31–40 of 45 posts
I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a better customer experience 9 times out of 10. I hope Square gets it. Retailers - many of them with limited resources and technical skills - face big technical, UI, and logistical issues. I'll give one implementation example that shows all three; this applies to all retail…
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> your core business model isn't that hot You can't just make a statement like that and play it off. Citations? I see Square devices used everywhere in retail, and no, I don't live in San Francisco or the Bay Area.
I do live in the Bay Area and the only place I have seen Square is at coffee shops and farmers market stands. I don't think it has that much traction and their growth is reported to be poor (or negative, I forget which). The mag stripe reader was a cute hack but when you get down to it the service is pretty expensive and you need a huge up-front investment in equipment, compared to ordinary cash registers which are d…
I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a better customer experience 9 times out of 10. I hope Square gets it. Retailers - many of them with limited resources and technical skills - face big technical, UI, and logistical issues. I'll give one implementation example that shows all three; this applies to all retail…
Had a similar experience ordering from Chapters Indigo around Christmas. I had the option to pick it up in-store, or ship it to my home. It was quicker to ship it to my home, because they wanted to ship it from their warehouse to the store I would pick it up at... even though that store had the item in-stock. This service would take up to 2-3 weeks to happen, IIRC (though I may be remembering wrong).
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I think you're referencing an episode of This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1... It was a very informative episode, and did a great job highlighting the financial difficulties faced by car dealerships. It made me sympathetic to their plight, but it's an old business model and I still prefer the direct sales method being championed by Tesla.
Yeah, that piece. It was great, but it also seemed like they're all doing business the same as in the 60's, at least from an operations standpoint.
I got into my financial situation by not wasting money, and it seems a properly maintained 90s car could last 16 years..
You guessed it, October of 2014 and there's still a dot matrix printer in the financial office.
I've worked with cheap lasers and I've worked with expensive lasers and from a labor cost perspective it would take several thousand dollars to get a new laser as fast as the dot matrix, so I can't blame them. The latency of completely printing a form was perhaps 1/4 the time it takes a typical laser to warm the fuser, and surely the energy cost is lower...
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I do live in the Bay Area and the only place I have seen Square is at coffee shops and farmers market stands. I don't think it has that much traction and their growth is reported to be poor (or negative, I forget which). The mag stripe reader was a cute hack but when you get down to it the service is pretty expensive and you need a huge up-front investment in equipment, compared to ordinary cash registers which are d…
Square is a POS system, comparing it with a cash register is ridiculous. Many POS systems sold to restaurants fly well above the thousands of dollars with shitty UIs that take hours for employees to learn (knowing the turnover in the food industry, it's a lot of wasted time).
For food trucks, this seems interesting. Most food trucks I see using square enter the orders directly into square already. If I can avoid the line at a food truck by putting in my order and just wait for them to call my name with my food, that would be pretty amazing.
Busy food truck lines are not great for calling names out. With a line of people yapping, and traffic noise, you have to be nearly under the canopy to hear your name called, and there's only room there for ~8 people (crowded). So they'd have to send you an update to your mobile device, which now creates more questions like, how to communicate to the person in line that's been waiting for 15 minutes that no, you are n…
Something like a pick-up window would work.
> do you show your phone to the person and hope they have good organization of orders pending pickup?
In my opinion, if the food truck has implemented this Square software, they might keep "organization of orders pending pickup" in mind. Showing your phone to the person should be enough, (with some sort of simple identification on the phone message).
I don't know if Square Pickup does this but I'm just arguing against your doubt that it wouldn't work.
I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a better customer experience 9 times out of 10. I hope Square gets it. Retailers - many of them with limited resources and technical skills - face big technical, UI, and logistical issues. I'll give one implementation example that shows all three; this applies to all retail…
As a consumer I've had great service from EatStreet and their local restaurant partners. No idea what the vendor side of the process is like. Square is building quite a tie-in to their handy hardware as much as the app itself.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/07/following-competitor-grubhu...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Square is a POS system, comparing it with a cash register is ridiculous. Many POS systems sold to restaurants fly well above the thousands of dollars with shitty UIs that take hours for employees to learn (knowing the turnover in the food industry, it's a lot of wasted time).
Not anymore. Clover costs $500-$1000 and works for categories of retailers that Square doesn't, particularly table service restaurants.
(edit: nope, it was Breadcrumb)
It's like bundle sale: have something charming as primary item and earn real money by less attractive add-ons.