Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/90134
W e all know how the iPad has influenced the physical side of the café world. Hundreds of shops around the country now use a tablet and a tucked-away cash drawer instead of tra- ditional registers or point-of-sale computer terminals. The move saves space, adds barista mobility and can bring a slice of coolness to any countertop. But the more significant industry change being spawned by the tablet transition is not physical at all: Instead, it has to do with competition in the point-of-sale segment of specialty. Over the past 18 months, a raft of POS startups has begun vying for the business of shop owners. Companies like ShopKeep, Square, SalesVu and others offer POS software via iPad apps, and in many instances these providers give shops access to relatively robust setups at prices far cheaper than those of the industry's more longstanding POS players. Not surprisingly, those more established entities have themselves begun offering tablet solutions, putting extra emphasis on the café-specific nature of their products. In addition, because the newer iPad-oriented systems are based on cloud computing, they are opening up intriguing new pos- sibilities in terms of the remote access an owner has to his or her sales data. This same innovation, however, is sparking new concerns about the security of that information. What's it all mean for shop owners? In short, your POS options are varied like never before, but navigating the fast-evolving landscape can be confusing. Here's some analysis to help you sort it out. T he shifting café-POS paradigm is well illustrated by the recent decision-making process of Lloyd Swords, who in March 2011 opened the Harper & Madison café and bak- ery in Billings, Mont. As Swords and his wife were planning the business, they were approached by a vendor selling a high-end res- taurant-style POS that carried a price tag of more than $18,000. Swords knew that dollar amount was out of his range, but he also didn't want to dismiss the notion of POS all together—it was important to him to find a product that offered better sales tracking and inventory info than a simple cash register could. "I said, 'There's got to be something in between those two,'" he explains. "'Somebody has to have an app.'" After some research, Swords came across ShopKeep, which at that point was still in beta mode. The system could be downloaded onto his iPad from Apple's App Store and offered all the func- tionality and data management his business seemed to need as it approached its opening day. To get ShopKeep up and running, Swords was looking at $1,200 in upfront fees and equipment costs and a $49-per-month charge thereafter. The iPad-based system was still fairly unproven, and Swords says he investigated Coffee Shop Manager and other well-established café-focused POS pro- viders. Those companies offered him reliability and customiza- tion, but they would have carried around $4,000 in initial costs. Eventually, Swords chose the iPad-based system and has stayed with it since opening. "Every time I had a question with ShopKeep, $33 25781,7< +DUSHU 0DGLVRQ LQ 0RQWDQD RSSRVLWH DQG 9DQFRXYHU :DVK ·V &RPSDVV; &RIIHH; 5RDVWHUV DERYH ERWK XVH 326 SURJUDPV GRZQORDGHG RQWR L3DGV McGinness says his initial investment was around $1,100 and that he pays no monthly fee for the service. Before installing SalesVu, he didn't use a POS, relying instead on an old-school register that required him and his staff to tabulate sales totals manually. That side of the business is significantly different now: SalesVu does the math and also keeps track of essentials like employee hours and inventory levels. And McGinness can keep tabs on those numbers from anywhere, as long as he has an Internet connection and his laptop. "I'm over at the roastery and continued on page 48 freshcup.com November 2012 47 it was a green light," Swords says. "The more I saw it was a positive experience, the more I stopped looking at the others because the system was doing everything I wanted it to do." The Harper & Madison situation demonstrates that shop owners have an opportunity to get systems at lower costs than in the past—they just have to put their trust in startups. For Swords and others, doing so has not been particularly daunting. "I looked at some of the traditional POS guys, but why spend all that money when you don't have to?" says Mike McGinness, who owns Vancouver, Wash.-based Compass Coffee Roasters and has for four months been using the SalesVu app on an iPad as the POS system at his primary retail store.