If I’m at a sitdown restaurant, I have no desire to struggle with an iPad to order my hamburger hold the onions and water with light ice. What I wish was eliminated is the cumulative days (years?) of waiting to:
- Get the check
- Pay the check!
Yeah, Chili’s and Red Robin now have tablets where you can pay at your table, but the experience, though better that waiting for the server, is still overly complex. The iPad has games, promos, and ordering features which clutter up the killer feature. Just give us a simple way to auto-pay at the table. It seems that all the enabling technology is available, and a clean mobile payment experience is there for that taking.
Can’t we do this?
- Customer walks into a restaurant with the Apple Pay app installed and running.
- Each restaurant table has an iBeacon.
3. The restaurant enters the bill against the table #. The restaurant’s point-of-sale would use an Apple Pay API to transmit and collect the payment.
4. The iBeacon would send a notification to the customer’s Apple Pay app that they can complete the payment via Apple Pay whenever they are ready.
5. The customer runs an Apple Pay session to add the tip and complete the payment.
6. The iBeacon transmits the session to the Point-of-Sale to complete the payment session.
As you can see, this experience would be streamlined and intuitive for the user. No login or data entry (except for the tip amount) would be required.
I know this idea is not novel. There are certainly a number of people working to solve this problem. The problem is that besides the few chain restaurants with the iPad pay-at-the-table option, none of the other dozens of restaurants I frequent offer this experience.
The economics may be tough to pull off for a standalone mobile payment company, but it would be a great solution for restaurant POS companies. They could use this solution as a distinct advantage over their competitors. Their restaurant customers benefit from lower labor cost, faster table turns, and higher customer satisfaction.
