San Francisco to help us split a check. Here’s how it worked: he ran my credit card through a tiny plastic doohickey (technical term) that attached to his phone. We entered the amount I owed for the pizza, inflated by the price of a couple Belgian beers, and voila, I’d paid him with a credit card.  It was a subtly impressive demonstration of the alternative payment system’s appeal to the tech-savvy. The whole thing was slick and easy, and Square’s pricing — a flat 2.75 percent of transactions — seemed a small enough price to pay for the convenience of the service.

But I wondered if it had mainstream appeal. We were on Valencia Street, after all, the epicenter of the Bay’s hipster world, and both of us worked (at the time) for Wired.  Would people and businesses whose lives didn’t revolve around technology toss away their old-school credit card machines? It didn’t seem likely.

Over the last few months, I started to notice Square doohickeys popping up all along eastern seaboard. Coffee shops are using them. Food trucks (@lobstertruckdc, anyone?) are using them. Boutiques are using them. Where hipsters lurk, Square abounds. But what about everywhere else?

I asked Square to make me a map of their transactions to see where they had users. The map you see at the top of the page shows one hour of transaction volume on a Friday afternoon. The size of the bubble represents the volume of the transactions while the different colors indicate the types of users that Square has.

This map is good news for Square, which recently took in a $100 million venture investment and put Larry Summers (yes, that Larry Summers) on its board. Just about every major city and plenty of smaller places have someone using the device. I was particularly to see that the whole southeast is blanketed with Square users.

How were all these people finding out about it? I called up a few customers, one of whom I got a hold of through Square and others through Twitter.

The first business I talked with was The Tree Man nursery in Paso Robles, which is a small city north of San Luis Obispo in central California. Anthony Overturf answered the phone with a laidback vibe that made me quake with nostalgia for the West Coast. I asked him how and why the nursery made the switch to Square. It turns out that local farmers converted the nursery’s owner after their standard machine broke.

“Back in the rainy season, we cover our credit card machine with plastic, but the wind blew the plastic off and the rain hit the credit card machine and we were out a credit card machine,” Overturf said. “We were in the process of ordering one and we went to the Farmer’s market of all places and all the guys there were using them.”

Overturf said it was actually an easy decision because the Square hardware was free and the cut that Square takes was less than they’d paid before. Overturf likes the machine, particularly because it allows him to move around the nursery and make sales on the spot.

They did have one big problem in the months they’ve been Square customers. One day, they “made too much money,” Overturf said, meaning they’d charged over $1,000 worth of transactions in less than seven days. That caused their funds to be held for longer than the couple days they had been. That in turn caused problems when they wrote checks against the income and the money wasn’t in the bank. In online forums, that seems to be one of the major knocks on the company. Competitors are hitting them on it, too.

Square, for its part, appears to have removed the $1000 per week limit, or more precisely, the $1000 limit only exists for the first week as Square checks out the transactions being made to ensure they’re not fishy. A company representative said that the cap originally was instituted to protect against fraud, and one presumes that the loads of transaction data they’ve gathered has enabled them to spot bad actors in more sophisticated ways.

And for many customers before and after the thousand-dollar switch, Square is working just fine. A Twitter contact’s wife had ridden in a taxi in Ohio that used the payment system. She’d gotten his card and passed along his contact information to me. I caught the Cincinnati cabbie, Aziz Mabyae (above), during a free moment. He said that his entire cab fleet converted to Square at the request of the company’s owner. After four months of use, he loves the device. “It’s a lot quicker and easier,” Mabyae said. He also noted that relative to their old way of accepting credit cards, it seems more secure for passengers. They also found the technology exciting when it was their first time using it.

Kevin Druff, an IT consultant in Richmond, Virginia, said he used Square rarely, but likes it. He tends to use it for personal things, like splitting the food bill when he goes on vacation with family. He found out about the service the way you tech nerds probably did: from Twitter.

His usage seems to be pretty standard for individuals. Kais Davis of Eugene said he used Square for “rent, settling debts with roommates, poker tournaments, selling collectables, craigslist.” Basically all the peer-to-peer payments a young man might make.

For big businesses, Square can be more expensive than the standard card reader. The entrenched payment companies ask for up-front fees, but then can take a smaller percentage than Square. Purely anecdotally, I haven’t seen a lot of traditional, large businesses switching out their old card readers.

But really, the reason Square is exciting isn’t as a direct swap-out of existing payment methods. Square is exciting because its mobility and low up-front costs allow entirely different types of business to move money with credit cards. Individuals, freelancers, farmers, nursery owners, Etsy DIY types, and a whole bunch of other people can actually treat cards as cash.

And below, there’s a bonus map! It shows one month of Square transactions, representing each as a point.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/square-the-iphone-credit-card-machine-goes-mainstream/244088/#.TltmdxM3V1s.twitter

By DAVID BRACKEN | NewsObserver.com

Simply plug in and swipe!

Two months after opening a food truck business in Raleigh, Mike Stenke realized an inconvenient truth about his customers: Many of them did not carry cash.

Figuring his inability to accept debit and credit cards was costing him sales, Stenke went looking for a solution that would fit his needs.

“It’s got to be in a truck and I was on a really tight budget,” said Stenke, 41, owner of the Klausie’s Pizza Truck. “I also wanted to get going fast because I had a couple of big events coming up.”

Instead of turning to his bank, Stenke signed up for Square, a 1-year-old service that enables him to attach a credit card reader to his iPhone and run customers’ cards on the spot.

The service, which emerged from beta testing in fall 2010, is an increasingly popular payment method for small-business owners in the Triangle and around the country.

Customers sign right on your phone!

Square has shipped 500,000 of the postage stamp-size card readers that can be plugged into either an iPhone or an Android-powered smartphone.

The Triangle alone has more than 1,300 Square users, said Lindsay Wiese, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco startup.

The company, whose CEO, Jack Dorsey, was one of the founders of Twitter, raised $100 million in venture capital funding in June.

Among the first to sign up for Square in Raleigh was Jason DiMambro, who has owned the network consulting business marvel Internetworking for eight years.

DiMambro, 36, doesn’t have an office and works with a lot of startup companies. Before Square, he would have customers write him a check or would bill them and wait for the payment to arrive.

“And in some cases I didn’t get paid,” he said. “It’s nice that I get paid instantly.”

How much it costs

Square’s card-reader and the application that users download to their smartphones are both free. The only cost for the service is a 2.75 percent fee for every transaction processed.

The charge is 3.5 percent plus 15 cents if the physical card isn’t present and the credit card number has to be entered manually.

Square accepts most major credit cards, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Customers sign a digital receipt on the smartphone screen using their fingers and have the option of having the receipt emailed or texted to their own phones.

A retailer links the Square account to his or her bank account, and most transactions are deposited within 24 hours.

The service’s simplicity makes it an object of curiosity among first-time customers.

“They think it’s the coolest thing ever,” DiMambro said.

Stenke said he initially wondered whether customers would have security concerns about running their credit cards on the device. But he said the fact that customers are instantly sent a digital receipt of the transaction seems to alleviate such fears.

Most retailers now using Square were previously either cash-only, used the online service PayPal or paid for a service through their bank.

Watching it grow

Square has plans to expand outside the United States next year, and the service’s growth makes it a closely watched player in the emerging market of mobile payment transactions.

A number of new and traditional companies are scrambling to prepare for a future where customers use their smartphones to make purchases.

Jeff Clark, president of Southern Community Bank and Trust, said he doesn’t view Square as a threat. He said the customers that Square is signing up don’t represent a significant amount of business for the Winston-Salem bank, which has 22 branches in North Carolina.

“The regular business that has a storefront is going to use our technology that we’re all used to,” Clark said. “I think the Square technology is going to be for the smaller micro-type businesses.”

Southern Community offers smaller retailers a credit card payment service through a vender, Atlantic Merchant Services. A retailer rents or leases card-reading equipment, which can cost $250 to $750, and then also pays a monthly service fee and a percentage fee on each transaction.

The fees are higher for retailers that only do a small number of monthly credit card transactions. Clark said monthly fees are in the $50 range, and the transaction fee can range from less than 1 percent to 2.5 percent.

“It all comes down to monthly fees, discounts and then service,” he said. “We sell the service piece of it as much as anything.”

If their credit card processing system goes down, Clark said, retailers want to know they have someone to call to get it up and running again quickly.

Convenience counts

Most Square users say they have been impressed with both the service’s reliability and the responsiveness of the company in dealing with problems that arise.

For businesses such as Olly Oxen, a clothing retailer in Raleigh, Square is as much about convenience as it is boosting sales. Charlotte Guice, 24, the owner, sells at tailgates and other events on college campuses.

She used PayPal and wrote down credit card numbers on a form to enter them later. With Square, Guice doesn’t have to worry about writing down a credit card number wrong.

And the campus representatives she uses can link their smartphones to her Square account so the payments go directly into her bank account.

“It made just a huge difference for my business because a lot of my sales happen out in public,” Guice said. “People want that fast, quick way to pay and they don’t always have cash with them.”

In recent years the point of sale industry has helped restaurateurs, big and small, maximize profits, increase efficiency and promote customer loyalty. With the stronger, faster, smaller computers and network options on the market today, an opportunity exists for the mobile food market to take advantage of these benefits as well.

What are the benefits to investing in a POS system? The answer to this is a long one. Let’s highlight a few. Reporting, speed of service and control over theft and error are three areas an operator will see a quick return on investment.

Comprehensive reporting allows the operator to see exactly what is selling, when it is selling and to whom it is selling to. Experience shows that customers are creatures of habit. The Thursday lunch crowd will be different from the Wednesday lunch crowd. That same Thursday lunch crowd though will be very similar to next Thursday’s lunch crowd. Knowing this is a major benefit as it will cut down on wastage and extra inventory. Ordering supplies when you know they will be needed. It also allows for effective promotions that can be scheduled to automatically occur within the POS system based on your business trends.  Reporting can also help recognize employee theft problems and hourly sales trends.

Increasing the speed of order taking is where we see a little goes along way. If you currently move 30 people through the line at peak time and you knock 15 seconds off each order time you added 7.5 people in an hour. What’s your average check? 7.5 x average check = increased sales.

Reducing mistakes with forced questions and combo detection is another area you will discover savings. It is similar to having a script in front of your staff alerting them to ask the right questions. POS systems, if properly programmed, guide staff through the order process, ensuring items are not forgotten, and up-selling opportunities have been taken advantage of. A record of all voids or discounts is kept in a file log alerting owners to un-authorized activity or unexplained patterns developing.

Reducing theft or the opportunity to steal is of paramount importance. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates 75% of all employees will steal from their employer once. Half of this number will steal multiple times. By limiting access to critical areas in the POS and reviewing pos activity logs, owners have the tools to fight this costly trend.

The list of benefits goes on to include scalability for growing your business, on-line access to your trucks and the advent of mobile apps and social media loyalty add more and more to your bottom line.

If you are looking to take your business to the next level, perhaps a look into the Point of Sale market is right for you.

]]> http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/2011/09/point-of-sale-for-food-trucks-the-bottom-line/feed/ 1 http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/2011/08/turn-your-ipad-into-a-food-truck-cash-register-with-shopkeep/ http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/2011/08/turn-your-ipad-into-a-food-truck-cash-register-with-shopkeep/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:50:00 +0000 MobileFoodNews.com http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/?p=19863 By STAFF | MobileFoodNews.com

All Point-of-Sale Systems Go!

Problems with traditional point of sale have led to a chorus of snickering each time the acronym POS is used. But what if the S stood for “Space-Saving?” “Simple & Speedy?” “Stable?” “Secure?” “Supported?” or “Scalable”?  Or all six?  With ShopKeep.com’s iPad POS system that dream may now be a reality for mobile food truck operators.

Available in the ipad App store this month, ShopKeep Register for iPad is a pay as you go service starting at $49 a month that turns an iPad into a cash register, wirelessly popping the cash drawer and printing receipts and offering a food truck operator real time sales and inventory information from any computer anywhere including a phone. ShopKeep has been in beta testing for almost a year at hundreds of locations across the US including the Mexicue food truck in New York City (video of ShopKeep in action at Mexicue here).  Designed by a retailer, ShopKeep.com is perfect for a mobile quick serve environment or any coffee shop, ice cream store, bakery or other quick serve restaurant with less than 270 items.

Purchase with or without the bracket for mounting your drawer under your counter!

Space Saving

ShopKeep.com takes up zero counter space if you undermount a 14″ electronic cash drawer and receipt printer and wall mount your iPad. The recipt printer is optional and can also be used as a ticket system for communicating orders to the line. To enable wifi communication, a wireless router and 3G USB stick is needed.  All ShopKeep-compatible hardware is available on the ShopKeep.com website (and there’s a special offer code for Mobile Food News readers below).

Simple & Speedy

Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn set up the ShopKeep system at 9 am on the day they opened in the middle of a New York City heatwave.  With three teen-aged cashiers learning the system on the fly, they managed to sell out of ice cream in 3 days. With just 4 buttons to press to ring up a cash sale, ShopKeep can ring faster than your cashiers can take orders.

Stable

ShopKeep was founded by a retailer who had 2 servers running his point-of-sale go down while he was on vacation.  Knowing that when the POS is down, you are essentially closed and tired of having to be a part-time IT professional instead of a full-time retailer, he said ‘there’s got to be a better way.’  In creating ShopKeep he coupled a cloud-based system with a native application so that ShopKeep keeps ringing transactions even if the Internet goes down and even if the cloud servers go down.

Secure

With ShopKeep the cash drawer can only be opened with a key or by ringing a sale. This means off-site operators have important controls on cash, which can make up to 75 percent of an operator’s business. Opening shift amounts are entered and when a shift is closed the drawer can be counted and compared to cash sales. The system has integrated credit card processing using an encrypted iDynamo swiper that attaches to the iPad power outlet with a passthrough for a power cord so the iPad can be charging while credit cards are.  Use of the iDynamo which is encrypted end-to-end means you stay PCI compliant. You never store credit card information and ShopKeep never does, only the processor.

Supported

As any mobile truck operator knows, stuff happens. For point of sale issues or questions, ShopKeep customer support reps are just a call away. Yes, that’s right, an actual human being will take your call. The 800 number for support is right on the front page of the App ensuring that all your employees are able to get help when they need it. And wouldn’t you rather they call them rather than you?

Scalable

Adding another register or another truck to your ShopKeep account is as easy as clicking a button. Each additional register is $49 a month and with the average cost of hardware needed at around $1000, you can save your capital to build out your truck.

Space-Saving, Simple, Speedy, Stable, Secure, Supported and Scalable, ShopKeep can turn your POS into a Point of Satisfaction.

ShopKeep Register for iPad can be demoed and downloaded in the Apple iPad App store at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shopkeep-register/id434906089

For more information visit www.shopkeep.com or call (800) 820-9814.

Through December 31, 2011 MobileFoodNews.com readers can take 15% off hardware compatible with ShopKeep Register for iPad.  Visit http://shop.shopkeep.com/collections/ipad-hardware and enter the code “MobileFoodNews” at checkout.

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