There’s plenty of reasons (not just covid related) that you should replace your cash tills with a tech solution.

• Reduce shrinkage
• Instant reporting and stock levels
• Noting wastage

But is a full EPOS system the answer? There are plenty of products out there aimed at providing card and cashless solutions, such as Zonal, which dominates the pub world. They’ve been providing an electronic till system to pub clients for years, and when covid came along they offered their existing clients a mobile payment app to keep service quick and efficient. Boom - overnight pubs could offer their customers a contact-free mobile payment solution.

However, even Zonal haven’t successfully migrated their mobile payment service to stadiums, festivals and other mass gatherings. This is because there is an impassable chasm of differences between a pub and a stadium bar:

Stability: volume of people + thick concrete walls = not enough phone connectivity to guarantee multiple simultaneous mobile payments. Moreover, when they’re unsure if a payment has gone through, fans head straight to the bar and waste valuable staff time finding out if their payment has gone through.

The SwipeStation app, meanwhile, works in airplane mode. The SwipeStation unit, which is hardwired to the internet, acts as an unmanned till, each unit able to process 20 customers per minute. So by the time they reach the service area they have chosen and paid for their items dramatically improving the efficiency of the journey.

Untrained staff: Generally speaking stadium bar staff are transient. Something not everyone knows is a monumental issue in the stadium world. On average at least 30% of them are on their first ever shift. Daunting! With SwipeStation the only training needed is: take the piece of paper with the order written on it - and go and fetch those products. No till training, no dialog with the customer, no mistakes. It couldn’t be easier and staff love working the SwipeStation lanes.

So the short answer is while other products have tried and failed in this market, SwipeStation doesn’t just cope with mass gatherings - we excel in them. By removing deliberation, ordering and payment from the service area, we’ve made it possible for untrained, inexperienced minimum wage staff to serve 3-4 customers a minute - increasing sales and improving visitor experience.

However with the ‘complex EPOS’ systems, the staff member has to try and use a highly sophisticated till system that has been built for a pub or restaurant to be used by well trained, full or part time staff.

We’ve all been there… you’re standing in a queue watching the bar staff flounder around looking like they haven’t got a clue what they’re doing. This is because someone gave them a 10 minute crash course in a highly sophisticated till system earlier that day. It’s really not surprising that the current system is broken.

I could go on for hours about the nuances around catering for mass gatherings vs pubs and restaurants, but hopefully those two examples give you a flavour. No doubt the big EPOS players are frustrated that they’ve struggled to excel in this huge market, and might even attempt to build a competitive product. However, if you consider the R&D that would go into developing an entirely new method of payment to emulate ours (not to mention the patents pending we have around the world) it would make better financial sense to buy the company - and the client base, the reputation and the expertise that came with it - than start from scratch.