Online Ordering

I’ve been turning away these companies like campusfoods.com and such that offer online ordering for you and then want a 5% cut of your orders. I personally don’t want to pay a percentage when I could just be paying a setup and some small maintenance fee. I’ve been waiting instead for my POS company to finally get around to offering an online ordering feature.

So, the time is approaching when they will be able to finally implement online ordering. I have to upgrade to their newest software, but we were going to do that to grab some other new features anyway. I ask them what the costs will be for the online ordering component and they respond with a nominal setup fee and… (do you see it coming?)… 5 or 6% of our online sales?!?

When did we become a franchisee of our POS company? Hell, why not charge us a % of every order we take now since we’re using their POS system to do it! The whole point is to make MY business more efficient and increase profit for ME… not so I can pass those savings and then some along to some programmers that are basically done programming. You wouldn’t believe the splitting headache I’m fighting off right now after the hour drive home thinking about this.

Anyways, do any of you have a POS company that can program an online ordering capability for a setup fee and a reasonable monthly maintenance fee? I can’t believe every POS company is attempting to fleece their customers like this - so I’m looking at switching. Please point me in the right direction.

Who is the POS company you are talking about?

Is it some sort of secret or something?

we’ve used eorders.com for a couple years. they charge $50 per month and .10 per order
it comes by fax and we manually enter into POS

PZ

Really not relevant to the answer(s) I’m trying to obtain. I am currently doing business (and may choose to continue doing business) with this company. Smearing their name may hinder my ability to do so and really wouldn’t benefit anyone.

Brad,

This year we switched to Phoenix from Firefly. We are working on integrating the online ordering right now. I was hoping to have it done by now, but we are making progress. They have an open xml format that any 3rd party developer can use to tie your website to your server for online orders.

This was one of the selling points for us switching from our old system. I’ve been very please with Fire Fly. We integrated our credit card processing into the system as well.

I’m in a higher income area where high speed internet is getting pretty close to being “normal” – hopefully this will be a home run for us.

-Scott

Excellent. We were actually getting ready to schedule a meeting to take a look at the Phoenix system! This is the type of setup we were hoping to find.

Thank you.

Is FireFly’s price in line with Brad’s supplier?

Even though the technology seems incredibly simple, it is not. The development on both the client and server side is very expensive. With technology this new and so few adopters, there’s just no way to make it cheaply.

Listen to me defending high prices! Unbelievable.

I understand. I think I know who it is anyway, was just wanting to verify.

I’m expecting to pay a pretty penny for the development of this technology. I can see a potential for it to someday become huge and allow me to generate higher profits through accuracy and efficiency - as such, I am willing to make an investment. What I am NOT willing to do is pay eternal royalties for the setup - especially of a size that gobble up any potential savings and then some.

Is the up-front cost high enough that the ongoing percentage seems to be a ripoff? If your software acquisition cost is reduced by paying over time with the order percentage, that’s probably OK. If, on the other hand, the developer is charging the percentage because everyone else does and they feel like they can too, I understand why you’re mad!

I may be crossing the line on this one, but what is the cost of the software? Is there a monthly fee other than the percentage of orders?

SOmeone ( can’t recall the vendor) just did a press release about having succesfully integrated a web portal with Firefly. It was for Extreme Pizza - you could probably google the names and find them.