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Cantaloupe Inc. has strengthened its hand in the highly competitive market for payments at sports and entertainment venues with the launch of Suites, an order-management application designed for such venues, on Cantaloupe’s Cheq platform.
Cantaloupe developed the new app as a way to make it easier for guests in stadium suites to change orders last minute, and to streamline the ordering process in general. Both actions are very manual processes, according to Jake Stone, vice president of partnerships for Cantaloupe.
The move comes about six months after Cantaloupe entered the stadium and venue market through its acquisition of Cheq for $4.75 million.
With Suites, suite owners can log into a portal via a mobile device or desktop system to search all food, beverage, and merchandise items available for purchase, select the items they want, place last minute orders, initiate a payment, and change orders that have been placed up to a predetermined time.
By comparison, suite-management applications require last minute changes to pre-orders to be made manually or via phone, which can lead to ordering errors, according to Cheq.
“There is a lot of friction in placing [and changing] orders for suite owners. Menus are typically sent as PDFs, orders are placed by email, and changing an order is a very cumbersome, manual process,” says Stone, who joined Cantaloupe from Cheq. “Streamlining last-minute order changes is the biggest problem we solved for our customers. We see this as a key point of differentiation.”
Another point of differentiation is that Suites can be installed as a standalone app that can be integrated into existing stadium and venue point-of-sale and order-management systems or as part of the Cheq platform.
Making the Suites app available on a standalone basis opens the door for Cantaloupe to broaden its reach into the highly competitive sports-and-entertainment market by allowing venue operators to keep their relationships with other providers of POS and order-management technology.
“Venues use of a lot of technology partners, and offering Suites on a standalone basis means they don’t have to rip and replace their technology stack to install Suites,” Stone says. “Instead, venue operators can choose the setup that best meets their needs while delivering exceptional customer service to suite owners.”
