Intuit And Revel Systems Ride Their mPOS Partnership Into Salons And Grocery Stores

By John Stewart
@DTPaymentNews

When Intuit Inc. launched QuickBooks Point of Sale with tablet-payments specialist Revel Systems Inc. early last year, the move represented a bold thrust for Intuit into POS payments. Now its link-up with Revel has apparently performed well enough for the two companies to take it into salons and grocery stores.

“We’re excited to expand our partnership with Intuit and continue to both power and support small-business owners and entrepreneurs,” said Lisa Falzone, co-founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Revel Systems, in a statement issued on Monday.

The expansion follows the duo’s original thrust into general retail and restaurants, a niche where Revel has developed strength with its iPad-based POS system. This new stage in the partnership also includes some new features. For salons, Intuit and Revel offer capabilities for online appointments, payments for add-on services, and commissions for employees handling specific services or products. For groceries, features include an integrated scale for produce and the capability to print barcodes reflecting weight-based pricing that can be scanned at checkout.

The significance of these moves for Intuit is that it furthers the 33-year-old company’s efforts to make its popular QuickBooks Online product more attractive for retail businesses that want an integrated checkout function. Until recently, the cloud-based accounting product had been used primarily by service-based businesses to run their books. The need for a POS capability also grew as more and more businesses migrated from the packaged-software version of QuickBooks to the online version.

Revel offered Intuit a ready-made conduit to reach new users for QuickBooks Online. “Distribution is at least half the game,” says Rick Oglesby, principal at consultancy AZPayments Group LLC, Mesa, Ariz. “To the extent you can find a partner that can give you distribution, you’re ahead.”

Intuit will not disclose how many QuickBooks Online users have been acquired through the Revel integration. Observers, however, say the expansion of the Intuit-Revel tie-up indicates it is at least meeting the partners’ expectations. “You don’t expand it if it’s not doing well because it just costs too much,” Oglesby says. Overall, the QuickBooks Online user base now stands at more than 1.5 million, according to John Shapiro, director of product management and payments at Intuit. In November 2014, when the Revel linkup was announced but had not yet started, the number stood at 700,000.

Revel has attracted $127.3 million in equity financing since its founding nearly six years ago and has scored sales successes with merchants like Cinnabon, Tully’s, and Goodwill Industries. Intuit is among Revel’s investors.

In 2014, Revel struck a deal with Smoothie King Franchises Inc., a chain of 700 juice outlets, to install Revel tablets chainwide in what at the time was the largest such deal on record.

Earlier this month, news emerged that IBM Corp. is in early talks with Revel about acquiring the company in an effort to bolster its retail-solutions business.