AirPOS Super Shopkeeper for June - Meet Nicola Moger, owner of the Cafe2U francise in Darlington

Cafe2U, pioneer of the mobile cafe industry and the UK’s premier mobile coffee franchise system, is a mobile cafe van with all of the safety and quality features of a regular brick and mortar café on the road. The idea, like all great ones, is simple: bring the coffee to the customer.

But why AirPOS? Nicola Moger, owner of the Cafe2U francise in Darlington needed a system that was portable enough to take on the road but would also provide her the analytics to make better business decisions. With this in mind, and having come from a retail background, Nicola spent several months researching the market prior to trading and began looking for a system that would not only keep better track of inventory, but also garner valuable sales information that would enable Nicola to monitor her business and produce precise accounts.

In October 2012, Nicola found AirPOS - exactly what she had been searching for and said;

“From day one I have used AirPOS on the Google Nexus 7 and the application is very stable on the Android platform. The support offered by the team is also very good.”

Nicola went on to explain her experience of AirPOS so far

“AirPOS is great for accounting for sales at different tax rates for vat purposes, applying price changes easily and adding up multiple sales quickly. The backoffice is fantastic and the set up is so easy. The reports go straight into excel and using this program it is a simple matter to extract information.”

Another huge bonus for Nicola was the confidence AirPOS is giving her, the cafe2U staff and most importantly the customers. Mrs Moger explains

“AirPOS enables my staff to serve customers with confidence - without having to refer to a price list and is also helping increase customers confidence in my business.”

So if you’re in the Darlington area and you need a coffee, why not get it delivered right to your door? Cafe2U provides a safe, reliable and professional service and delivers fresh espresso coffee and great food to you at work, everyday.

We blog about our customers every few weeks and if you’d like to get involved as one of our featured shopkeepers, just email aaron@airpos.co.uk

AirPOS Super Shopkeeper for May - Meet Sarah Whiteley from Walking on Waves

Sarah Whiteley’s surf school, Walking on Waves, is based on Saunton Beach in North Devon right between Croyde and Braunton. After years at the top of the competitive surfing game (British and European Champion), Sarah decided to return to her roots and give something back to the sport.

But why AirPOS? Well Sarah needed a system that was feature rich, fast and easy to use to give her time to do what she does best - surf. With this in mind, Sarah began looking for a system that would not only keep track of lessons, but also garner valuable sales information without incurring the large price tag of traditional ePOS.

In February 2013, Sarah found AirPOS - exactly what she had been searching for and said;

“The AirPOS staff and help desk is second to none, and this has given me the confidence to sign up and use the AirPOS software”

So whether you’re looking to catch your first wave, improve your style or to step up to competitions (or you just fancy getting a few tips from an instructor with real surf pedigree), then get yourself down to Walking on Waves in Saunton, one of the most accessible surfing beaches in the UK and get lessons from Sarah Whiteley, one of Britain’s most successful female surfers.

Surfs up Folks!

We blog about our customers every few weeks and if you’d like to get involved as one of our featured shopkeepers, just email aaron@airpos.co.uk

Rage Against the Machine

We might make retail software systems, but we’re customers too! There follows a tale of what happens when the machine is in charge, and out of control. In short half a day of frustration and a farcical sales process. Names have been removed to protect the innocent…

At AirPOS we already know the importance of making software easy to use, usability and simplicity is central to our design philosophy. And if we ever forget, we can go back to (name redacted) to remind ourselves of what a point of sale and customer management system should not be doing.

So we wanted to buy a mifi, for the uninitiated that’s a little handy device that takes in cellular data such as 3G and makes itself a portable wifi hotspot (we know that we’re narrowing down the outlets here, but the story is the story.)

To make things easier, we didn’t want a contract for the mifi and were happy with a pay-as-you-go deal for occasional use. In essence we wanted to walk into a retail shop, pay for the thing, and walk back out. Which should be easy right?

Well normally yes. Instead we got an abject lesson in what happens when software goes badly wrong and staff are at the mercy of its inadequacies. 

A condensed version went like this:

“Hello sir, can we help you?”

US: “Yep, we’d like a pay-as-you-go mifi please. In fact this one here…” (points to device in brochure)

“That’s no problem, take a seat.”

We informed them that we were purchasing on behalf of our business, and were taken through a number of steps (for example VAT number, incorporation number, address etc.)

After ten minutes, with the staff member as baffled as we were by the process, we got stopped in our tracks. Essentially, computer says no. For a pay-as-you-go item? How bizarre.

Okay, we decided to expense the device to make things simpler. We informed (names redacted) that we were already a customer of theirs with a contract for more than two years in the belief that this would speed up the process. Again, no dice. After going through various identification checks on their system, the staff member helping us hit a wall (essentially the computer didn’t know who we were…)

A senior staff member later and we were no further along. In the end this turned out to be a problem with how the system recognised cards, in that it had no field at all for Visa Debit which seems like a huge oversight. After trying Visa Credit (denied), Delta (denied) it was decided that a way of identifying us (we repeat a customer for years) would be to take £1 from our bank account and then put it back.

At this point, we’d been there for over an hour going through various system checks (repeat, been a customer for years) only to then be moved to a different terminal where we had to enter our card details.

Then a contract was produced (a 30 day one) and the staff informed us that we could cancel at any time with 30 days notice. That exchange went something like:

“It’s really simple, you can just cancel at any time with 30 days notice…)

US: “Which means that if we only want it for occasional use we need to inform you that we want to cancel right now?”

“Erm, yes…”

How bizarre.

Two hours in (and some cross words among staff members later) and we seemed to be coming to the end of the process, which had involved by this point seven signatures, three terminals, three seats and four card chip and pin entries.

And to top it all off the system then decided that the device (advertised as £49.99 in the brochure) was in fact £29.99. We pointed this out to the staff, being the honest souls that we were. That exchange?

US: “Eh the price on the receipt says £29.99, is that what we’re being charged?”

Staff: (blank looks…)

Fair enough, scant compensation for a half day spent trying to buy something that was almost laughably called pay-as-you-go.

And the lesson? If the machine is going to be in charge it must know what the hell’s going on! A timely reminder to us that we need to create in AirPOS something that is not only intelligent, but usable and accountable. Any retail store relies so heavily on their POS that it must be correct, the profound example above being a (very short) version of the farce that can happen when this is not the case.

As for being a long-standing customer, we won’t be soon simply exacerbating the loss to the company from what should have been a five minute pay and go experience.

As Gordon Ramsey once said:” POS, piece of s**t.” We promise we’ll strive to make sure that yours isn’t!

Scratching Under the Surface, could POS be the big market for Microsoft’s under-appreciated tablet?

Here at AirPOS we love a good tablet, be it the iPad or Android, there’s nothing better than a simple little computer that can be made to do hugely powerful things, like say, operate a complete Point-of-Sale system for retail shops. 

As these devices grow in capability, get ever enhanced support for peripherals and drop in price it’s becoming ever easier to see why people have been talking for a couple of years about the death of the PC. A recent steep decline in PC sales may even prove the doom-mongers right over time.

There’s an acceptance that Windows 8 is not shaking the trees as expected, in fact some analysts are now predicting that Microsoft’s multiple failures in the mobile space and skepticism around emerging strategies like Blue could well see the grim reaper hovering over Redmond in a much more threatening way. Some even want to see the firing of Ballmer, such as Geoffery James, a long-time Windows and Microsoft commentator. http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/has-microsoft-gone-insane.html

At AirPOS however we deal with a slightly skewed reality when it comes to hardware. Far from the humble PC dying out in our industry, we’re witnessing the seemingly daily birth of yet more hardware manufacturers making ever more Apple-like ePOS tills with shiny touch screens, no bevels, beautiful stands and, say it quietly, Windows. Retailers it seems are happy to stick with what they know, and at the price-points they’re still paying, they are willing to pay handsomely for it also.

So a few months back when we ordered a Microsoft Surface for the office, we admit that we did it with a sense of foreboding. It’s a Microsoft tablet after all, and having been spoiled rotten with the iPad and the ever increasing quality of Android devices like the Google Nexus, our expectations were pretty low. 

So when we broke open the box to find a thin, light and frankly gorgeous looking device we were very very pleased indeed. As tablet design goes on a hardware level the Surface is first class, it fact we might even stretch it out to being a close second to the big daddy of Apple. “Class” we thought, “let’s get AirPOS on there!”

And that’s where we hit a snag. Since AirPOS will happily tick along on any Windows operating system since XP, including Windows 8, we kind of expected to be able to run our software out-of-the-box on Windows RT. Not so however, the Atom architecture won’t play ball with how our software has been designed, which is of course from our perspective a fundamental flaw.

At AirPOS our core philosophy is to devise an app and architecture that develops in tandem on all of the platforms. This is important for a few reasons:

1. We are a small team and can’t be doing with fragmenting our develop across multiple applications. That would be the road to ruin.
2. We never penalise customers for their choice of device, everyone will get the same treatment right across the board (unlike Twitter / Facebook etc). Of course we need to develop a version for you first! (which we will in time.)

Windows RT, much like iOS, has become a problem in achieving this goal and has led to us relegating the Surface to where the iPad has been for a long time in our development i.e. we’ll do it when we can do it our way! Thankfully we know exactly how to get our app running on both iPads and Surface and it will only be a matter of time before each sees a release. 

On that note we think we can see a bright future for Surface, in one vertical at least. We believe that correctly positioned it can be the most natural upgrade path for ePOS systems, cannibalising all of the legacy Windows terminals out there in the market, some 9 million of them in Europe alone.

It will play nicely with other hardware such as receipt printers as well, which is a bonus in the tablet world. It will feature an operating system that many retailers, and more importantly, retail staff are accustomed to and, most important of all, at a price point of sub £500 it’s cheap enough to be disruptive which is what we’re all trying to achieve.

We’ll let you know when AirPOS has been rejigged for the Surface, and you can have a scratch at it yourselves. We wouldn’t write it off just yet. Software problems aside, it’s a fantastic piece of hardware, bevel free and sleek black, that’s the trend right?

AirPOS Super Shopkeeper for April - Meet Nick Lyon, Owner of Highland Bottle Shop

Established in 2013 and located in Inverness, Highland Bottle Shop is a locally owned independent off licence that serves hard to find craft beers, small batch spirits, whisky and wine to the local community.

Highland Bottle Shop really needed an ePOS solution that was both easy to manage and simple to add inventory for their expanding offerings and according to Highland Bottle Shop owner, Nick Lyon

“When we opened in January 2013, AirPOS was installed from Day 1 and we can’t imagine working without it.”

But why AirPOS? Well according to Nick,

“AirPOS has been amazingly easy to use and add products. With 100s of products and new arrivals coming in every week the ability to batch import has been real time saver. The ability to look at sales from individual transactions up to whole month overviews has helped us measure our performance with little effort - the cloud based system means its easy to check from home or when out and about.”

Another massive bonus for the Highland Bottle Shop was the fact that AirPOS works well on legacy hardware. Nick explains,

“Currently AirPOS is on a laptop which meant we didn’t have to purchase a lot of dedicated equipment except a receipt printer and cash drawer. We have recently added a barcode scanner which works great with the system and has speeded up serving customers.”

So whether you’re looking for a high quality wine, a craft beer or even a little whiskey, head down to the Highland Bottle Shop where you can be guaranteed to not only get value for money and great customer service but also a wide range of drinks from all over the world.

Cheers!

We blog about our customers every few weeks and if you’d like to get involved as one of our featured shopkeepers, just email aaron@airpos.co.uk

Mobile World Congress 2013, a classico by any measure

When you tell a Barcelona native that they have a beautiful city a curious thing occurs. They simply nod as if to say, “Obviously.” And of course they are right. Barcelona is quite simply a work of extraordinary art made large. From the architecture to the streets, from the fountains to the lamposts everything has been not made but designed to the finest detail, with precision rarely seen.

And of course this makes it an ideal place for the tech world to descend yearly, to cast their wide geeky eyes over the latest tablets, smartphones, gadgets and toys with a child-like sense of wonder. 

And by God is there a lot to see. The conference centre at Fira Gran Vila is akin to twenty huge supermarkets laid back to back, complete with supermarket style flooring and ground escalators that provide a welcome momentary relief from what seems like hours of walking between the halls.  It really is THAT big, so big in fact that getting lost for a half a day is a real possibility. 

At AirPOS we were there as a launch partner for PayPal Here in Europe, PayPal’s latest entry into the mobile payments melee. This meant showing off the integrated apps, the new PayPal chip and pin device and hailing the next generation of retail software and hardware to a gathering of uber developers at the WipJam stage. 

Image credit: @bndouglas

We talked up the new wave of payments, how technology is changing the shopping experience both for the customer and the retailer alike and demoed a transaction, which was cool as all hell. And of course we touched on what comes next and invited the gathered audience to get involved, building the next generation of customer loyalty, inventory scanning and all sorts of the other great stuff. We collectively hope to see some apps and systems spring up that will become part of the ecosystem, the market is definitely large enough and the systems in use are either epic failures (printed loyalty cards) or archaic and beyond their time (the humble barcode scanner.)

The trade show itself featured all of the leading lights of the mobile and tablet worlds, with of course the notable exception of Apple who just don’t do this sort of thing and RIM who were conspicuous by their absence given that they have a recent range of smart phones to promote. Samsung won the prize for the most garish of stands, with a gargantuan setup not unlike an Apple store clinking with tablets, TVs and phones. They also won the prize for the smartest use of the walkway to the venue, placing a scaled down version of their main stand inside the train station was a genius bit of thinking and got them noticed by everyone who got the Metro to the site, which judging by the numbers was almost everyone.

However we went looking for the hidden gems, not the devices we already knew about and found a couple in the guise of the Ubuntu tablet which looks like a great device and some top kit from Verifone for their coming range of mobile payment devices on the iPad. 

Our ticket status didn’t allow access to many talks or exhibitions, which was as well as the talks we did see were haphazard at best. While we appreciated the scratchy approach to the organisation, like all conferences the timings went awry and anything that looked interesting was either just over, half way through or an hour away depending on the various slippages. 

Some genius somewhere may well devise a system for keeping large scale conferences on track and if they do, we’ll thank them in advance. 

Also Mobile World Congress marked the first time that we had used NFC as we had an NFC enabled pass on our smartphones. The experience was okay, but really it simply mirrored the use case in the Metro with a printed tickets. And so we remain unconvinced, yet to see anything achieved via NFC that couldn’t be achieved by the savvy use of barcodes. In fact given the amount of retail facing exhibitors we felt that NFC was actually further than ever away from becoming the heralding of the new dawn that everyone felt it might be a couple of years ago. Again some genius might make us eat those words, and we’ll wait patiently for that to happen.

The big takeaway from Mobile World Congress really was that the age of the personal computer as we know it is rapidly coming to an end. The form of laptops and desktops is being phased out, to be replaced by truly portable, pocket sized powerful machines that can perform all of the tasks we’ve been used to doing all these years on bulky, heavy machines.

For the retail space this is of course fantastic news. The days of paying way over the odds for a touchscreen device for use as a point of sale are all but over, as may be the days of struggling with Windows installs, licenses for operating systems, virus worries and all that stuff that now seems like the dark ages compared to lean and fast modern equipment.

And with AirPOS and systems like PayPal Here the software will match the hardware. From a technology standpoint, it’s a great time to be in retail. To witness the utter destruction of the old way of doing things is a blessing, especially when the new dawn is cheaper, leaner and smarter.

AirPOS client Revelloyd Interiors, from London to the world!

Here, There and Everywhere - AirPOS announced as the first UK POS company to partner with PayPal Here on game-changing payment device

AirPOS and PayPal Here team up to bring mobile payment processing capability to UK retailers of all sizes, out of the box.

Let’s face it, processing card payments in the UK and Europe has always been a pain and it’s not been getting any easier. Unnecessary bureaucracy, baffling merchant account applications, impossible hardware integrations and fees, fees and more fees have left small retailers frustrated and confused. The retail industry has been crying out for something simple, a new approach to processing cards that takes away all of the technical difficulty and makes the encyclopaedia of acronyms someone else’s problem.

PCI, EMV etc etc? Small retailers in particular would give a limb to forget these things and to focus on giving their customers a pleasurable experience. After all in challenging times, making the customer experience smooth and memorable is not only required for success, but for survival. A month ago those demoralising conversations with the banks and acquirers were a necessary evil. Today, retailers can start thinking about what comes next.

PayPal Here is the solution we’ve collectively been waiting for. It’s a beautiful, simple, pocket-sized device and an app. Compliance? PayPal Here takes all of that away. Semi-integration? Retailers may never hear the term again. For us at AirPOS, PayPal Here is the final piece of our ecosystem for retailers. Cloud ePOS, automated inventory control, multi-channel e-commerce capability and now payments are all part of our retailer platform. And that’s that. Now we’re going to be focusing on what comes next. 

PayPal Here teamed with AirPOS also opens the doors to that loyalty scheme we’ve all been dreaming of and so much more. It’s all about the data, and with PayPal’s unique infrastructure behind the scenes the data is already there giving them a jump on all of their competitors and giving retailers access to a brave new world of business intelligence, metrics, trends and reporting like never before. Now that we’ve nailed mobile payments, that’s where we’re going next. We hope you will join us on this exciting journey.

PayPal Here will launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 25th - 28th of February 2013. Excitingly AirPOS will be delivering a presentation on the subject of Mobile Payments and Retail on the main developers stage on Thursday 28th at 11am. Look out for this online or follow our Twitter feed for live updates from the conference.

The Team at AirPOS

Register your interest for PayPal Here at:

airpointofsale.com/paypalhere 

AirPOS Youtube Channel

In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding all things AirPOS including case studies, tutorial videos, demos, interviews and so much more to the AirPOS YouTube Channel. As the features develop and evolve, we’ll have more to share so keep checking back regularly, post comments, ask questions, share your thoughts and let us know your feedback.

The team at AirPOS

Build Conference 2012

Organised by the extremely talented (and all round great guy), Andy McMillan, Build isn’t just a design conference — it’s a festival that brings together a community of creative, likeminded folk. It’s a weeklong extravaganza of learning, listening, watching, creating and of course, drinking that takes place here in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

I had the privilege to attend my first Build this year thanks to our friends at Crafty Devil and it was amazing. From coffee roasting to chocolatiering, from leather craft to axe restoration, the Build workshops gave us the opportunity to learn a traditional craft from the experts and create something with our own hands (that wasn’t code or copy for a change). From film to live music, from the craft beer festival to the Open Book Exam, Build provided us with a place to come together, enjoy the arts and drink a few beers.

Then there was the conference, the pièce de résistance, where we heard some of the industry’s brightest minds speak about their craft, tell their story, and share their knowledge. We had Rob Giampietro, Principal at Project Projects talk about the ‘art of unbuilding’ and how when we invent, we actually disrupt. Tiffani Jones Brown, Content Strategist at Pinterest spoke about the Narrative Paradigm and how to get more from every story we tell by cutting out the ‘bullshit.’ We also had Jeff Veen, Co founder of Typekit and VP of Products at Adobe, express the importance of “equanimity” to help cultivate a culture of making amazing things.

Although for me, Kirby Ferguson gave not only the best and most thought provoking talk of the day, but gave the best presentation I think I’ve ever seen. In his talk, Kirby explored creativity in a world where he believes “everything is a remix”, that art cannot be created or destroyed — only remixed. We heard Ferguson’s views on whether remixing is a form of creativity or just plain copying. Kirby came out confidently on the side of creativity and explained that, like remixing, creativity is the result of three basic techniques: copying, transforming and combining as all ideas are consciously & unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.

Kirby’s talk really resonated with me and was in fact very apt for the day as the definition of Build is ‘to construct by assembling parts’; to transform what has gone before. Something that Henry Ford, one of the world’s creative powerhouses talked about;

 “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work…”

With this in mind, it’s clear that remixing previous innovations enables technology and society as a whole to continue evolving. In essence, we are all remixers.

Build truly was an experience not to be missed and all I can say is roll on Build 2013.

Oh and as for the Build after party… well that’s a story for another time.

@lessthanaaron from @AirPOS