I'm also very interested in this! here is my fairly elaborate thoughts on it:
Hi, my name is Jonny. I own a small neighborhood bar and restaurant in Philadelphia called Martha (
marthakensington.com @
marthakensington on IG) and is focused on local sourcing, natural fermentation, and all that hippie stuff
🙂 . a chill place in general. Prior to the pandemic, we used a POS system called Lightspeed and made our own cool web app that would pull menu data from the cloud POS and then push it through HTML and Javascript filters in order to display the menu simultaneously on our in house projectors and also to the web so people could look at it on their phones (at home or in the restaurant). paperless menus essentially. It worked pretty well, and because it was directly connected to the POS, any menu changes (which we made very often) were instantly updated in all locations (POS, projector and online). here are a few horrible pictures:
During the pandemic, we started using Square for its Weebly online store to help us sell all of our food and beverages to go. it has been a great system for us, and as Philadelphia prepares to open up its restaurants and bars to dine-in guests once again, we would really love to keep using Square. the POS part is superior, imho, to lightspeed, and changing to that is not much of an issue. However, recreating our custom menu app and adapting it to fit the new / current business models is proving to be a little more challenging. Here is what i think would be the ideal scenario.
The goal is a contactless online menu (no paper menus or wiping menus) and also a truly contactless ordering and payment system. we hope to continue to do take out and in house dining simultaneously and seamlessly.
In Square , you would create a new location (ours would maybe be called 'Dine In Martha' or something). that location would be created alongside other locations that are currently being used for pick-up and/or delivery (we call ours 'Pick up Martha' and 'Delivery Martha') . They would all share the same inventory, the price and variations are adjustable by location (so that you can charge different prices for dining in than you do for delivery). Then when people visited the online store they would see the menu and be prompted with a pop-up like the one that is used now :
sorry for the terrible picture.
what would be different than now, is that there would be a third option at the top for "dine-in" . so you could choose 'dine-in' (an already existing location type i believe?) or 'pick-up' or 'delivery'. super simple adjustment , imho.
That simple option would allow for easily adjustable paperless menus for all of your restaurants! think how valuable that is!
Then, what is really exciting is, if you start to develop the 'dine-in' location of the square online store just a little bit more you can have truly contactless ordering system! here is what needs to happen, imho.
guests in a restaurant would go on their phones and open the online store. then they would choose dine-in. then they would be prompted , by another simple pop up box, to enter their table number. maybe the table numbers would be indicated on the tables themselves or even just communicated by 6ft distant server who welcomes them and explains things. then they can peruse the menu and place an order which will print in the kitchen / bar and be delivered by a server. super simple. the table number information would be printed on any kitchen / bar tickets . the guests would be paying from their phone without touching a server at all.
so that one super small incredibly easy to do idea, a pop up table indicator, would allow for contactless ordering and paying within the restaurant.
One other small adjustment that needs to be made in the Square Online Store (weebly) for this to work is adjustable tax rates per item. Currently the online store is only capable of flat rate taxing . it needs to be able to vary for food vs alcohol. The work around is tax inclusive pricing, but that is not ideal for most restaurants. i have no idea how hard it would be to pass tax data for each item, in addition to price, but it seems like a doable programming task, imho.
Now, what would it make it a much superior concept, and more on par with competitors like BBOT (integrated with toast), GoTab (think group), and Odero, just to name a few, is if you could run a tab in this dine-in online store option, instead of just paying for each round. i think this is an achievable goal as well. you are simply utilizing some of the credit card pre-approval process that the restaurant POS uses to start a tab and then allowing for the sending of orders indepently of paying for them. a check out function at the end would be roughly the same as now, but with less information collected. maybe parts of square apointments could be used?
There is evidence provided by some of the companies mentioned above, that this type of 'self-ordering' typically increases sales by 25% and also simultaneously creates labor efficiencies. win / win. it is also SAFER in terms of virus spreading. This is worth investing in for all of us Square Restaurant users.
The next level beyond what is mentioned above is if BOTH the server and customer could add to the check. i believe this is very possible, because i can currently see online store orders in my restaurant POS system. but at this point those orders are already closed and paid for. what if they were still open? then a server could add a round to the table as well, but the customer would still be able to review and close the check from their phone at the table. this is the most flexible and ideal situation.
Another cool idea would be to separate out orders to different kitchen / bar printers. that might be harder , but still doable imho.
And the really cool part would be to collaborate with tables ready or square appointments to start the process at the reservation or waitlist level. enter your payment information to reserve a table and it gets carried over to the square restaurant side, placed at a table (no need for users to enter table numbers) and then allows for payment via the square online store before leaving. incredibly seamless contact less and safe process.
Something specifically very useful to my restaurant would also be the ability to add a % service fee. being hippies and all , we are trying to use this break to get away from the old tipping model and move towards a fair wage 'service fee' model. essentially its an auto-gratuity for each check . the pick up and delivery models already have a service fee, its just not currently a percentage, its a flat rate.
now, i have a MILLION other related ideas, but I thought I would start small here. IMHO these are mostly pretty small fixes to greatly improve the overall product and safety of our population!
really all we need is access to the weebly API and I think my team can make most of these changes on a test level. may we please have that access?
Ideally I would just link our own very capable programmers,
kevin@mudrick.com and
rico.pamplin@gmail.com , with a developer on that team.
this is very important for us and without being overly dramatic, the safety of our guests and employees going forward really depend on this connection. we need some very simple adjustments in order to have paperless menus and even truly contactless ordering. please, please make this connection a very high priority.
