Should I upgrade my current Pos???

[Denny]

We have 2 stores and currently use POS Pizza (11 years)which other than having what I consider to have an unacceptable online ordering platform has been fine for us. No it does not have all the fancy bells and whistles but I dont feel like its held us back. My main reason for wanting to switch is to have online ordering which we presently do not offer. The system we would would be switching to is Speedline at a cost of about $17,000 per store($35,000) and ongoing cost of $150 per month support and $250 per month for online ordering through brygid. So an extra $5,000 per year per store? Is it worth it to switch? Why?

 

[paul7979]

7 or 8 years ago I was the one talking about how absurd online ordering was. How could someone be so lazy as to not pick up a phone to place their order. Today, I think online ordering is crucial if you offer delivery. Right now it amounts to 20% of sales at each of my stores. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m approaching 30% by the end of 2015. That said, you can find good online ordering platforms that don’t integrate with your POS. Orders get faxed to you or print via a receipt printer and you need to input them into your POS. I wouldn’t opt for this route but there’s something to say about keeping nearly $100,000 in your pocket over the next 6 years.

 

[bodegahwy]

Those are pretty high monthly costs. Have a look at Prism from Microworks. They have an excellent online ordering platform and the costs are less than half what you are talking about monthly. I have been using them for 16 years and the support is outstanding (and rarely needed!)

When it comes to online ordering, there is no way I would consider a system where my my staff would have to enter the orders. Why would you give up one of the major benefits of an online system? The order should drop right into the system and appear on the makeline like any order entered in house and the CC processing should be taken care of as well. I would not be interested in a set-up where I have to have a third party providing that bridge… just a set up for finger pointing when something is not working right!

 

[RobT]

I have to concur with the above posters. There are other systems out there that can do this for much less.

I opted for a high end system and am paying the price now with online ordering growth.

You really don’t want to have to enter each online order in the pos cause it defeats the purpose. It should integrate with the system. There is nothing worse then jammed faxes, lost emails, etc.

 

[pizzapiratespp]

The Speedline/Brygid combo works very well. We have been using this setup since 2009. We have used Speedline since 2005 but it took until 2009 before I could get an internet connection at each location. Brygid does have volume discounts when your online orders start to ramp up. We are paying about .35 an order right now. My average phone order takes 2.03 minutes to take, so we pay our employees .43 for each order. Then on top of that our average ticket is $2.00 higher for online orders. Its win / win for everyone.

 

[bodegahwy]

We pay nothing per order, but our annual costs for online come to more like 50 cents per order. Considering that our front counter staff do other things like take money, put labels on boxes, grab sides for pickup orders etc etc, I think that the time they spend actually taking orders is maybe half the time which would mean that my cost for order taking is maybe 75 cents cheaper for online for us too. Our average ticket online is a bit lower than our storewide and considerably lower than our best phone people though.

The biggest advantage in my opinion is that once the customer orders online I have the email address and I can reach them for free with email blasts. That saves thousands compared to sending them things in the mail.

 

[Home_Town_Pizza]

I hope I’m not hijacking the thread, but does anyone that doesn’t deliver have online ordering? I’m just curious if online orders tend to be more for delivery. We are carryout/dine in only and I was just wondering if online ordering would do me any good.

 

[noreason]

Revention is installing on Monday. Making the switch from aloha. Both are quality systems for what we do, but I like what revention has to offer. I won’t be able to give my actual honest opinion on revention for a few weeks or so, but I can say aloha works, but is just falling behind as far as being cutting edge. I doubt I’d invest in their software again until they really step up their game in the pizzeria field.

 

[Pizza_of_the_Month]

I hope I’m not hijacking the thread, but does anyone that doesn’t deliver have online ordering? I’m just curious if online orders tend to be more for delivery. We are carryout/dine in only and I was just wondering if online ordering would do me any good.

We do not deliver. Our online orders account for 3% of our sales. We are extremely busy and find it nice when an order just pops out and we didn’t have to take the call. Our online order ticket average is about 60% higher than our average ticket for eat in or take out.

 

[paul7979]

I hope I’m not hijacking the thread, but does anyone that doesn’t deliver have online ordering? I’m just curious if online orders tend to be more for delivery. We are carryout/dine in only and I was just wondering if online ordering would do me any good.

I think a lot of that depends on how much take out you do, how many of those order ahead of time and how much you market the online ordering. Last night each of my stores did about 10% of our takeout orders in online sales. An approximate breakdown of our takeout ordering was 50% walk in to order, 40% call in to order and 10% ordered online.

 

[famousperry]

The Speedline/Brygid combo works very well. We have been using this setup since 2009. We have used Speedline since 2005 but it took until 2009 before I could get an internet connection at each location. Brygid does have volume discounts when your online orders start to ramp up. We are paying about .35 an order right now. My average phone order takes 2.03 minutes to take, so we pay our employees .43 for each order. Then on top of that our average ticket is $2.00 higher for online orders. Its win / win for everyone.

Pizzapirate, do they charge a % of the sale on top of the $0.35 or is that it? I have Foodtec which charges a monthly fee of approx $35/month for the first $1,000 in online sales plus 3% of the remaining sales (currently approx $500/month - I figure my total cost runs approx $1/order in my price structure)

I absolutely LOVE them as a POS provider (the online integrated ordering is awesome), but a my % of online ordering increases every month so does my monthly fees. It would be nice to have a flat $ fee or at least a discount tiered pricing instead. We are currently at online orders accounting for 12% of sales (11% delivery & avg ticket $1.25 higher for online delivery orders, 1% pickup & & avg ticket $2.00 higher for online pickup orders).

I just searched back my reports the last few years and noticed that although % of online orders steadily increase approx 1% each year, unfortunately the avg ticket of those orders has been steadily decreasing…this is not a good trend which leads me to believe that although more people are embracing this medium, the profitability is decreasing which make cost even more of a factor…just think in 80 years I can canel my phone service to offset the cost

 

[durbancic]

We are with Revention. $75 / month flat fee. In Jan this worked out to be 16¢ per order. This does not include though, the monthly “service contract” that we have. This is for the customer support for other POS related issues.

 

[pizzapiratespp]

Pizzapirate, do they charge a % of the sale on top of the $0.35 or is that it? I have Foodtec which charges a monthly fee of approx $35/month for the first $1,000 in online sales plus 3% of the remaining sales (currently approx $500/month - I figure my total cost runs approx $1/order in my price structure)

I absolutely LOVE them as a POS provider (the online integrated ordering is awesome), but a my % of online ordering increases every month so does my monthly fees. It would be nice to have a flat $ fee or at least a discount tiered pricing instead. We are currently at online orders accounting for 12% of sales (11% delivery & avg ticket $1.25 higher for online delivery orders, 1% pickup & & avg ticket $2.00 higher for online pickup orders).

I just searched back my reportd the last few years and noticed that although % of online orders steadily increase approx 1% each year, unfortunately the avg ticket of those orders has been steadily decreasing…this is not a good trend which leads me to believe that although more people are embracing this medium, the profitability is decreasing which make cost even more of a factor…just think in 80 years I can canel my phone service to offset the cost

They have different plans. You just choose which one fits you best. We started out at $20 a month and $1.00 an order. After 6 months or so we changed it to $100 a month and .50 an order. ( don’t quote me on these, my memory may be off). Once we got up to the 3000+ online orders a month I went to $150 a month and .25 an order. That puts us around .35 per order currently. It was much higher to start out, but I don’t think I ever paid more than $1.00 an order.