Nowadays, restaurants have started using POS integration via
an API. Deliveroo is opening Point of
Sale (POS) integrations to restaurant partners, via an API and developer portal.
The integration is intended to free up front-of-house
staff from having to manually input Deliveroo food orders into the restaurant’s
sales system.
A Deliveroo spokesman told us that one major chain had
been having to assign a single member of staff at peak times to just “sit there
and type in the orders”, thereby reducing the number of staff who could attend
to customers in the restaurant at a busy time. Order inputting also isn’t
necessarily popular with staff, given there’s no direct opportunity for tips.
Automating the task certainly seems a no brainer. Deliveroo claims initial
tests show the integration cuts order processing time from ~2.5 mins to ~30
sec. It also reckons POS companies and “tech savvy restaurants” can complete
the integration in two weeks. “We weren’t sure how many people were going to
adopt it — now we can see it’s clearly taken off and is working supporting
restaurants,” said the spokesman.
So far around 500 restaurant sites are using integration,
having joined during the trial, along with 25 POS companies that are plugging
into its API. And Deliveroo says it expects thousands to be doing so by the end
of the year.
A “couple of hundred” restaurants are joining each month,
the spokesman added.
He said Deliveroo opted to go for an API approach — and
rely on restaurants to integrate its order system into their sales systems —
because of how diverse the POS market is.
“At a European level it’s crazy how many different types
of POS companies there are. So, from our perspective, rather than trying to
produce our own system which worked with every single one it was best to design
a system where they were able to use an API of ours and integrate from their
system,” the spokesman told us. Deliveroo now operates in 12 markets, with
eight in Europe and four in other continents. So far, POS integrations have
been achieved with restaurants in the UK, France, Belgium and Spain — with the
UK, where it has with more than 10,000 restaurant partners, being the most
“advanced” so far. The spokesman said it is also working on rolling out integrations
to all other markets “in coming months”. There are still some places where this
isn’t going to work. And this is where firms tend to use middleware companies.
And we still are working with a middleware company for places where the direct
integration isn’t going to work,” he added. “But in terms of a principal, Uber has
boasted on principal that they’ve bought a middleware company and that now
they’re going to do the middleware themselves. [But] if you can reduce your
reliance on middleware you reduce the chances of errors, problems you face and
an extra link in the chain that could go down and prevent orders.”
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