Commerce

Square’s POS system now integrates Postmates, DoorDash, and other food delivery services


With the advent of on-demand food delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, GrubHub, Postmates, and DoorDash, it’s fair to say hungry consumers are spoiled for choice.

But these myriad services mean restaurants typically have to set up and manage several tablets in order to cover all the ordering and delivery options. They also often have to manually extract orders and re-enter them in their own point-of-sale (POS) system, adding yet another screen to the mix.

To eliminate this “tablet farm” scenario, which could see five or more screens splayed across a restaurant’s front of house, Square has announced a host of new integrations to help centralize their ordering, delivery, and payment processing in a single interface.

"Tablet farm"

Above: “Tablet farm”

When the service launches, restaurants using Square’s payment-processing services will be able to access all their DoorDash and Postmates orders through Square. A separate integration with Chowly — software that connects online food ordering apps with restaurants’ POS systems — will usher in integrations with GrubHub, Uber Eats, ChowNow, and similar services.

For now, these integrations will only be available through Square for Restaurants, which includes a POS system, but they will be added to Square’s free Point of Sale app “soon,” according to a spokesperson.

Food for thought

It’s worth noting that Square announced a separate partnership with Postmates last month that enables all Square sellers to tap into Postmates’ on-demand infrastructure and offer deliveries for anything from clothes to groceries. This latest partnership is different — it’s specifically aimed at food outlets, combines all the major food delivery providers, and aims to help restaurants save time and resources.

Above: Square for Restaurants now integrates with various online food services

Square, cofounded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, is better known for its payments service that makes it easy for merchants to accept card payments in-store through a mobile device. But the company has branched out into all manner of verticals as it seeks a bigger piece of the business pie. One of these is food ordering and delivery, which Square has been building out since its Caviar acquisition back in 2014.

Square for Restaurants has been integrated with Caviar since rolling out last year, so it makes sense that the San Francisco-based company is now looking to make its platform even stickier with support for third-party alternatives. Restaurants stand to benefit too, as all orders are automatically processed and dispatched to the kitchen through a single tablet — no manual data entry required.

“Juggling different delivery platforms and managing multiple tablets is a huge pain point for our restaurant sellers, and now we are addressing this problem head-on,” said Alyssa Henry, seller lead at Square. “Now all delivery orders, whether via Caviar, Postmates, DoorDash, or platforms integrated through Chowly, can be automatically sent to the point of sale and routed directly to the kitchen, helping sellers reduce labor costs, food waste, and other potential errors that result from manual order entry.”



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