TechCrunch: Square launches restaurant point-of-sale platform

Square is breaking into the restaurant industry. Today, TechCrunch announced the release of Square for Restaurants, a point-of-sale system that will assist with everything from floor layouts to employee scheduling. 

“The omnichannel piece of restaurants is now truly coming into fruition with this integration,” Caviar Product Lead Gokul Rajaram shared with TechCrunch. “We believe and we’ve seen restaurants increasingly becoming a multichannel or omnichannel platform where an increasing percent of their orders are coming from online channels — not just from diners coming into the store, but from delivery and pickup.”

The system is still in beta, but more than 100 restaurants have used int he product across the U.S. The package will cost restaurants $60 per month with $40 per month for each additional POS set-up. 

Both Rosnet's Director of Business Development, Patrick Bobrukiewicz and as Givex's Founder Don Gray shared their perspective on Square getting in to the restaurant space.

Bobrukiewicz mentioned that though Square is popular because of its ease of access to customers, the product has a lot of room to develop a POS platform that services more than coffee shops and drivers and move to something that can do tables, item splits, happy hour prices, etc in order to be successful for larger merchants in the restaurant space. He also suggests the platform should not force their merchants to use the overpriced processing fees or, if this is not an option, at least allow contracts for larger restaurant groups to be more customized.

On the other side of the spectrum, Gray is excited about Square entering the space, that has so long struggled with costly legacy systems that fail to deliver on all-in-one functionality. Like Givex's Vexilor platform, Gray envisions Square providing more of an all-encompassing approach with kiosks, online ordering, apps, KDS and many more systems without the hassle of working with different vendors to make sure the solutions are working together.

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