Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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THE TABLET EFFECT continued from page 47 I know exactly how the downtown shop is doing," he says. "I know who's doing what where and I know exactly how many bags of coffee have sold so I know whether I need to re-stock." M cGinness and other ardent sup- porters of low-cost, downloadable POS apps say the technology that's shifting their businesses could mark a significant loss of relevance for compa- nies such as Coffee Shop Manager and SelbySoft, both of which are brands with deep ties to the specialty café scene. (Coffee Shop Manager was acquired by Granbury Restaurant Solutions earlier this year, but the brand name lives on and the product remains largely the same.) The industry's established POS compa- nies have responded to the recent app push by moving their own systems to tablet for- mats. Coffee Shop Manager and SelbySoft both unveiled POS-via-tablet technologies within the past year. Because those com- panies' POS solutions are built on the Windows operating system, their soft- ware can't be downloaded onto an iPad— shop owner clients instead must procure Windows-based tablet hardware from the POS providers, and the tablets come with the systems loaded on them. Reps from SelbySoft and Coffee Shop Manager acknowledge that their systems don't allow an owner to download and install software in a single sitting like the iPad-based players can, but they say the trade-off is getting a POS that is specifically geared toward the coffee shop environ- ment. "The startup app companies are not focused on coffee," says Duessa Holscher, marketing and solutions manager at Granbury Restaurant Solutions. She points out that many of the iPad solutions don't easily integrate gift-card and loyalty-card programs, and they don't offer café-specific nuances that would, for example, allow a barista to simply enter all the ingredients of a complicated latte or smoothie order. ShopKeep co-founder Jason Richelson counters that though his company currently lacks all the functionality of CSM and oth- ers, the service is set on bringing on more features in the coming months. "We're going to give you access to gift cards and loyalty programs," he says. "Integration with QuickBooks is coming by the end of this year, and we're looking at all kinds of analytics and met- rics to help you run the store better. We're getting there really fast." Still, the more seasoned POS players are standing behind the 48 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com 7$.( ,7 2876,'( -LP .R]DN RZQHU RI 7DOLD (VSUHVVR LQ :LONHVERUR 1 & XVHV D WDEOHW IURP 6HOE\6RIW products they've developed over years of working closely with independents. "It's easy to write a basic point-of-sale system, but it's difficult to do that on a national scale," says Mike Spence of SelbySoft, which has been in the POS business for 16 years. "It's not so much whether a company has features—we have a couple thousand features. The issue is that no two coffee shops need the same set of features, and so how do you help a shop get exactly what they need? If these new POS companies truly want to grow and take a percentage of the market, that's going to be their challenge." I t seems likely that in many ways everyone in the POS field will end up offering similar functionality—they'll all have straightforward ways to enter in complicated drinks,