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With consumer spending for concessions and merchandise purchases steadily increasing at sports stadiums, SpotOn Transact, LLC, which provides point-of-sale and digital-ordering systems to 37 stadiums across the National Football League and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, is gearing up for an increase in volume for the 2022 professional and collegiate football seasons.
One driver of the expected increase in volume is that spending per fan at NFL and National Basketball Association venues has grown in recent years, the company says.
“Fan spending is up overall, and fans are spending more on food and beverage purchased during the events they attend,” says Kevin Bryla, chief marketing officer and head of customer experience at SpotOn. “Some of this increased spending is based on price increases compared to pre-pandemic, while another source of the additional spending comes from more self-service technologies being deployed.”
Self-service solutions—such as mobile apps and kiosks through which fans can digitally place orders from their seats or other locations in the stadium—augment the current POS footprint by increasing the ways consumers can place an order without standing in line at the concession booth, Bryla says. In addition, these solutions offer the opportunity for upselling by recommending items that can be added to the order.
“In general, sports venues see high-volume sales at very specific times,” Bryla says. “We saw that decreasing lines [for ordering] helps concessionaires to serve more guests [and] was of great value for venue operators and fans. The market was ripe for innovation in ordering and payment technology, from mobile ordering and kiosk ordering to handheld POS that allows for staff to transact with more fans while speeding up the order, payment, and fulfillment process.”
NFL stadiums in which SpotOn provides POS and digital-ordering technology include Empower Field at Mile High, home of the Denver Broncos, and Met Life Stadium, home of the New York Giants and New York Jets. NCAA venues include Tiger stadium, home of the Louisiana State University Tigers football team.
The market for POS and digital-ordering systems in sports stadiums has become highly competitive in recent years as processors such as Shift4 Payments Inc., Fiserv Inc.. and OLB Group Inc. aggressively carve out market share in the space.
To strengthen its position in the sports-concession market, SpotOn last year paid a reported $415 million to acquire Appetize Technologies Inc., which has been providing cashless point-of-sale technology to Major League Baseball, minor-league baseball, and professional soccer teams since 2011.
“Contracts that teams and concessionaires give out are normally multi-year, so the sales cycle for enterprise clients is normally very long and competitive,” says Bryla. “The competitors and clients know everyone else in this space, so when contracts come up for renewal, many competitors show up to pitch their business.”
Despite this competitiveness, Bryla adds that sports stadiums, like many businesses, have accelerated their adoption of new technologies to cater to customer demands and work through staffing shortages. “Clients typically use a large range of integrations and solutions to service their venue,” he says.
