Background
When COVID hit, many shops scrambled to find a solution to provide contactless ordering and curbside service. At joe, we saw a massive influx of shops joining our platform and 75% of our customers say that their business grew when they enabled mobile ordering with joe relative to alternative solutions. For shops that didn't join joe, there is basically two routes:
- Enable online ordering through a point of sale
- Launch a branded app
In a previous post, we unpacked why there are hundreds of dead branded apps in the app store. In this post, we want to help you calculate the real cost of accepting online orders through your point of sale.
Calculate Cost
Enabling online ordering through your point of sale can be quick and easy, but the customer experience is really built for restaurants - not daily coffee consumers which puts a major damper on sales. It's also a lot more expensive than most coffee pros realize.
The one area most people overlook is the $0.30 flat fee per transaction that is standard with "card not present" transactions. At joe, we eat the cost so you don't have to and bet on creating such a good experience that people will stick around a long time so we can make up for the cost. Point of sale companies on the other hand, have you take on that cost. For a $4 latte ordered online, that adds 7.5% to the 2.9% variable rate for a total of 10.4% just to process the payment.
Despite that cost, those costs don't include loyalty, marketing investment, or access to the largest community of indie coffee lovers like we do at joe. To contrast, we reinvest half of our profit back into our coffee shop partners in the form of automated deals and discounts to maximize your spend per customer without you having to lift a finger. We automate the customer marketing across the network so you can focus on great product and service while we take care of growing your bottom line for just 9% including payment processing (6% commission).
Use the tool above to calculate what your cost is as a % of total so you can compare solutions apples to apples. If you are charged any flat fees to enable loyalty or anything else related to the online menu, make sure you add that in. Then, read on below for some more context behind the numbers.
Have questions? Email us at success@joe.coffee to chat with a human.