ShopKeep Pushes Trend Toward a Tablet-Based POS Managed from the Cloud

While much of the payments industry’s attention is on mobile payments, mobile technology is also starting to transform the traditional retail checkout. This week, a tablet-based point-of-sale startup called ShopKeep POS launched software to keep track of employee hours and to let restaurants modify orders on the fly.

Also this week, POS terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. announced an offering that integrates its GlobalBay in-store mobile technology with Fujitsu America Inc.’s GlobalStore software. The integration will run on a variety of mobile devices and allow store personnel to check out customers anywhere in the shop. It will support alternative payments as well as digital wallets, according to the announcement.

New York City-based ShopKeep, which started in 2008 and introduced its application for the Apple Inc. iPad only 15 months ago, now has 3,000 merchant locations using its service around the country, says Sandhya Rao,, vice president of marketing and sales. Most of these outlets are specialty stores, coffee shops, and dining establishments. Competitors include another startup, Revel Systems Inc., San Francisco, and NCR Corp., which markets a tablet-based POS product under the Silver name that works on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

With competition heating up, providers are rushing to add features. ShopKeep’s  new so-called modifier feature lets restaurant personnel change standard menu items to suit customer orders. A customer might ask that mustard be added to a hot dog, for example, or mayonnaise not be put on a hamburger. The app keeps track of the changes for pricing purposes and sends the customized order to the kitchen to be printed out. Meanwhile, the company’s new time-clock feature lets managers enter and track employee hours on the iPad.

ShopKeep works with about 140 independent sales organizations to help generate lead for its cloud-based checkout system, says Jamil Hossain, director of partner channels. The system can process cards but also features an integration with PayPal Inc. Similar integrations with two other alternative-payment processors, Dwolla Inc. and LevelUp, are in the works.

Merchants pay $49 per month per iPad, which includes the app, unlimited access to customer service, and a transaction gateway. Merchants continue to process transactions through their existing acquirer. “We are acquirer agnostic,” says Rao. She adds that, while ShopKeep is working out a residual plan for ISOs, most are interested in working with the company to be able to offer new technology to their merchants. “We’re getting good traction even without [a financial] incentive,” says Rao.

She adds that there will probably be integrations in the near future beyond PayPal, LevelUp, and Dwolla. “We get quite a few calls from payment providers who want to be in our system, so that’s going to be a trend,” she says.

As for boarding more merchants, ShopKeep expects features like the order-modification capability, known as “modifiers,” to be especially attractive . “About half our merchants are in the coffee/quick-serve/bakery category,” Rao notes. “Because of modifiers, we expect we’ll bring in a lot more. There’s not a lot of cloud-based apps that do this real well.”

Observers say startups like ShopKeep are exploiting a durable trend in POS technology. “They’re another outfit that’s emerged to say we have a very different hardware environment than we did five or 10 years ago,” says one independent expert who asked not to be identified. “They saw an opportunity.”