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Education

StreetSmarts SM

Steve Feldshuh

“Talk To Steve”

Merchant services in an app-driven world

By Steven Feldshuh Order ahead popular
Merchants' Choice Payment Solutions East I was also surprised how many businesses have order
ahead functionality. Whether it was a chain like Starbucks
hile spending a month in Santa Monica, or a smaller, regional competitor such as Philz or Peet's,
Calif., I looked for differences between East the locations had separate lines for orders that had been
Coast and West Coast merchant processing. placed via website. Consumers seem to demand the option
W I did find some differences that may even- to order ahead, which made no sense to me, because the
tually translate from the West to the East. coffee drinks that were ordered in advance tended to sit
for a while, and after the drinks were paid for, it seemed
First, I was extremely surprised by how many larger people sat for hours working on their laptops.
merchants are using tablets instead of full-fledged POS
systems ‒ and these are serious businesses. I was also Another reason order ahead made no sense to me was
somewhat surprised at how many of these merchants that the pick up and ordering lines seemed to go at the
were using the Square device. I understand that the same speed, and more than one order placed in advance
Square device is fairly easy to use, but when I asked a few online was messed up. I asked a few people in line their
merchants why they weren't concerned about the costs reasoning. Their answer was simply, "We do everything
of processing, they either didn't know their costs, were on our phones."
completely wrong about Square's program costs or didn't
seem to care. So not only are customers using their phones for making

Ease of use a priority payments, they are even ordering ahead for coffee,
sandwiches, pizza and other take-away items. We have
The Square device, they said, is easy to use, easy to train all known for some time that cell phones will become
their staff on, and the monthly statements are simple increasingly indispensable in our daily lives, but the
to understand. I had always thought Squares' monthly extent to which this is happening has enormous import
statement didn't say very much, but I guess that must be for our industry.
a plus. Processing costs seemed to play a lesser role than I
thought they would. We all have been using the phone to order ahead for years.
Fifty years ago, I remember my family calling from our
This isn't the first time I have been wrong about what house phone to order Chinese food to pick up. There
merchants deem to be important. So the obvious takeaway weren't any online menus, and you had to remember to
was processing costs are less important than ease of use grab a paper menu from the restaurant when you picked
and the probable functions that mobile devices provide up your first order. That may have been inconvenient, but
merchants. This is good news for us residuals guys, since we did it.
we are getting newer, better and easier-to-use systems to
sell. Examples include Poynt, Verifone's Carbon and First
Data's Clover.

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